Most of the internal and public scrutiny of college sports involves high profile athletes in sports such as football and men's basketball; yet, recent research on the impact of sport participation on student learning and development has largely focused on comparing all athletes to their non-athlete peers across institutional types. There is a need to better articulate what contributes to engagement in educationally purposeful activities for student athletes who participate in different sports and how that in turn relates to desirable outcomes for this student population. This issue is particularly important as the public becomes increasingly skeptical about the quality of education for college athletes and distrustful about the role of athletics in American higher education. To that end, the purpose of this study was to examine factors related to student athletes' engagement in educationally purposeful activities at Division I universities and its impact on a set of cognitive and affective outcomes. The following research questions guided this study: (1) To what extent do student background characteristics and other factors influence student athletes' engagement in educationally purposeful activities?; (2) Controlling for student background characteristics and other factors, to what extent does engagement in educationally purposeful activities influence cognitive and affective outcomes for student athletes?; and (3) Is the influence of student engagement on college outcomes conditional on the profile level of the sport in which the student athlete participated? The results from this study point to several conclusions. First, like other college students, student background characteristics tend to have limited influence on engagement in educationally purposeful activities. That is, who the students are matters very little in what the students do in college. Second, engagement has positive and significant impacts on a set of college outcomes for student athletes, suggesting that college athletes can benefit from increased college engagement in ways similar to the general student population. Finally, the findings show evidence that the influence of student engagement on cognitive outcomes is conditional on the type of sport student athletes participate in, suggesting differential effects for student athletes in different sport types. Implications of these findings for policy and practice related to student athletes in higher education are discussed. (Contains 5 tables.)