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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n
That\u2019s 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\u2014Paul Gompers, George Hu, Will Levinson and Sachin Srivastava\u2014set out to test something Wall Street recruiters have long insisted anecdotally, namely that being a college athlete is a hiring edge.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBroad school ties do relatively little; the pull comes from intensive shared experiences like a varsity team,\u201d Srivastava, a co-author and doctoral student at Wharton, told Fortune <\/em>over email. \u201cIf anything, I think the old boys\u2019 club looks less like a club and more like a roster.\u201d<\/p>\nThis 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\u2014a premium the authors partly attributed to skills like leadership and teamwork.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHow well you do in your career is highly dependent upon what an economist calls human capital and social capital,\u201d Gompers, a professor at Harvard Business School and a co-author of the paper, told Fortune<\/em>. Human capital is \u201cthe skills you have, what you bring to the table.\u201d This new paper, he said, \u201creally explores potentially that second channel\u201d\u2014the networks and reputational effects that don\u2019t show up on a resume.\u00a0<\/p>\nIn fact, the ranks of the Fortune 500 are replete with examples of executives who played sports at elite schools. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan played rugby at Brown University and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts played squash for the University of Pennsylvania, both describing their college sports as formative for their leadership.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The \u2018teammate multiplier\u2019\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\nWhile much research focuses on cognitive skills or classroom performance, the NBER study quantifies a massive, previously unmeasured network: college athletics, the most extensive extracurricular system in American higher education.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The researchers compared each graduate\u2019s actual first employer against every other firm that plausibly could have hired them, then measured how the presence of fellow Ivy Leaguers at those firms shaped where graduates actually landed. <\/p>\n
Simply sharing a university with existing employees\u2014without overlap in a sport or team\u2014raised a graduate\u2019s odds of landing there by just 4.6%. Sharing a sport with employees at a different Ivy raised the odds by 16.4%. But having one additional former teammate\u2014same sport, same school, same roster\u2014already working at a firm raised a fellow player\u2019s odds of joining that firm by 193.7%, or nearly triple the baseline. Team identity, the study concludes, \u201ccarries most of the effect.\u201d<\/p>\n
The effect doesn\u2019t fade with graduation, either. Alumni who played on a team years before a given athlete ever set foot on campus\u2014people that athlete never actually met\u2014still boost that athlete\u2019s odds of getting hired (171.9%) almost as much as teammates who were literally in the locker room with them (193.7%).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gompers argues those similar numbers likely reflect two different mechanisms. Recent teammates mostly function as an information pipeline, while older, non-overlapping alumni may be shaping how recruiters and HR assess candidates who share their team affiliation, rather than simply passing along a tip.<\/p>\n
That finding lands squarely in finance\u2019s backyard. Ivy League athletes made up only about 5% of the graduates in the sample, but a disproportionate 7.08% of first jobs in the finance sector went to athletes. Morgan Stanley and Bank of America topped the list of athlete-heavy employers; Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase led on overall Ivy League hiring. McKinsey and Bain showed up prominently on both lists.<\/p>\n
Elite gatekeeping isn\u2019t new to Wall Street\u2014but the paper quantifies it<\/strong><\/h2>\nThe findings contribute to the debate over how elite social circles restrict access to top jobs, showing that Ivy League athletes are overrepresented in high-powered, high-retention industries like finance, insurance, and consulting. But Wall Street\u2019s relationship with sports and with gatekeeping isn\u2019t anything new.<\/p>\n
Fortune <\/em>has chronicled how deeply the industry\u2019s culture is fused with athletics\u2014Goldman built out a dedicated sports and entertainment group inside its private wealth division, and the bank recently tapped a fraud investigator, Nicole Pullen Ross, specifically to guard athletes\u2019 fortunes, evidence of how enmeshed the firm has become with the sports world it also recruits from.\u00a0<\/p>\nFortune<\/em> has also reported for years on the machinery of elite-school gatekeeping more broadly, from Wall Street\u2019s secretive alumni societies to the recurring debate over whether an Ivy League degree still buys the career premium it once did.<\/p>\nThat debate has taken an odd turn lately. In January, a Blackstone executive told Fortune<\/em> that elite degrees \u201caren\u2019t good enough\u201d anymore and that new analysts need to simply work harder. Ramp\u2019s CEO told Fortune<\/em> that he ignores r\u00e9sum\u00e9s and Ivy pedigrees entirely, hunting instead for people who built things themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\nGompers cautions against reading the findings as pure network capture.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the reasons I\u2019m doing this work on athletics is that I think you learn things in athletics that are hard to learn in the classroom\u2014discipline, goal-setting, dealing with failure,\u201d he said. \u201cPart of the nod that athletes get in hiring may actually be due to an assessment that they have skills applicable to jobs in finance or business\u2014not because of the network.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
#Wall #Streets #hidden #recruiting #pipeline #isnt #Ivy #League #diplomaits #college #teammate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanl… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1657,2661,1193,1259,546,2659,2660,2658,2657,327,2656,2662,2048],"class_list":["post-1358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-college","tag-diplomaits","tag-hidden","tag-hiring","tag-isnt","tag-ivy","tag-league","tag-pipeline","tag-recruiting","tag-sports","tag-streets","tag-teammate","tag-wall"],"yoast_head":"\n
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