3 This chapter discusses data sources available for studying

the experience of student athletes on college campuses and

highlights the need for national-level data to address com-
plex questions concerning this population.

The Student Athlete Experience

Joy Gaston Gayles

Prior to the 1980s, the literature on the experiences of collegiate student

athletes was rather scarce. Since that time the National Collegiate Athletic
Association (NCAA) has passed several eligibility rules to address concerns
about the academic performance and the overall experience of student ath-
letes on college campuses. As such, the literature related to the impact of
participation in college sports on student learning and personal develop-
ment over the past two decades has grown substantially. Although there is
still much to learn about the experiences of student athletes in college, we
know much more about factors that bear on student learning and personal
development for this population than we did twenty years ago. Of particu-
lar interest today is the extent to which student athletes benefit from their
college experience in ways similar to their nonathlete peers. As future
research is conducted on student athletes’ college experiences, it is impera-
tive to understand the data sources available to answer key questions for the
purpose of developing policy and practice.

Today’s Student Athletes

Student athletes on most college campuses today represent a special popu-
lation of students with unique challenges and needs different from their
nonathlete peers. Student athletes on average spend over twenty hours per
week in practice or play, sustain bodily injury and fatigue, and miss a fair
number of classes when their sport is in season (Watt and Moore, 2001;
Wolverton, 2008). These students are also expected to perform well in the

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33
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34 DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING IN INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS

classroom and earn grades strong enough to maintain their eligibility for
playing college sports.
Such academic and athletic demands, particularly for freshman student
athletes, can be difficult to balance. Most athletics programs at the Division
I level, where the time constraints are most demanding, have high-quality
support service programs in place to assist student athletes with managing
academic and athletics tasks. These support programs offer a plethora of ser-
vices and programs designed to enhance the overall experience of student
athletes. Despite the extensive programs and services provided by academic
support programs, institutional faculty, administrators, and other critics con-
tinue to speculate about the engagement of student athletes in the overall
college experience and the extent to which they benefit from their over-
all college experience relative to their peers.
Some of the harshest criticism suggests that athletics programs create a
separate culture in which student athletes experience lower levels of aca-
demic performance, graduate at lower rates, cluster in certain majors, and are
socially segregated from the general student population (Bowen and Levin,
2003; Shulman and Bowen, 2001). Despite efforts by the NCAA to restrict
the numbers of student athletes who live together on campus and enforce
standards to promote academic success and retention, suspicion about the
role of intercollegiate athletics on the college campus continues to exist.

The Student Athlete Experience

The seven principles of good practice in undergraduate education (Chick-
ering and Gamson, 1987) have been widely cited in the literature on how
the college experience affects student learning and personal development.
Chickering and Gamson developed these principles in response to the grow-
ing concern about the quality of undergraduate education. These seven
principles—interaction between faculty and students, cooperative learning
among students, active learning, prompt feedback, time on task, communi-
cation of high expectations, and respect for diverse ways of learning—have
been identified and supported in the literature as having a positive impact
on important learning outcomes of undergraduate education for all types of
students (Chickering and Gamson, 1987; Kuh, 2001). In addition, Astin’s
theory of involvement (1999) is closely related to the seven principles of
good practice because at its core, the theory suggests that when students are
involved in meaningful ways in their undergraduate experience, they learn.
Thus, the amount of psychological and physical energy students invest in
tasks related to the academic experience, such as interacting with faculty
and peers, participating in student groups and organizations, and complet-
ing academic assignments, is positively related to their overall learning expe-
rience and personal development. We know a great deal from the empirical
literature about the impact of these practices for students in the general pop-

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 THE STUDENT ATHLETE EXPERIENCE 35

ulation. However, less is known about the extent to which student athletes
engage in such practices and the impact of these kinds of activities on their
learning and development.
A few studies in the literature address concerns about the lack of stu-
dent athletes’ engagement in the undergraduate experience and the creation
of a separate athlete subculture on campus that is not in line with the aca-
demic mission of higher education institutions. However, the weight of the
limited evidence to date suggests that student athletes are involved in their
undergraduate experience in ways similar to their undergraduate peers
(Richards and Aries, 1999; Stone and Strange, 1989; Umbach, Palmer, Kuh,
and Hannah, 2006).
In addition to understanding student athletes’ engagement on college
campuses, another key area of interest in the literature focuses on how par-
ticipation in athletics influences student learning and personal development.
Student learning and personal development are desired outcomes of under-
graduate education and have several subcomponents. Particular to student
athletes, these subcomponents consist of academic performance, cognitive
development, attitudes and values, and psychosocial development (related
to career maturity). In studying the effect of athletics on student learning
and development, scholars have relied on various data sources to answer
key questions about how students grow and what they learn in college.
Several studies have focused on the career maturity of athletes relative
to their nonathlete peers, and the evidence in general suggests that athletes
tend to differ from their nonathlete peers in their levels of career maturity
and psychosocial development (Kennedy and Dimick, 1987; Smallman and
Sowa, 1996; Sowa and Gressard, 1983). Furthermore, the bulk of the evi-
dence indicates some key differences between athletes and their peers along
one psychosocial dimension: developing purpose. What we know less about
is how athletes compare to their peers on other dimensions of psychosocial
development, such as developing competence and establishing mature rela-
tionships and identity formation, as well as the net impact of participation
in college sports on psychosocial outcomes. Related to the impact of partic-
ipation in intercollegiate athletics on cognitive development, the evidence
suggests that participation in college sports may have a negative impact on
cognitive development. For example, McBride and Reed (1998) examined
differences between athletes and nonathletes’ critical thinking skills and
found that athletes had lower critical thinking scores, particularly related to
open-mindedness, inquisitiveness, and maturity.
Moving beyond understanding differences between athletes and their
peers to assessing what factors are important to cognitive development, Pas-
carella, Bohr, Nora, and Terenzini (1995) examined the effects of participa-
tion in college sports on reading comprehension, mathematics, and critical
thinking skills in the first year. After controlling for background character-
istics and other confounding variables, the authors found that male athletes

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36 DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING IN INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS

in football and basketball scored lower in reading comprehension and

mathematics compared to nonathletes and athletes in other sports. Further-
more, there were no significant differences between male athletes in sports
other than football and men’s basketball compared to nonathletes. How-
ever, the effects of participation were general, rather than varying in mag-
nitude, for students at different levels on the control variables. Female
athletes scored lower than female nonathletes on reading comprehension.
Moreover, the effect was conditional on precollege reading comprehen-
sion, indicating that female athletes with lower precollege reading compre-
hension experienced the highest disadvantage in reading comprehension
by the end of the first year.
In a follow-up study, Pascarella and others (1999) examined the impact
of participation in college sports on cognitive development in the second
and third years of college. A major finding was that the conditional effect of
precollege reading comprehension for female athletes was not present in this
study, which indicates that female athletes do not experience long-term dis-
advantages in reading comprehension as a result of participating in college
sports. Another critical finding was that male athletes in revenue sports may
not be experiencing cognitive benefits (as indicated by lower scores in crit-
ical thinking) to the extent of other males in college. Further study is
needed to understand why intercollegiate athletics has such a negative effect
on cognitive outcomes.
The evidence concerning the impact of participation in college sports
on cultural attitudes and values is somewhat mixed. The evidence from
examining intercollegiate athletics holistically suggests that intercollegiate
athletics has a positive impact on the development of cultural values (Whitt
and others, 2001; Wolf-Wendel, Toma, and Morphew, 2001). Nevertheless,
when certain populations of student athletes are studied, the evidence sug-
gests otherwise. For example, Wolniak, Pierson, and Pascarella (2001)
examined the impact of intercollegiate athletics on attitudes and values for
male athletes and found that participating in male nonrevenue sports had a
negative impact on openness to diversity and challenge. Furthermore, par-
ticipation in nonrevenue sports, in addition to participation in Greek life,
exacerbated the negative impact on openness to diversity compared to par-
ticipating in nonrevenue sports alone.

Data Sources for Studying Student Athletes’ Learning

and Personal Development
This brief survey of the literature on student athletes and their experiences
reveals that the majority of studies conducted on student athletes use self-
collected data from single institutions. In order for colleges and universities
to make sound decisions concerning the welfare of college athletes, longi-
tudinal data sources are needed. There are a few such data sources available
for shared use.
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 THE STUDENT ATHLETE EXPERIENCE 37

National Collegiate Athletic Association. The NCAA has a research

and education office that provides educational and leadership opportunities
for student athletes. In addition, the office collects data on the academic per-
formance and educational experiences of student athletes on college cam-
puses across the country. The research and education Web site publishes
information on the academic progress rate (APR) by school, as well as press
releases summarizing the APR and graduation rate data for its member insti-
tutions. The Web site also provides summary APR data that, with the APR
data by school, can be used for secondary analysis.
Graduation rates published by the NCAA have consistently shown that
student athletes complete degrees at higher rates compared to students in
the general student population. However, when the data are disaggregated
by sport, gender, and race, the numbers tell a different story. Several conclu-
sions can be drawn from the evidence to date. First, male athletes tend to
enter college and perform at lower levels compared to their peers. Second,
athletes who enter college with lower levels of academic achievement tend
to have lower first-year grades in college. Third, participation in intercolle-
giate athletics has been found to increase motivation to complete a college
degree.
One of the first surveys commissioned by the President’s Commission
of the NCAA was conducted in the 1980s. The Association for Institutional
Research (AIR) designed the survey to collect data on the role of intercolle-
giate athletics in higher education from a national representative sample of
student athletes and nonathletes at forty-two Division I institutions. A series
of reports describe the experience of student athletes on college campuses.
In addition, researchers have used these data to study the experiences of
African American and female athletes and career expectations for African
American male athletes (Sellers and Kuperminc, 1997; Sellers, Kuperminc,
and Damas, 1997).
In the mid-1990s, the NCAA administered the Basic Academic Skills
Survey (BASS) to a sample of Division I institutions. The BASS consists of
three parts: Progress in College (PIC), Social and Group Experiences
(SAGE), and Mini-battery of Achievement (MBA). The PIC survey mea-
sured student athletes’ academic and social experiences, personal goals, and
attitudes. The SAGE survey measured high school and college experiences.
The MBA survey measured cognitive skills such as reading, writing, math-
ematics, and factual knowledge. Researchers recently used these data to
study the impact of engagement and sport participation on college out-
comes. To address this issue, the authors conducted a secondary analysis of
the PIC and SAGE components of the BASS (Gayles and Hu, 2009). They
found that engaging in educational activities had a positive influence on
cognitive and affective outcomes. Moreover, the effect of engaging in edu-
cational activities had differential effects across levels of sport.
The NCAA education and research office currently publishes reports
on its Web site about the student athlete population in terms of gender,
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38 DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING IN INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS

race/ethnicity, injuries, substance use, and sports wagering. This informa-

tion provides descriptive data about student athletes on today’s college cam-
puses that can be used for trend analyses concerning how student athletes
change over time.
The education and research office is responsible for collecting survey
data on the experiences of student athletes. During the early 2000s, the
NCAA research office funded research projects that focused on the student
athlete collegiate experience. In 2004, researchers at the University of
Nebraska received funding and administrative support from the NCAA to
study college athletes’ experiences at eighteen Division I-A schools across
the country (Potuto and O’Hanlon, 2006). Overall, student athletes in the
study reported positive experiences with participating in college sports.
However, the findings were mixed regarding the extent to which partici-
pants viewed themselves as athletes more than students and whether pro-
fessors discriminated against or showed favoritism toward student athletes.
In addition, the NCAA education and research office periodically conducts
surveys that are available for shared use by interested researchers.
National Survey of Student Engagement. The National Survey of
Student Engagement (NSSE) is administered by the Indiana University Cen-
ter for Postsecondary Research and the Indiana University Center for Sur-
vey Research. Since 2000, Indiana University has administered NSSE on an
annual basis to various four-year colleges and universities across the coun-
try. To date over twelve hundred colleges and universities have participated
in this project.
Scholars at Indiana University designed NSSE to assess undergraduate
educational experiences, particularly concerning how students spend their
time and what they gain from the college experience. Data from the NSSE
have been used to formulate five benchmarks that represent good practices
in education similar to the seven principles of good practice developed by
Chickering and Gamson (1987): level of academic challenge, active and col-
laborative learning, student-faculty interaction, enriching educational expe-
riences, and supportive campus environments (Kuh, 2001).
Identifying good educational practices for student athletes and poten-
tial conditional effects of those practices warrants further research in the lit-
erature on the experiences of student athletes. NSSE could serve as a
potential data source to address such questions. An item on the demographic
portion of the survey asks students if they participate in varsity sports at the
institution. When this question was first asked, it did not differentiate stu-
dent athletes by sport; however, the 2009 administration of the survey asks
student athletes to identity the sport(s) in which they participate.
Only one study to date has used NSSE data to examine the engagement
practices and educational gains of student athletes compared to their
non-athlete peers. Umbach, Palmer, Kuh, and Hannah (2006) used the
spring 2003 administration of NSSE data, which contains a sample of

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 THE STUDENT ATHLETE EXPERIENCE 39

57,308 freshmen students across 395 four-year colleges and universities of

varying institutional types. The spring 2003 administration included an
item to assess whether students participated in varsity sports but did not
assess the type of sport. Therefore, the researchers were not able to disag-
gregate the data by sport. Overall the authors found that student athletes
were as engaged in educational activities compared to their nonathlete
peers. In fact, the authors found that student athletes were more satisfied
with the college experience and perceived their campus environment to be
more supportive. There were a few interesting findings related to the impact
of being a student athlete at different institutional types, as defined by the
divisions of the NCAA. Student athletes at the Division III level were more
engaged compared to student athletes at Division I and II institutions.
Higher Education Research Institute. The Cooperative Institutional
Research Program, in conjunction with Higher Education Research Insti-
tute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles, administers sev-
eral surveys, some of which can be used to study attitudes, values, and
experiences of college students. The College Students’ Beliefs and Values
(CSBV) survey is administered by the Spirituality in Higher Education Proj-
ect at UCLA and can be used in conjunction with CIRP data (also collected
by HERI) to study student athletes. The CSBV is a multiyear survey
designed to assess trends and patterns related to college students’ spiritual-
ity and religiousness, as well as the impact of college on spiritual and faith
development. The survey began in 2003 with administering the survey to
thirty-seven hundred juniors across a representative sample of four-year col-
leges and universities. The institute collected these data in conjunction with
the institutions that participated in the CIRP freshman survey three years
prior to 2003.
The religious and spiritual values of college athletes represent an
understudied topic that deserves attention in the literature. The CSBV is a
potential data source to study the religious and spiritual experiences and
values of college athletes because it includes an item on whether the stu-
dent is a varsity athlete and a follow-up question to determine the level of
sport.
Gayles and Bryant (2009) used the CSBV to examine the impact of par-
ticipation in varsity sports on civic engagement. In particular, they studied
the impact of athletic participation on social activism, defined as an individ-
ual’s general concern for and commitment to making the world a better
place. The researchers also examined the extent to which the factors that
influence social activism were conditional on the level of sport in which the
student athlete participated. The findings from this study suggest that ath-
letes did not differ from their nonathlete peers in their commitment to social
activism. Furthermore, athletic participation alone did not influence student
athletes’ level of social activism. Finally, the factors that affected students’ lev-
els of social activism were generally uniform across level of sport.

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40 DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING IN INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS

Conclusion
This chapter focused on what we know about today’s student athletes and
their experiences on college campuses, as well as how we know. Using large-
scale data provides the best opportunity to study the experiences of student
athletes and provides the freedom to generalize to the larger student athlete
population. Single-institutional and other small-scale studies have the poten-
tial to provide valuable information at the institutional level; however, large-
scale data sources with representative samples should be relied on most
heavily for decision-making purposes at the national level. Not only do such
data sources allow researchers to generalize to larger populations, but they
also allow researchers to conduct more sophisticated statistical analyses and
to address more complex problems concerning the experiences of student
athletes.

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JOY GASTON GAYLES is associate professor in the Department of Leadership,

Policy, Adult, and Higher Education at North Carolina State University.

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH • DOI: 10.1002/ir