Popular, Not Studious

High school senior Taylor Matheny is a popular kid who plays on the varsity football and baseball teams. But what some of his classmates don’t know is that he spends three hours a night studying. “You don’t go and brag how much you study or things like that,” he says.

Because for many students, being studious means being “not cool at all,” says one high school junior. “Like really being a geek,” adds another. “They’re nerds,” explains a sophomore.

In fact, a study in the Journal of School Health found that neither students nor parents ranked being studious very highly. Among teens, non-studious athletes were the most popular, while non-athletes who were good students ranked last.

“It’s just the stereotype, if you’re a brain then you’re not really good at anything else,” says Taylor. It’s a stereotype even parents hold. Two-out-of-three parents said they’d rather have a child involved in sports who gets Cs rather than an A student who’s not an athlete.

“Parents just want their kids to be accepted and popular,” says Marla Shapiro, a licensed psychologist and specialist in education issues. “They remember what it was like for them.”

And, she says, when parents let their children focus on sports, on what makes them popular, “it’s the homework and the study that gets the last bit of attention at the end of the day. We’re somehow unconsciously reinforcing this notion that all this other stuff is much more important.”

The irony? Studies show kids who get the best grades are more likely to finish college, get good jobs and make more money than athletic kids with average grades. It seems that being an unpopular A student is a temporary problem.

As one high school sophomore says, “Usually they end up unpopular but that’s OK because they’re going to get a good education.” Another students adds, “And they’ll be the people giving jobs to the people who aren’t studying.”

Nearly 99 percent of eighth-graders with A averages (and comparably higher test scores) earn a high school diploma. However, only 80 percent of C students graduate. For seniors in 1982 who planned on getting a bachelor’s degree or higher, chances of actually achieving that goal during the next decade were four times greater for A students than C students.

In the 1998-99 school year, 2.3 million secondary school students were directly insulted just about every day they came to school that year. Another 3.9 million students had about a 20 percent chance of being insulted to their face on any given day. Physical confrontations proved less common, with less than 4 percent of students (an estimated 890,000 students) reporting daily abuse. Another 4.3 percent reported physical altercations occurred weekly. Consider the following:

• An A rather than a C average in high school raised male earnings at age 31 by $5,549 (20 percent) and female earnings by $2,906 (17.7 percent).
• Cliques are small groups of friends who hang out together a great deal and are personally close.
• Crowds, by contrast, are larger, reputation-based collectives of similarly stereotyped individuals who may or may not spend much time together.
• Students are often part of more than one friendship circle or clique.
• A teen’s height affects future earnings in both Britain and the United States. This is attributed to the impact of height on a teen’s self-esteem and participation in extracurricular activities.

By a 2-to-1 margin, American parents say “if forced to choose, they would prefer their sons or daughters to make C grades and be active in extracurricular activities rather than make A grades and not be active.” Parents agreeing with this statement might believe extracurricular activities teach teamwork, time management, self-discipline and other skills important later in life and on the job. In fact, students who participate in sports during high school spend more time doing homework and less time watching television, are less likely to drop out of high school, and are more likely to attend college and earn more as an adult.

Most students said they were aware of their crowd assignment, and the assignment of their friends, within a month of when they started middle school. Many were not happy with the stereotype they were assigned. Some tried to branch into a different group over the next few grades but found once categorized by classmates, a crowd identity was very difficult to change. Usually changing crowds requires a student to abandon friends.

The primary signal of a person’s popularity is with whom he or she hangs out. Peers encourage each other to hang out, and they tend to reward those who do with popularity. Unless studying can be combined with hanging out, such as in group study sessions or team projects, the result is usually less study time and less learning. Only 18 percent of teens polled said studying a lot tends to make you less popular. However 60 percent said not spending time socializing and hanging out tends to make you less popular.

Some groups – namely Goths, Freaks and Punks – publicly mock the popular crowds. Researchers speculate this is the primary reason why it is common for other students to consider these groups as “choosing to be outcasts.” Consider the following concerning your child’s circles or cliques:

• Know that academic achievement is very important to the success of your child in his or her future.
• Aptitude test scores were unrelated to clique membership.
• The clique a student was in was a better predictor of GPA than an aptitude test taken during the year.
• Traits most often associated with being popular reflected services – telling jokes, entertaining, participating in sports – that popular students provide for classmates.

Journal of School Health