Many college athletes have been thought to spare their academic effort to be able to focus fully on their sport. Below, I have broken down the different aspects of this and how athletes' academics stack up against non-athletes.
GPA
GPA (Grade Point Average) may be the most obvious and telling category to show the academic achievement of a person. Under this category, athletes are clearly below the level of non-athletes. On average, athletes record a lower GPA than non-athletes, though this varies depending on the group of athletes. In some groups of athletes, they averaged almost .25 points worse than non-athletes. The difference in GPA is clearer at higher ranked and more selective universities. Below is a graph that represent averages of GPA:
Grades based on sport
Even thought the average GPA of college athletes does a good job of representing those athletes as a whole, the data varies depending on the sport. Generally, the lowest GPA scores throughout colleges came from basketball and football. This may have to do with the fact that at many colleges, there is more pressure and greater importance placed on the students that play these sports. Below, is data collected from Purdue University about Purdue University's student-athletes.
Gender
It is clear by the data and information above that throughout colleges across the country, on average, females have the higher GPA out of both athletes and non-athletes. But what is more interesting is that the difference in GPA between female athletes and non-athletes is smaller on average than the difference between male athletes and non-athletes. This means that female athletes’ academics on average are
not as affected by their commitment to college sports as males are.
Graduation
Despite athletes having a lower GPA on average, graduation rates contradict this information. In the most recent Graduation Success Rate data, 82 percent of Division 1 freshmen student-athletes who received a scholarship that entered college in 2004 received a degree. Meanwhile non-athletes have a graduation rate of 63 percent. This is very contradicting with the earlier data and the general thoughts of people. This data may be misleading as student-athletes have received a high amount of academic oversight by coaches. There has also been debate and questioning of which students were included in calculating this data, which may have led to misleading data.