Drawing material from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS - 88) and tracking a representative sample of students who were in 10th grade in 1990 and 12th grade in 1992, to see what was happening in their lives in 2000, the following was
discovered in comparing high
school athletes to non-
athletes.
Though racial and ethnic breakdowns were missing from his data, what Coleman
discovered, and documents with some detail, is that students didn't care much about scholastic things; that, in all the
schools, they cared more for «good looks» and «being an
athlete» than they did for «good grades» and «being smart.»