http://www.theatlantic.

com/business/archive/2015/05/why-do-former-high-school-athletes-make-more-money-and-get-better-jobs/394283/

People Who Played High-School Sports Make More Money and Get Better Jobs
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

theatlantic.com

This project was a slam dunk, that one was a home run, and its just
the way the ball bouncesthe last thing the business world needs to
catalogue its accomplishments is another facile sports metaphor.
But its not just athletic metaphors that proliferate in the business
worldits also athletes themselves. A recent study documented just
how much the labor market smiles upon people who played sports as
children: Former high-school athletes generally go on to have
higher-status careers than those who didnt play a sport. On top of
that, former athletes wages are between 5 and 15 percent higher than
those of the poor trombonists and Yearbook Club presidents. This
earnings advantage doesnt appear to exist for any other
extracurricular activity.

What Kinds of Jobs Do High School Athletes Go on to

Do?
The thrust of the new article is to scratch the surface of the long-term, and workplace, relevance of playing competitive youth sports since it's
not a topic that's been closely studied, despite the fact that sports offers a common experience for more than 40 percent of the population,
says Kevin Kniffin, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University who co-authored the study (as well as a childhood baseball, football, and
soccer player).
Kniffin and his fellow researchers, Cornells Brian Wansink and Southern Illinois University Edwardsvilles Mitsuru Shimizu, also found that
high-school athletes were perceived to be better leaders and more confident than people who participated in other extracurricularswhich
hints at a possible pro-athlete bias in hiring processes.
Another finding was that former varsity athletes reported giving more money to charity and volunteering more time in their old age than their
more sedentary classmates. Strikingly, this correlation was statistically significant even 55 or so years after the majority of this
cohorthundreds of WWII veteranshad graduated from high school. (This research involved people who attended high school well before
the Title-IX era and thus necessarily focused on men, but women who played high-school sports enjoy an earnings premium too.)
Are high-school sports conferring leadership skills and self-confidence onto a bunch of otherwise unambitious kids? Or are they simply signals,
activities that professionally gifted youth gravitate toward? Its not exactly clear. On one hand, team sports, with their constant passing of balls,
pucks, and batons, might teach children and teens cooperation. And young people might learn something just from being in situations when
theyre subordinates. But on the other hand, the likelihood that someone plays a sport could have to do with several variables not recorded in
the data: coming from a family that can afford the proper equipment, that has the time to shuttle kids to practice, or that puts a premium on
physical activity. Also, popular kids might be more likely to play sports, and popularity is really just a proxy for networking
prowesssomething that the business world prizes.
Kniffin hopes that he can whittle down the possible explanations with further research. With data provided by the NCAA, I'll be looking at the
question of whether there is variation across types of sports with respect to behaviors like volunteering time for others, he says. For example,
do rowers, whose sport places a real premium on cooperation, also show more other-oriented behaviors in other parts of their lives?
While recruiters might not directly ask about a candidates athletic history, What are your hobbies? is often a natural lead-in to talking about
sports. Is that a fair interview topic? Theres agreement that traits beyond someones control, such as height or skin color, shouldnt affect job
prospectsand yet, they do. High-school sports are several degrees more voluntary than physical characteristics, but there are tons of
perfectly capable people who simply have no interest in sports, and might be at a slight disadvantage because athletes are thought to be better
leaders.
Whatever the virtues of high-school sports end up revealing themselves to be, its worth remembering that there could and should be a thicker
barrier between high school and sports. In Germany, where some youth sports dont exist in an academic context, being an athlete still was
associated with higher earnings down the line, which suggests some of the same dynamics might be at work even when sports are decoupled
from school. So if its indeed the case that athletes gain skills with lasting professional relevance, that says nothing of the loss of skills that
comes when schools direct money away from academic programs to support their athletic teams instead.
Joe Pinsker is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he covers business.

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Sep 02, 2015 09:22:19AM MDT