Understandings of who plays college sports are dominated by assumptions that lack academic scrutiny. Using the Education Longitudinal Study (N = 7,810) and multilevel modeling, this study examines the extent to which high school indicators of family socioeconomic statuses, athletic development and merit, academic expectations and knowledge, and school contexts predict the likelihood of becoming a college athlete. The authors find evidence that supports our understanding of the process of becoming a college athlete being shaped by family socioeconomic status. Still, high school sport participation characteristics, academic expectations and knowledge, and school contexts also seem to offer independent contributions to the odds of becoming a college athlete. Overall, these results suggest that college athletic opportunities are not simply a function of athletic merit, based on unique analyses of quantitative empirical evidence from a large national sample of high school students.

Inequality research has found that a college education can ameliorate intergenerational disparities in economic outcomes. Much attention has focused on how family resources impact academic achievement, though research continues to identify how mechanisms related to social class and structural contexts drive college attendance patterns. Using the Education Longitudinal Study and multilevel modeling techniques, this study uniquely highlights how extracurricular activities relate to family socioeconomic status and school contexts to influence college attendance. Altogether, sport and non-sport extracurricular participation, college expectations, and academic achievement scores, situated within unique school contexts that are driven by residential social class segregation, contribute to the cumulative advantages of children from higher SES families. The results from this study show that these cumulative advantages are positively associated with college attendance and an increased likelihood of attending a more selective school.