In-the-moment experience is one thing, but what about long-term benefits? Do extracurriculars pay off in any measurable way?
There are countless research studies showing that kids who are more involved in extracurriculars fare better on just about every conceivable metric—they earn better grades, have higher self-esteem, are less likely to get in trouble and so forth. A handful of these studies are longitudinal, meaning that researchers waited to see what happened to kids later in life. These longer-term studies come to the same conclusion: more participation in activities predicts better outcomes.
The same research clearly indicates that overdosing on extracurriculars is pretty rare. These days, the average American teenager reports spending more than three hours a day watching television and playing video games. Additional time is drained away checking social media feeds, texting friends links to cat videos, and tracking the Kardashians as they figure out which outfit to wear—which makes it hard to argue that time can’t be spared for the chess club or the school play, or just about any other structured, skill-focused, adult-guided activity.
But what about grit? What about accomplishing something that takes years, as opposed to months, of work? If grit is about sticking with a goal for the long-term, and if extracurricular activities are a way of practicing grit, it stands to reason that they’re especially beneficial when we do them for more than a year.
In fact, lessons learned while working to improve from one season to the next come up repeatedly in my interviews with paragons of grit.
Here’s an example: After a lackluster passing season his junior year of high school football, future NFL Hall of Famer Steve Young went down to the high school woodshop and fashioned a wooden football with tape for laces. In one end, he screwed in an eye hook and used that to latch the football to a weight machine in the high school gym. Then, gripping the ball, he’d move it back and forth in a passing motion, the added resistance developing his forearms and shoulders. His passing yardage doubled the next year.
Even more convincing evidence for the benefits of long-term extracurricular activities comes from a study conducted by psychologist Margo Gardner. Margo and her collaborators at Columbia University followed eleven thousand American teenagers until they were twenty-six years old to see what effect, if any, participating in high school extracurriculars for two years, as opposed to just one, might have on success in adulthood.
Here’s what Margo found: kids who spend more than a year in extracurriculars are significantly more likely to graduate from college and, as young adults, to volunteer in their communities. The hours per week kids devote to extracurriculars also predict having a job (as opposed to being unemployed as a young adult) and earning more money, but only for kids who participate in activities for two years rather than one.
* * *
One of the first scientists to study the importance of following through with extracurricular activities—as opposed to just dabbling—was Warren Willingham.
In 1978, Willingham was the director of the Personal Qualities Project. Even today, this study remains the most ambitious attempt ever to identify the determinants of success in young adulthood.
The project was funded by the Educational Testing Service. ETS, as it’s more commonly called, occupies a sprawling campus in Princeton, New Jersey, and employs more than a thousand statisticians, psychologists, and other scientists—all devoted to the development of tests that predict achievement in school and the workplace. If you’ve taken the SAT, you’ve taken an ETS test. Ditto for the GRE, TOEFL, Praxis, and any one of three dozen advanced placement exams. Basically, ETS is to standardized testing what Kleenex is to tissues: Sure, there are other organizations that make standardized tests, but most of us are hard-pressed to think of their names.
So, what motivated ETS to look beyond standardized tests?
Better than anyone, Willingham and other scientists at ETS knew that, together, high school grades and test scores did only a half-decent job of predicting success later in life. It’s very often the case that two kids with identical grades and test scores will end up faring very differently later in life. The simple question Willingham set out to answer was What other personal qualities matter?
To find out, Willingham’s team followed several thousand students for five years, beginning in their senior year of high school.
At the start of the study, college application materials, questionnaires, writing samples, interviews, and school records were collected for each student. This information was used to produce numerical ratings for more than one hundred different personal characteristics. These included family background variables, like parent occupation and socioeconomic status, as well as self-declared career interests, motivation for a college degree, educational goals, and many more.
Then, as the students progressed through college, objective measures of success were collected across three broad categories: First, did the student distinguish him or herself academically? Next, as a young adult, did this individual demonstrate leadership? And, finally, to what extent could these young men and women point to a significant accomplishment in science and technology, the arts, sports, writing and speaking, entrepreneurism, or community service?
In a sense, the Personal Qualities Project was a horse race. Each of the hundred-plus measures at the start of the study could have ended up as the strongest predictor of later success. It’s clear from reading the first report, completed several years before the final data were collected, that Willingham was entirely dispassionate on the issue. He methodically described each variable, its rationale for being included, how it was measured, and so on.
But when all the data were finally in, Willingham was unequivocal and emphatic about what he’d learned. One horse did win, and by a long stretch: follow-through.
This is how Willingham and his team put a number on it: “The follow-through rating involved evidence of purposeful, continuous commitment to certain types of activities (in high school) versus sporadic efforts in diverse areas.”
Students who earned a top follow-through rating participated in two different high school extracurricular activities for several years each and, in both of those activities, advanced significantly in some way (e.g., becoming editor of the newspaper, winning MVP for the volleyball team, winning a prize for artwork). As an example, Willingham described a student who was “on his school newspaper staff for three years and became managing editor, and was on the track team for three years and ended up winning an important meet.”
In contrast, students who hadn’t participated in a single multiyear activity earned the lowest possible follow-through rating. Some students in this category didn’t participate in any activities at all in high school. But many, many others were simply itinerant, joining a club or team one year but then, the following year, moving on to something entirely different.
The predictive power of follow-through was striking: After controlling for high school grades and SAT scores, follow-through in high school extracurriculars predicted graduating from college with academic honors better than any variable. Likewise, follow-through was the single best predictor of holding an appointed or elected leadership position in young adulthood. And, finally, better than any of the more than one hundred personal characteristics Willingham had measured, follow-through predicted notable accomplishments for a young adult in all domains, from the arts and writing to entrepreneurism and community service.
Notably, the particular pursuits to which students had devoted themselves in high school didn’t matter—whether it was tennis, student government, or debate team. The key was that students had signed up for something, signed up again the following year, and during that time had made some kind of progress.
* * *