New Study Shows How Ivy League Playing Fields Turn Into Job Pipelines

The influence of the “old boys” network on a college graduate’s employment turns can be particularly strong if the graduate played intercollegiate athletics at an Ivy League university. In fact, if a firm employs just one additional alum from a specific Ivy League college sports team the likelihood that an athlete from that same team joins that firm increases by 194% compared to the baseline probability.

That’s one of the main takeaways from a new National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, entitled From Field To Firm: College Sports And Early-Stage Career Choice by Paul Gompers (Harvard University) George Hu (Harvard University) Will Levinson (Duke University) and Sachin Srivastava (the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

To assess the role of Ivy League athletic participation on early-stage careers, the researchers studied the first jobs of more than 120,000 Ivy League college graduates between 1950 and 2020. This sample included 5,658 intercollegiate athletes (79% of whom were men), equal to about 5% of the total number of graduates.

Using Lightcast and hand-collected data, the research team determined the graduates’ educational history, first full-time jobs within two years after completing college, and whether they participated in intercollegiate athletics at any one of the eight Ivy League institutions. From those data, they tracked the total number and share of Ivy League alums, recent Ivy alums, former Ivy League athletes, and recently graduated Ivy League athletes who were employees at firms within a graduate’s potential job set.

These data allowed the researchers to compare, among all the potential jobs that a graduate reasonable could have taken, how the presence of different types of recent alumni peers vs. older alumni network connections affected the graduate’s initial job placement.

Peers were defined as the number of individuals at a job who graduated in the past three years from the same university as a given graduate. "Peer effects” were calculated for the total employees from the same university as well as for athletes who played the same sports, athletes from the same university, and athletes from the same team.

“Network effects" capture the more indirect influence of an older alumni network beyond immediate peers. They were calculated by subtracting “peer effects” from firm-level variables for the above categories. As an example, to determine the number of “network connections” who played the same sport as a given individual, the researchers counted the total number of firm employees who played the same sport and then subtracted the number of peer alums.

Here’s an example: a peer effect captures the impact of Princeton basketball players who were on the team between one to three years before a given Princeton hoopster graduated, while a network effect would examine the influence of Princeton basketball players who were on the team more than 3 years before the focal player graduated.

All eight Ivy League universities were represented in the data. Princeton and Yale had the highest shares of athletes; the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell the smallest percentages. Football, track and field, and lacrosse were the sports that had the highest representation of athletes in the sample.

Results

Both peer and network ties formed through participation in intercollegiate athletics exerted statistically significant effects on where the graduates took their first jobs, but some connections were stronger than others. As examples:

Employing one additional graduate from the same Ivy League school as a recent graduate increased the likelihood that graduate joins the employing firm by only 1.8% compared to the baseline probability.

Employing one more Ivy League alum who played the same sport as an athlete who attended any Ivy League school increased the probability of the focal athlete joining the same firm by 16.4%.

But here’s the kicker: Employing one additional former teammate of an athlete raises a firm’s probability of hiring that athlete by 193.7% relative to the baseline probability.

Both direct peer and indirect alumni network effects matter. Companies that have more employees who are both recent former teammates and older team alumni appear to influence a student-athlete’s choice to join a firm. “However,” the authors conclude, “when looking beyond the team context, direct peer effects appear to persist whereas the impact of indirect alumni network effects appear to decline over time.”

This study suggests that athletic team connections have a substantial impact on the initial career choices of Ivy League athletes. Their shared experiences of competition, teamwork and commitment may create social capital in ways that other collegiate experiences might not be able to match. Related research has found that Ivy League athletes outperform their non-athlete counterparts in the job market. Athletes earn cumulatively more than non-athletes over the course of their careers even after controlling for school, graduation year, major, and first job, and they ascend to more senior positions in the organizations they join.

Scoring goals at Dartmouth may be associated with a shot-maker’s chances of scoring a job at a firm that employs one of his or her teammates, but how well that leg up would transfer to non-Ivy-League associations remains to be seen. Athletic team culture and alumni networks in the Ivy League differ in several ways from universities in the so-called Power Five conferences or from small regional liberal arts colleges. In addition, the industry sectors where Ivy League athletes are most likely to take their first job are concentrated in finance, banking and consulting, an elite labor market that graduates of less prestigious institutions are less likely to engage.

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