College teammates, not diplomas, drive hiring on Wall Street, study finds

A new NBER study shows that Ivy League athletes are far more likely to land jobs at firms where former teammates work, outweighing the effect of the school name alone.

A team of economists from Harvard Business School, Duke and Wharton analyzed the career paths of 120,306 Ivy League alumni spanning seven decades. Their findings reveal that the presence of a former college teammate at a company raises a graduate’s chance of being hired there by roughly 194%, dwarfing the 4.6% increase from simply sharing a school. Even alumni who never overlapped on the same team but played the same sport at the same institution lift hiring odds by about 172%.

This “teammate multiplier” remains strong long after graduation, suggesting both information sharing and recruiter bias. Athletes, who make up roughly 5% of the sample, secure more than 7% of first-job placements in finance, insurance and consulting, with firms like Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs leading the trend. The study adds quantitative weight to long-standing anecdotes about elite sports networks feeding Wall Street pipelines. Authors caution that athletic experience may also signal valuable skills such as discipline and teamwork, not just networking advantages.