As a lifelong runner who spent countless hours training and competing his way up to the national level, Professor Paul Gompers has always believed that his athletic experiences were critical to shaping who he is, both as a competitor and in the professional sphere. Now he has evidence to show that the effect is both real and widespread: His 2023 working paper, “No Revenge for Nerds? Evaluating the Careers of Ivy League Athletes,” examined the career paths of 401,785 graduates and found that by many measures the athletes outperformed their less-sporty peers in the working world.

Studying a sample of graduates from 1970 to 2021, Gompers and four coauthors found that those who had participated in varsity intercollegiate sports differed from their peers in several specific ways: They were more likely to pursue careers in business and finance, more likely to obtain an MBA or hold a C-suite position, and enjoyed higher cumulative wages (by 3.4 percent).

Gompers, who was an all-American runner and held the 10,000-meter record at Harvard for 30 years, attributes the differences to a few soft skills, the most obvious being teamwork and leadership. “The ability to work in and lead teams is hard to learn in an English class. But when you’re spending 20 to 30 hours a week with your teammates trying to achieve a common goal, you learn that in a very real way,” he explains. Secondly, as athletes work toward goals well into the future—that championship cup or a coveted title—they learn about delayed gratification and long-range goal-setting. The third skill is resilience. “Anyone who’s been involved in athletics knows that in certain sports you fail a lot more than you succeed. Being able to pick yourself up from failure, learning to recalibrate and reset yourself on a path is again harder to learn in a classroom setting,” he says.

While the data are clear that athletes benefit from these skills—and that managers would be smart to hire for them—Gompers acknowledges that the existing research doesn’t explain why. Do sports select for people who already have these innate abilities? Are great athletes born or developed? To what degree does the so-called old-boys’ network advantage these athletes in the professional space? “The next phase of the research is to peel back the layers of the onion to understand that,” he says.

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