The Effects of Physical Attractiveness on High School Grades

A new scientific study released by experts at the University of Miami looks at the influence that personal traits such as physical attractiveness have on academic performances and on how students, both male and female, make use of their beauty. It has also sought to understand if a person's beauty is enough to predict a successful school experience. Already, people know that attractive college students have a much higher chance of finding a job in the marketplace, but the UM investigators wanted to know if this could be predicted since high school.

The study, entitled “Effects of Physical Attractiveness, Personality and Grooming on Academic Performance in High School,” will soon be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Labor Economics. It has been authored by a team of experts at the UM Health Economics Research Group, including UM College of Arts and Sciences Professor of Health Economics Michael T. French. Results have revealed the fact that non-cognitive factors have a very high stake in determining how grades are alloted in the classroom.

“Several studies in the literature have found that physical attractiveness is significantly related to labor market earnings for men and women. Thus, we were somewhat surprised to find that physical attractiveness was not the most important non-cognitive predictor of grades. Instead, grooming and personality were stronger predictors of academic success in high school for boys and girls, respectively,” French said.

The team have also learned that adolescents' behavioral patterns, regardless of whether they look at themselves as “rebels” or “conformists,” bare no influence in their GPA levels. On the other hand, for girls, personality has been deemed to be the most important non-cognitive factor that is correlated with an increased GPA. Conversely, for boys, grooming has influenced their GPA the most. For the overall population, the investigators have determined that Hispanics and African Americans have, on average, a lower GPA than white students, while girls apparently learn better than boys throughout high school.