No Revenge for Nerds? Evaluating the Careers of Ivy League Athletes
nber.org
nber.org
Business is all about impressions. People respond much more positively towards people on the high end of all the mentioned traits vs the low end. If a company wants to make a good impression, they'll send a 6'2" handsome athlete over a 5'8" underweight introvert. Life is the continuous compounded realization of opportunities afforded by the luck your preexisting circumstances allow you to have.
One simply has to browse through the headshots of C-levels and VCs vs engineers and researchers. People tend to gravitate towards the fields that affirm where they "ought" to be by our biological and cultural biases. You'll notice that even among those in more stereotypically "nerdy" fields, those who make a bigger name for themselves and gain more social status tend to be physical exceptions to the negative stereotypes ascribed to their group.
"In terms of industry choice, athletes are far more likely to go into business and Finance related jobs than their non-athlete classmates. In terms of advanced degrees, Ivy League athletes are more likely to get an MBA and to receive it from an elite program, although they are less likely to pursue an M.D., a Ph.D., or an advanced STEM degree. "
So, not so much that Ivy League athletes out earn their peers, but that they are more likely to prioritize money and choose careers that pay more in the first place.
I have only read the abstract, but does the paper control for networking? (Is that even possible? I presume by "resume data" the authors mean LinkedIn, but surely they mean individual profiles; I doubt they persuaded every single Ivy graduate to reveal linked profiles.) It's well known that Ivy League athletic teams are very effective referral networks for jobs, and that Wall Street is always a popular destination.
That said, I am an Ivy League graduate who did not play a sport in school. I learned after the fact that among those I had beaten out for my first job, at an investment bank's technology group,[1] was an Ivy League QB who had transferred from a Division I school. (I'd even read about him in the Wall Street Journal.)
I am an immigrant and my family had zero connections to Wall Street. I still don't know how I did it.
[1] Not the IT department
At that level, student athletes are also nerds/have equal mental firepower and academic interest depending on how you want to define nerd.
I wonder where is the root cause that evolves into everything else.
Hypothetical example:
conscientiousness + willpower -> athletic ability -> $ ?
It's funny that people think this is a meritocracy. Nope, those student athletes get special treatment because they are student athletes. Or else, maybe those student athletes had NO athletic ability, but got athletic scholarships via fraud. https://abcnews.go.com/US/mastermind-varsity-blues-college-c... “Among those prosecuted were ... Ivy League coaches who opened sham spots on their rosters for Singer's clients in exchange for bribes”
Unless you have backing data, this sounds like sour grapes
Like income and dark triad traits. :-(
You still need talent, but at least there won't be roadblocks stopping you from expressing your talent (same reasons top musicians, actors etc. also tend to come from at least upper middle class)
[0] https://feed.georgetown.edu/access-affordability/what-impact...
Many of the sports and physical activities I participate in actually have a disproportionately high number of software engineers relative to the general population.
Ryan Van Duzer vs. SBF
If we assume that being a successful high school athlete gets you an admission percentage bump, they might be a little bit dumber on average than their stereotypical nerd dweeb counterparts, but we're talking about good students here.
anyway, the dichotomy might exist at all schools; If schools are at all selective, they let you in for a reason. If you are an athlete, that would be your reason; if not then your reason is more likely to be other gifts as a student.
I won't hold myself up as any kind of Adonis, but on a philosophical/idealistic level, what ever happened to the Classical ideal of mens sana in corpore sano?
Also, having served in the military and worked in the private sector, a well-functioning team will beat the brakes off a lone wolf any day and twice on Sundays. And oftentimes athletics fosters a level of sociability on that front which serves people well in other walks of life. And I say that as someone who in high school was a stereotypical "nerd" who hadn't learned that lesson yet.
isolated, awkward, with 'weird' interests (e.g. 4chan, H-games, trolling). less of a pure "loser" implication than 1980s nerd.
more of a "loser, but also creepy, and an outside chance of them shooting up the place"
Yes, I'm familiar with the existence of the weirdo subculture that coined the term. But there's a lot of technically "involuntarily celibate" straight men in the world who are just between relationships, haven't met Ms. Right yet and don't want to cat around, or aren't regularly getting laid for any number of other reasons, but who just do what normal people do and deal with it.
Using the term "incel" to describe the weirdo losers who feel entitled to women's attentions and affections without any effort on their part is arguably legitimizing their creepy argument.
Also Thucydides said “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.”
Discipline in the physical often benefits discipline in the mental.
If they repeated this study for a mid-tier schools (top 50-500 universities) with division 1 program like Michigan State or Gonzaga. I'm sure the results would be totally different and the academics at the school would show much better results.
Once someone is know from an entertainment role, maybe that enhances their ability to be admitted into MBA or similar programs.
But there have to be far fewer total people in athletics than in all of STEM, and I wonder how it works out when considering everyone.
However, I do give NBER full credit for scoring high on the clickbait metric. If you download the actual paper, the word "nerd" only appears in the title of the pdf.
(curiously, and as evidence that nerds don't really go to Harvard, they list Aerospace Engineering as an offered major, but with a participation rate of 0.00% across male/female, athlete/non.)
"Nerd" is typically associated to be deeply into scientific topics and rather introverted (if they are rather extraverted, they are typically geeks), but also often (though not always) socially unsecure (sometimes even awkward) and also sometimes (though not always) unathletic (if nerds are athletic, they often have a tendency to be rather attracted to sometimes obsure, and often non-mainstream forms of sport).
Thus, I would rather be surprised if there were many athletes who are nerds.
It would be interesting to see the statistics for sports that pay extremely well (NFL, Soccer, etc) compared to the Tier-2 sports (Volleyball, Track and Field, etc).
Tier-2 athletes have always had to juggle the prospect of never earning enough money with their sport and hence have had to focus on education too.
It's not surprising that after sporting careers the skills of being at the top of your sport (ambition, adversity, etc) transfer to Business and Finance.
In practice, today it's all about discipline. Lots of very smart technologists or financiers are also in great physical shape. The two correlate. (And by extension, if you look at the demographics that are least physically fit, they also tend to be the least educated.)
Being fit does not equal being an athlete in my view, much like being literate does not equal being a writer.
Precisely. I am quite fit but only a decent athlete. Two different things.
a lot of people that optimize for beauty as their only marketable skill self identify under the bimbo moniker to find goods, services, community and to be found
there is market demand for differentiators, and many cater to that
being on the demand side or merely acknowledging those in the supply side of that market doesnt make someone sexist so its not enough information from simply using the term
As far as I was ever aware, bimbo always meant pretty and stupid. In the same way that nerd is awkward and smart, or jock is fit and dumb.
Physical fitness, IQ and income are all positively correlated.
Real life isn't an RPG where you only have so many stat points to assign, being healthy or living well are going to improve all of the above.
Well, but there are only so many hours in a day. If you're lucky, then you don't have to work so hard on one or more of the aspects you mentioned (smarts, looks, income, etc.), but if you're not then you may have to put in effort in all three or more.
Maybe that's not true for al (although a 35 minute bike ride with existing fitness gets you a long way surprisingly fast). But one can lift while watching TV. One can do squats while doing laundry. Etc.
Of course, in each case, one of those two options is far less comfortable. For commuting that's particularly true in the winter. But WRT physical fitness, the barrier is almost always "discomfort" and almost never "time".
To me, the revenge of the nerds is not that Ivy League athletes should become miserable. It's the fact that a lot of top brass in huge companies is now people with STEM degrees, and a practical experience of working as an engineer.
Let's list a few: Bill Gates (once the wealthiest person on the planet); Andy Grove and Pat Geslinger (CEOs of Intel), Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Marc Andreesen, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. All these guys achieved considerable power and real financial success by starting and working as engineers, and applying science and engineering, not MBA skills, to win a colossal market.
That would be hard to imagine in 1930s, and even in 1960s.