Smart Teens Rub Off On Peers, Doubling Their Chances of Going to College

It turns out that smart teens rub off on each other. Scientists have found that joining an extracurricular team or club with members that get good grades can actually double a high school student's odds of going to college.

In order to better understand how groups might influence teens and how well they perform, the researchers constructed a dataset and statistical model that included 90,000 high school students and up to 10 of their friends. Since friends often join a team or club together, the model subtracted out the positive influence of friends who were also teammates. This isolated the impact of teammates who aren't otherwise in a student's social circle.

"Typically you think the benefits of participating come from the type of club or the intensity of the skills you learned there," said Ben Gibbs, the lead study author. "I think we're the first to show that who you are hanging out with in those activities really matters."

In fact, the scientists found that the type of club or team didn't really matter. What mattered was being around high-achieving peers, as measured by GPA.

"Tell your parents, whatever they ground you from, it shouldn't be from practice or a club activity," said Lance Erickson, co-author of the new study, in a news release. "If they ground you from a school club, you are more likely to end up living at their house because you won't be going to college."

The findings reveal that who a teen hangs around matters in terms of academic performance and college education. Not only that, but it shows the importance of offering extracurricular activities to students as part of their education.

"I would encourage middle schools and junior high schools to devote resources to those kinds of things so that as they transition to high school, they are prepared to join a team," said Mikaela Dufur, co-author of the study.

The findings are published in the journal Social Science Research.