>Supposedly sports are some of the most important socio-cultural learning experiences. Students who attend sports colleges develop higher levels of self-esteem.

Self esteem as in "there's no way they'll have me fail this exam, we have an important match next week... I think I'll just get a free pass again"... as in "I am the greatest", as in "don't know much about history, don't know much trigonometry, but I have one helluva kick".

>Sports is traditionally where boys have learned about teamwork, setting goals, and the pursuit of excellence. For girls, high school girls who play sports are more likely to get better grades.

Based on what? I've learned one thing about science here: don't trust any statistics. In a country where only a few things are the same all over (like everyone uses the dollar, there's a common foreign policy, army, postal service, federal police and maybe a few more things), there's nobody (no body) who would gather data in a unified manner. Everything is so decentralized and done in myriad different ways, there's no way to have any statistics on anything larger than a couple of thousand samples, and that's also costly. When it costs, we get into the motives of whoever pays up for it. IOW, I have no reason to trust them.

> All of this information is available as promotional material from any college that has a strong focus on sports. Personally, I think it just attracts the alumni and $...

IOW, if you want a college with good teaching staff, go where the money is... you may have to suffer the inconvenience of having a few classmates who are intellectually gifted in a wrong department (now someone will come in with a few counter-examples of guys who had great sport achivements and yet were successful in academics - which proves nothing, there's no real statistics), just on the odd chance that the money was actually used to have the best staff. Though it was probably funneled into a bigger stadium.