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........

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