For all four years of high school I spent half of every day dancing. Full-out, pre-professional ballet and modern dancing.

So, it would make sense to assume that I’m writing this as a dancer. But alas, a dancer I am not.

National data indicate that people who attended such schools frequently end up distancing themselves from that focus in the long run.

A recent analysis conducted by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, an organization run out of Indiana University that surveys those who attended arts institutions, found that only about half of the respondents who graduated from arts high schools currently hold a full- or part-time career as an artist.

Some academics I spoke with did express concern that intensive arts schools may limit a student’s options in terms of the more academic majors they could pursue in college, but Kenneth Elpus pointed out that students who study the arts aren’t disadvantaged in terms of selectivity of college, either: “That to me was a really important finding,” he said, “because this notion that you’re sort of wasting time taking an arts class, which is to me rather unenlightened, it also turns out to not be supported by the data.”

Read the full article on specialized high schools by Tori Latham at The Atlantic