The fact that this exclusively focused on Ivy League colleges may taint the results. Athletes at that level have probably passed through a couple of filters already.
The fact that this exclusively focused on Ivy League colleges may taint the results. Athletes at that level have probably passed through a couple of filters already.
The study this refers to can be found here. From the abstract: I wonder how much of this comes down to factors of discipline. If you're in a sports team you're expected to train hard and...
The study this refers to can be found here. From the abstract:
In terms of career outcomes, we find that Ivy League athletes outperform their non-athlete counterparts in the labor market. Athletes attain higher terminal wages and earn cumulatively more than non-athletes over the course of their careers controlling for school, graduation year, major, and first job. In addition, they attain more senior positions in the organizations they join. We also find that athletes from more socioeconomically diverse sports teams and from teams that have lower academic admissions thresholds have higher career outcomes than non-athletes. Collectively, our results suggest that non-academic human capital developed through athletic participation is valued in the labor market and may support the role that prior athletic achievement plays in admissions at elite colleges.
I wonder how much of this comes down to factors of discipline. If you're in a sports team you're expected to train hard and regularly, and there aren't really very many excuses allowed beyond injury and bereavement. And you get to see the fruits of your labour very easily: bigger muscles, faster times, heavier weights, higher scores. It's all very tangible. And you have a group of comrades who you are in the same boat with, presumably with a leader or coach of some kind, keeping you all in line. During your formative years you are being shown the benefits of a disciplined approach to practice, and that hard work actually does pay off. Later in life, even subconsciously, these lessons and experiences must surely have a large impact on one's work ethic.
Compare that with nerds (which I would happily define myself as) who very frequently found that learning and study came easy to them; not having to work very hard to attain good results in exams, and being able to benefit from the extra free time that comes from not needing to study constantly by investing into nerdy hobbies which are often more insular, focused on smaller groups, and have far less structure than that of a sports team. In this scenario you don't learn the same lessons that your more athletic peers do (even if in passing), and you end up finding yourself stagnant and unable to progress in your career. You have to learn as an adult to be disciplined, and to commit your time wisely. Hard work is, well, hard. And logically you know that getting that certification will pay off long term, but in the interim that's a lot of study, which you've never really had to do before.
This is all baseless speculation, of course. I would welcome being proven wrong! But it certainly tracks with my own experience. I have not excelled in my career as much as I ought to, in part because so much of my identity is tied up in coming across as intelligent, and feeling paralysed by not knowing what I'm doing, or feeling like I'm bad at something. I know that putting in the time and effort towards improving my skills would have major benefits, but it proves extraordinarily difficult to overcome my own psychology and put in the work that I need to, even if that means discomfort in the short term.
The whole study is kind of pointless to be honest. They're already looking at the best schools in the country. If you're an athlete in an ivy league, you're guaranteed to both be very intelligent,...
The whole study is kind of pointless to be honest.
They're already looking at the best schools in the country. If you're an athlete in an ivy league, you're guaranteed to both be very intelligent, while simultaneously not being in the best school for most sports, so even the athletes there are generally "nerds" by normal standards, relatively speaking.
Not everyone is solely motivated by the absolute most money they can make in their life and nothing else. If that were true, no one would major in physics or math or any of the other hard sciences that take a ton of work, but don't pay very well. I would imagine many "nerds" fall into this category.
Also, how much of "athlete" is legacy and daddy's connections. I'd say networks and familiar wealth are the most important factors. Teams are also just great networks later in life.
Also, how much of "athlete" is legacy and daddy's connections. I'd say networks and familiar wealth are the most important factors. Teams are also just great networks later in life.
So, the study is a comparative study of athletes at ivy leagues vs everyone else at ivy league, so despite the Guardian making a cultural reference, it wasn't per se a comparison of "jocks" vs...
So, the study is a comparative study of athletes at ivy leagues vs everyone else at ivy league, so despite the Guardian making a cultural reference, it wasn't per se a comparison of "jocks" vs "nerds", but "jocks" vs "everyone else".
Compare that with nerds (which I would happily define myself as) who very frequently found that learning and study came easy to them;
Despite it being somewhat meaningless since the original study never compared it to "nerds", I'd mention that traditionally "nerd" has been a pretty broad group. I wouldn't say that being academically successful is a necessary trait - it's just one stereotype. There's equally as many nerds who eschew their studies to watch anime, or star trek episodes or whatever.
I think if you were to compare ivy league athletes to, say, math olympiad members in the ivy league, or people in the ivy league that score well on the putnam exam, then they would have the income lead, being uniformly courted for quant positions in HFT firms, but that is an even more narrow niche, so it's to be expected. Mainly, the study just wanted to know if those student athletes are merely there for the sport's team success or actually do well with their fancy credential and network later in life.
I don't think you're wrong by any means, but I do think there's more to it than that. Band, for instance, requires plenty of discipline, and many/most nerds do some amount of that in high school;...
I don't think you're wrong by any means, but I do think there's more to it than that. Band, for instance, requires plenty of discipline, and many/most nerds do some amount of that in high school; not to mention the kind of dedication it takes to become proficient at their special interests outside of school, which can often translate to workplace skills.
Of course this is anecdotal, but my partner is like this: band kid, brilliant, mechanical engineer who has a shocking depth of knowledge in many other STEM corners because of his hobbies and interests... To the point where co-workers often have no idea what he actually specializes in, because they assume his degree is in whatever he's helped them with in the past, which is rarely the case. He's a sponge, and he won't profess familiarity with a subject until he knows he knows it, inside and out.
What he doesn't have is the piece of paper and/or the confidence to prove that knowledge on a wider scale. If you can't put it on a resume, it basically doesn't exist, so he's kinda stuck.
All this to say I think the issue is that athletes are more likely to be neurotypical, and thus are better able to 'play the game' correctly and succeed in more obvious ways. Sure, working for their grades/athletic skill probably helped, but it's so much more important to be able to perform a skill than to actually have it, ya know?
(Read 'perform' here as 'performative,' as in it doesn't matter if you know the thing or not so long as you can convince others that you do.)
Agree with other comments that looking at Ivy League grads alone probably skews things quite a lot. Anecdotally, as far as I'm aware out of everybody in my graduating high school class as well as...
Agree with other comments that looking at Ivy League grads alone probably skews things quite a lot.
Anecdotally, as far as I'm aware out of everybody in my graduating high school class as well as those before and after, the nerds are the ones doing best career-wise by a long shot. I'm sitting among the top earners in that group despite having dropped out of university halfway through, and negative compensation impact from not having a bachelor's is minor… that's difficult to pull off in anything outside of software dev or IT.
That said, the road getting here was bumpy. I was dead broke for several years, basically the total opposite of gently landing in a bed of rose petals coming out of university as an Ivy League graduate would. That's not necessarily a bad thing in my eyes, though.
The fact that this exclusively focused on Ivy League colleges may taint the results. Athletes at that level have probably passed through a couple of filters already.
More than a couple I'd bet, great point.
.. or which university the jocks and nerds from high school ended up going to respectively.
The study this refers to can be found here. From the abstract:
I wonder how much of this comes down to factors of discipline. If you're in a sports team you're expected to train hard and regularly, and there aren't really very many excuses allowed beyond injury and bereavement. And you get to see the fruits of your labour very easily: bigger muscles, faster times, heavier weights, higher scores. It's all very tangible. And you have a group of comrades who you are in the same boat with, presumably with a leader or coach of some kind, keeping you all in line. During your formative years you are being shown the benefits of a disciplined approach to practice, and that hard work actually does pay off. Later in life, even subconsciously, these lessons and experiences must surely have a large impact on one's work ethic.
Compare that with nerds (which I would happily define myself as) who very frequently found that learning and study came easy to them; not having to work very hard to attain good results in exams, and being able to benefit from the extra free time that comes from not needing to study constantly by investing into nerdy hobbies which are often more insular, focused on smaller groups, and have far less structure than that of a sports team. In this scenario you don't learn the same lessons that your more athletic peers do (even if in passing), and you end up finding yourself stagnant and unable to progress in your career. You have to learn as an adult to be disciplined, and to commit your time wisely. Hard work is, well, hard. And logically you know that getting that certification will pay off long term, but in the interim that's a lot of study, which you've never really had to do before.
This is all baseless speculation, of course. I would welcome being proven wrong! But it certainly tracks with my own experience. I have not excelled in my career as much as I ought to, in part because so much of my identity is tied up in coming across as intelligent, and feeling paralysed by not knowing what I'm doing, or feeling like I'm bad at something. I know that putting in the time and effort towards improving my skills would have major benefits, but it proves extraordinarily difficult to overcome my own psychology and put in the work that I need to, even if that means discomfort in the short term.
The whole study is kind of pointless to be honest.
Also, how much of "athlete" is legacy and daddy's connections. I'd say networks and familiar wealth are the most important factors. Teams are also just great networks later in life.
So, the study is a comparative study of athletes at ivy leagues vs everyone else at ivy league, so despite the Guardian making a cultural reference, it wasn't per se a comparison of "jocks" vs "nerds", but "jocks" vs "everyone else".
Despite it being somewhat meaningless since the original study never compared it to "nerds", I'd mention that traditionally "nerd" has been a pretty broad group. I wouldn't say that being academically successful is a necessary trait - it's just one stereotype. There's equally as many nerds who eschew their studies to watch anime, or star trek episodes or whatever.
I think if you were to compare ivy league athletes to, say, math olympiad members in the ivy league, or people in the ivy league that score well on the putnam exam, then they would have the income lead, being uniformly courted for quant positions in HFT firms, but that is an even more narrow niche, so it's to be expected. Mainly, the study just wanted to know if those student athletes are merely there for the sport's team success or actually do well with their fancy credential and network later in life.
I don't think you're wrong by any means, but I do think there's more to it than that. Band, for instance, requires plenty of discipline, and many/most nerds do some amount of that in high school; not to mention the kind of dedication it takes to become proficient at their special interests outside of school, which can often translate to workplace skills.
Of course this is anecdotal, but my partner is like this: band kid, brilliant, mechanical engineer who has a shocking depth of knowledge in many other STEM corners because of his hobbies and interests... To the point where co-workers often have no idea what he actually specializes in, because they assume his degree is in whatever he's helped them with in the past, which is rarely the case. He's a sponge, and he won't profess familiarity with a subject until he knows he knows it, inside and out.
What he doesn't have is the piece of paper and/or the confidence to prove that knowledge on a wider scale. If you can't put it on a resume, it basically doesn't exist, so he's kinda stuck.
All this to say I think the issue is that athletes are more likely to be neurotypical, and thus are better able to 'play the game' correctly and succeed in more obvious ways. Sure, working for their grades/athletic skill probably helped, but it's so much more important to be able to perform a skill than to actually have it, ya know?
(Read 'perform' here as 'performative,' as in it doesn't matter if you know the thing or not so long as you can convince others that you do.)
Agree with other comments that looking at Ivy League grads alone probably skews things quite a lot.
Anecdotally, as far as I'm aware out of everybody in my graduating high school class as well as those before and after, the nerds are the ones doing best career-wise by a long shot. I'm sitting among the top earners in that group despite having dropped out of university halfway through, and negative compensation impact from not having a bachelor's is minor… that's difficult to pull off in anything outside of software dev or IT.
That said, the road getting here was bumpy. I was dead broke for several years, basically the total opposite of gently landing in a bed of rose petals coming out of university as an Ivy League graduate would. That's not necessarily a bad thing in my eyes, though.