One former teammate working at a firm can nearly triple an Ivy League athlete’s odds of getting hired there, according to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The paper, titled ‘From Field to Firm: College Sports and Early-Stage Career Choice,’ tracked the first jobs of more than 120,000 Ivy League graduates between 1950 and 2020, including 5,658 who played intercollegiate sports.
A separate Harvard-based study of the same eight schools found recruited athletes already skew toward richer families before they ever join a team. The hiring boost documented in the new paper stacks directly on top of that head start.
A Teammate Is Worth Far More Than an Alum
The paper comes from Paul Gompers, a Harvard Business School professor who has spent much of the past several years studying how college sports shape careers, along with George Hu of Harvard, Will Levinson of Duke University, and Sachin Srivastava of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Using employment records from the labor market analytics firm Lightcast plus hand collected rosters, the team measured every plausible job a graduate could have taken, then checked how the presence of fellow alumni changed the odds of actually landing at a given firm. The differences by connection type were stark.
| Connection Type | Hiring Probability Boost | What It Captures |
|---|---|---|
| Fellow graduate, same school | +1.8% | Any recent graduate of the same Ivy university, no shared sport |
| Fellow athlete, same sport | +16.4% | An Ivy athlete in the same sport, from any of the eight schools |
| Former teammate, same roster | +193.7% | Someone who actually played on that exact team |
Do the arithmetic and a former teammate’s pull on a hiring decision runs more than 100 times larger than an ordinary alumnus from the same school. The researchers split that pull into two layers: a ‘peer effect’ from teammates who graduated within the past three years, and a ‘network effect’ from older team alumni beyond that window. A Princeton basketball player graduating today gets a peer boost from guards and forwards who left the program in the last three years, and a separate network boost from everyone who wore the jersey before that.
Princeton and Yale Stack the Rosters
All eight Ivy League schools showed up in the sample, but not evenly.
- Princeton and Yale fielded the largest shares of athletes among the eight schools studied.
- Penn and Cornell produced the smallest athlete shares.
- Football, track and field, and lacrosse carried more athletes than any other sports.
- Athletes made up about 5% of the 120,000-plus graduates in the sample, and 79% of them were men.
Those numbers matter because a team’s network value depends on how many alumni it has stacked up at any given firm over decades. A sport with deep rosters and long alumni tails, like football or lacrosse, builds a thicker web of connections than a sport that graduates a handful of athletes a year.
The Edge Starts Before the First Practice
The teammate hiring bump does not begin on equal footing. Economists at Opportunity Insights found recruited athletes at elite colleges skew toward higher income families, one of three admissions factors, alongside legacy status and non-academic ratings, that give children from the top 1% of earners roughly twice the odds of attending an Ivy-Plus school compared to middle class applicants with identical test scores.
That research covered a dozen elite colleges, not the same exact roster data as the new NBER paper, but it studied the same institutions and the same admissions era. Put the two findings together and a pattern emerges. Wealthier applicants get recruited onto teams at higher rates, and once on a roster, that same team membership multiplies their odds of landing a job through teammates already working inside a firm.
Who Never Gets Near the Roster
Every graduate who never played a varsity sport competes for the same entry level finance, banking, and consulting jobs without a locker room behind them. Those three sectors are exactly where Ivy League athletes are most likely to land their first job, an elite slice of the labor market that graduates of less selective schools rarely break into at all.
The gender split compounds the gap. Only 21% of the athletes in the sample were women, meaning the teammate networks feeding finance and consulting firms are, by the study’s own numbers, drawn overwhelmingly from men’s rosters. A non-recruited classmate, a walk-on from a smaller program, or a graduate of a non-Ivy university competing for the same analyst seat is working against a hiring mechanism that was never built to include them.
The Paycheck Gap Outlasts the First Job
The advantage does not fade once the offer letter arrives. A companion paper posted in 2023 by three of the same researchers, titled ‘No Revenge for Nerds? Evaluating the Careers of Ivy League Athletes,’ followed a much larger group, roughly 400,000 Ivy League graduates from 1970 through 2021, and found the earnings gap holds for an entire career.
- 3.4% higher cumulative career earnings for athletes than non-athlete classmates, even after controlling for school, major, graduation year, and first job.
- $220,000 or more in additional lifetime wages for the typical Ivy League athlete.
- Athletes reach more senior titles inside the organizations they join than non-athletes with identical resumes.
- Athletes lean toward MBAs, often from elite programs, but trail non-athletes in PhDs, MDs, and advanced STEM degrees.
That paper, posted to NBER’s working paper archive under the number w31753, concluded that non-academic skills built through competing on a team get rewarded by employers in ways a transcript alone does not capture.
Recent Teammates Outlast the Old Boys
The newest paper adds a twist to the ‘old boys network’ label often pinned on this kind of hiring pattern. Recent teammates matter more, not less, as the years pass.
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.
The paper’s authors reached that conclusion after separating recent graduates from decades old alumni across the full sample. Gompers has previously flagged this research thread himself, sharing coverage of the athlete earnings gap findings from the earlier study. In practice, a firm stacked with alumni from 1985 carries less pull today than one with three or four recent grads from the same roster.
Does This Playbook Work Outside the Ivy League?
Not based on this data alone. The paper only covers eight Ivy League schools, and the authors do not claim the same teammate multiplier would show up at a Power Five football program or a small liberal arts college with a different athletic culture and a different alumni base working in different industries.
Team culture varies enormously outside this sample. A walk-on at a large state school with hundreds of teammates scattered across every industry is a different proposition than a rower at Yale whose eight teammates all interviewed at the same three banks. The Ivy League’s small, tightly clustered rosters combined with heavy alumni concentration in finance, banking, and consulting may be what makes the effect this large in the first place.
Whether a similar multiplier exists at other kinds of colleges remains untested.
