Academic Performance and Salary Expectations of Competitive and Recreational Athletes vs. Inactive Students

The aim of the present study was to find out whether salary expectations vary with the different types of athletic involvements. Previous studies based on high school pupil data show that the involvement in sports is beneficial for the grade but only to a certain degree. That is, during the high season of sport, athletes’ grades deteriorate (Schultz, 2017). At the college and university level, most studies find a positive relation between athletic participation and grades (Fricke et al., 2018). Labor economists have identified numerous positive effects of athletic participation, including a higher salary for athletes (Kuhn & Weinberger, 2005; Lechner & Downward, 2017) and former athletes (Ewing, 2007). We conducted an own survey among German university and college students during the summer semester 2016 and obtained a data set with information on sports participation for 4,592 students. Based on this information we group our participants in three athlete types: inactive students (IS), recreational athletes (RA) and competitive athletes (CA). We analyze three equations in a system of seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) with a three-stage least square estimator. Our (alternative) dependent variables are the current average grade, the number of semesters needed to acquire the degree, and the salary expectations. We find that CA expect a significantly higher salary than their inactive peers. CA tend to study longer until they achieve their degrees. We also find that the higher the weekly hours spent on sports, the lower is the student’s grade. The higher the amount of hours spent studying however, the better the grade and the faster the student achieves the degree.