The Effect of Minimum Academic Requirements to Participate in Sports on High School Graduation

During the 1970s, state interscholastic associations imposed rules requiring student athletes to pass a certain number of subjects in order to be allowed to participate in school sports. Using the NLSY together with a newly collected dataset on the stringency of the rules, I exploit variation in the rules across states to estimate their effects on high school graduation. I find that requiring students to pass one additional course is associated with a two-percentage-point increase in the likelihood of graduation. This result survives a number of robustness checks, including finding no effect for female students who at the time had limited access to interscholastic competitions.