At Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America, the fastest route from the Ivy league to a corner office might not run through the career center at all, but through the football roster.
That’s the implication of a new National Bureau of Economic Research study from Harvard, Duke, and Wharton researchers who tracked the first jobs of 120,306 Ivy League graduates between 1950 and 2020. The team—Paul Gompers, George Hu, Will Levinson and Sachin Srivastava—set out to test something Wall Street recruiters have long insisted anecdotally, namely that being a college athlete is a hiring edge.
What they found was more specific: the team bond is a far more potent career driver than the diploma itself, sharpening the narrative about elite college graduates hiring each other on Wall Street into something more concrete.
“Broad school ties do relatively little; the pull comes from intensive shared experiences like a varsity team,” Srivastava, a co-author and doctoral student at Wharton, told Fortune over email. “If anything, I think the old boys’ club looks less like a club and more like a roster.”
This paper is the second installment of a broader research agenda. An earlier study by some of the same co-authors, covering roughly 400,000 Ivy League graduates, found that athletes out-earn non-athletes and reach the C-suite more often, even controlling for major, graduation year, and school—a premium the authors partly attributed to skills like leadership and teamwork.
