It's funny that people think this is a meritocracy. Nope, those student athletes get special treatment because they are student athletes. Or else, maybe those student athletes had NO athletic ability, but got athletic scholarships via fraud. https://abcnews.go.com/US/mastermind-varsity-blues-college-c... “Among those prosecuted were ... Ivy League coaches who opened sham spots on their rosters for Singer's clients in exchange for bribes”
It’d be surprising if that stopped being true in college, in fact. It’s definitely still true from about 6th grade(!) on, at least in lots of schools. Ask some teachers (who aren’t also coaches) what that dynamic looks like—all the stuff about star athletes getting away with bad behavior, coach-teachers letting them get away with doing almost nothing in their classes, and other teachers being pressured to give them higher grades than they earned is still there, straight out of an 80s movie.
The special treatment star athletes get in many US universities with well-funded prominent sports programs, especially American football and basketball, is well-documented. Even not-so-star athletes get the benefit of the doubt. What reasons do we have to believe Ivy League universities are different? They may emphasize different sports – crew or field hockey instead of football – but the results are the same.
Wealth and athletic success aren't unrelated [0]. A direct quote that apllies to a lot of things really:
"A privileged background helps students succeed in sports just as it does in other parts of life"
You still need talent, but at least there won't be roadblocks stopping you from expressing your talent (same reasons top musicians, actors etc. also tend to come from at least upper middle class)
The idea that there needs to be a dichotomy between "nerds" and "jocks" is foolish anyway. Just because you're in physical shape doesn't automatically make you stupid, and just because you're intelligent doesn't mean you have to be out of shape or physically weak.
I won't hold myself up as any kind of Adonis, but on a philosophical/idealistic level, what ever happened to the Classical ideal of mens sana in corpore sano?
Also, having served in the military and worked in the private sector, a well-functioning team will beat the brakes off a lone wolf any day and twice on Sundays. And oftentimes athletics fosters a level of sociability on that front which serves people well in other walks of life. And I say that as someone who in high school was a stereotypical "nerd" who hadn't learned that lesson yet.
maybe its geographical? At my highschool the vast majority of those playing sports went to college, while the "weird" kids typically dropped out or worked random jobs after college for the entirety of their 20s
When I grew up, "nerd" effectively meant "weird loser". The dictonomy was not between the athletic and the intelligent but between the popular and the unpopular. The bullies and the bullied. The normal and the abnormal. Those with common interests and those with weird ones. Popular kids seemed more athletic, because it was socially acceptable to be interested in sports. Unpopular kids seemed more intelligent, because taking your studies seriously was often socially unacceptable.
And that term is still problematic. Just because a straight man has a lousy love life doesn't automatically make him a misogynist or a potential spree killer. If anything, that feeds into those freaks' arguments that men are entitled to sex or affection.
Yes, I'm familiar with the existence of the weirdo subculture that coined the term. But there's a lot of technically "involuntarily celibate" straight men in the world who are just between relationships, haven't met Ms. Right yet and don't want to cat around, or aren't regularly getting laid for any number of other reasons, but who just do what normal people do and deal with it.
Using the term "incel" to describe the weirdo losers who feel entitled to women's attentions and affections without any effort on their part is arguably legitimizing their creepy argument.
The two most intelligent people I know are very physically fit. One went to Harvard medical school, the other cal tech. Both have extremely enviable careers with extensive publication history, great resumes, etc. One is a runner and by my understanding has great times/stamina. The other is straight jacked. I think it’s reflective of their work ethic. They’re arguably gifted with intelligence to some degree but that needed effort to flourish.
Also Thucydides said “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.”
The "brain vs brawn" is one of the most misguiding stereotypes in our society, surely left over from an older time when training in one necessarily meant less in the other.
In practice, today it's all about discipline. Lots of very smart technologists or financiers are also in great physical shape. The two correlate. (And by extension, if you look at the demographics that are least physically fit, they also tend to be the least educated.)
Do you mean that you can be a "college athlete", that it, to play in a college's sports team, and it won't take much time or energy from you? You won't have to sacrifice anything?
Being fit does not equal being an athlete in my view, much like being literate does not equal being a writer.
I’m so tired of this false dichotomy. Athleticism and intelligence aren’t mutually exclusive.
Many of the sports and physical activities I participate in actually have a disproportionately high number of software engineers relative to the general population.
People who work out are also kinder ime - I think this comes from self confidence. A lot of stereotypical nerds are mean, and a lot of stereotypical athletes are actually really nerdy.
they're not falling prey your false dichotomy: these are Ivy League athletes vs other Ivy League students.
If we assume that being a successful high school athlete gets you an admission percentage bump, they might be a little bit dumber on average than their stereotypical nerd dweeb counterparts, but we're talking about good students here.
anyway, the dichotomy might exist at all schools; If schools are at all selective, they let you in for a reason. If you are an athlete, that would be your reason; if not then your reason is more likely to be other gifts as a student.
"In terms of industry choice, athletes are far more likely to go into business and Finance related jobs than their non-athlete classmates. In terms of advanced degrees, Ivy League athletes are more likely to get an MBA and to receive it from an elite program, although they are less likely to pursue an M.D., a Ph.D., or an advanced STEM degree. "
So, not so much that Ivy League athletes out earn their peers, but that they are more likely to prioritize money and choose careers that pay more in the first place.
Yeah, athletes and business degrees are a stereotypical combo and an Ivy League business degree means good earnings unless you’re a total fuck-up (and if you were a total fuck-up, you were probably weeded out way before becoming and Ivy athlete). No surprises here. Major determines earning range, and athletes tend to pick one of the better majors for that.
> So, not so much that Ivy League athletes out earn their peers, but that they are more likely to prioritize money and choose careers that pay more in the first place.
I have only read the abstract, but does the paper control for networking? (Is that even possible? I presume by "resume data" the authors mean LinkedIn, but surely they mean individual profiles; I doubt they persuaded every single Ivy graduate to reveal linked profiles.) It's well known that Ivy League athletic teams are very effective referral networks for jobs, and that Wall Street is always a popular destination.
That said, I am an Ivy League graduate who did not play a sport in school. I learned after the fact that among those I had beaten out for my first job, at an investment bank's technology group,[1] was an Ivy League QB who had transferred from a Division I school. (I'd even read about him in the Wall Street Journal.)
I am an immigrant and my family had zero connections to Wall Street. I still don't know how I did it.
> Real life isn't an RPG where you only have so many stat points to assign
Well, but there are only so many hours in a day. If you're lucky, then you don't have to work so hard on one or more of the aspects you mentioned (smarts, looks, income, etc.), but if you're not then you may have to put in effort in all three or more.
Totally agree at the peaks, you have to sacrifice a lot to get there, but there's a lot of basic stuff most people don't do that can make you relatively well rounded. A good diet and some level of ambition will get you well above average in the above for most people.
My driving commute is 20 minutes. My cycling commute is 35 minutes (with significant effort). The average drive-tru time at Starbucks is 5 minutes. Add in a 5 minute detour off the optimal driving path, and another few since commuting hours are peak demand and will therefore be at the tail of the distribution. Same job, same commute, but all told, relative to a car and a PSL, cycling is net neutral on time with a difference of 600-800 calories.
Maybe that's not true for al (although a 35 minute bike ride with existing fitness gets you a long way surprisingly fast). But one can lift while watching TV. One can do squats while doing laundry. Etc.
Of course, in each case, one of those two options is far less comfortable. For commuting that's particularly true in the winter. But WRT physical fitness, the barrier is almost always "discomfort" and almost never "time".
the vast majority of anecdotal experiences ive come across, those who regularly exercise also work harder than those who don't. when you spend time exercising, you make it up with increased productivity and more positive outlook on life.
As others have mentioned, brain vs. brawn is a false cultural dichotomy, and a particular female variant is brain vs. beauty (or if you're sexist, then you call them a bimbo instead of beautiful). Beautiful women often have to wear a nerd costume to be taken seriously in academic or engineering professions.
> or if you're sexist, then you call them a bimbo instead of beautiful
a lot of people that optimize for beauty as their only marketable skill self identify under the bimbo moniker to find goods, services, community and to be found
there is market demand for differentiators, and many cater to that
being on the demand side or merely acknowledging those in the supply side of that market doesnt make someone sexist so its not enough information from simply using the term
You're right, but I wasn't talking about people who optimize for beauty. I was talking about women who merely are beautiful and have to apply all sorts of non-make up to appear like they belong in academia or engineering.
These plots show a persistent difference at 30 to 40 years past graduation. Society was very different when the first teams in their study, from 1970, graduated. Even though the classification of athlete vs non athlete is of course silly and it would be hard to correct for other biases well, I would still like to see a followup in 30 years starting with graduates after year 2000.
Yeah, it's just that most ivy league schools aren't in Division 1 programs, so the school isn't prioritizing athletics over academics. When I went to a Division 1 school and had a class with an athlete, they were terrible people who clearly knew that the school was benefiting from them being unpaid employees and just partied together all the time.
If they repeated this study for a mid-tier schools (top 50-500 universities) with division 1 program like Michigan State or Gonzaga. I'm sure the results would be totally different and the academics at the school would show much better results.
The paper is not about nerds vs. jocks. It's about athletes vs. non-athletes. There are many athletes that are nerds, and many non-athletes that are not nerds.
However, I do give NBER full credit for scoring high on the clickbait metric. If you download the actual paper, the word "nerd" only appears in the title of the pdf.
(curiously, and as evidence that nerds don't really go to Harvard, they list Aerospace Engineering as an offered major, but with a participation rate of 0.00% across male/female, athlete/non.)
> There are many athletes that are nerds, and many non-athletes that are not nerds.
"Nerd" is typically associated to be deeply into scientific topics and rather introverted (if they are rather extraverted, they are typically geeks), but also often (though not always) socially unsecure (sometimes even awkward) and also sometimes (though not always) unathletic (if nerds are athletic, they often have a tendency to be rather attracted to sometimes obsure, and often non-mainstream forms of sport).
Thus, I would rather be surprised if there were many athletes who are nerds.
At a highly competitive institution like Harvard, I would expect the nerd distribution between athletes and non-athletes to be much less "stereotypical" than in the broader society.
I had a quick skim through the paper; but I may have missed the breakdowns by sport.
It would be interesting to see the statistics for sports that pay extremely well (NFL, Soccer, etc) compared to the Tier-2 sports (Volleyball, Track and Field, etc).
Tier-2 athletes have always had to juggle the prospect of never earning enough money with their sport and hence have had to focus on education too.
It's not surprising that after sporting careers the skills of being at the top of your sport (ambition, adversity, etc) transfer to Business and Finance.
To me, the revenge of the nerds is not that Ivy League athletes should become miserable. It's the fact that a lot of top brass in huge companies is now people with STEM degrees, and a practical experience of working as an engineer.
Let's list a few: Bill Gates (once the wealthiest person on the planet); Andy Grove and Pat Geslinger (CEOs of Intel), Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Marc Andreesen, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. All these guys achieved considerable power and real financial success by starting and working as engineers, and applying science and engineering, not MBA skills, to win a colossal market.
That would be hard to imagine in 1930s, and even in 1960s.
So much of high status jobs is looking the part, and demonstrating a certain masculine/eugenic "right" to a position above others. It has been repeatedly shown taller people out-earn and rise to higher ranks than their shorter peers. Same goes for more attractive, men with higher testosterone levels (which correlate and whose effects form virtuous confounding cycles pairwise with athletic ability, socialization, physical attractiveness, etc).
Business is all about impressions. People respond much more positively towards people on the high end of all the mentioned traits vs the low end. If a company wants to make a good impression, they'll send a 6'2" handsome athlete over a 5'8" underweight introvert. Life is the continuous compounded realization of opportunities afforded by the luck your preexisting circumstances allow you to have.
One simply has to browse through the headshots of C-levels and VCs vs engineers and researchers. People tend to gravitate towards the fields that affirm where they "ought" to be by our biological and cultural biases. You'll notice that even among those in more stereotypically "nerdy" fields, those who make a bigger name for themselves and gain more social status tend to be physical exceptions to the negative stereotypes ascribed to their group.
This study did not control for height which other studies have shown correlates to higher wages. Id also wager that fitness plays a large role. They should have controlled for weight and height (BMI?) to really tease out causation
IMO this analysis is best done with three groups, not two. People who do well in sports, do well in academics, and third group who does neither. Any analysis that put the middle group to the other will not give right output.
61 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadAt that level, student athletes are also nerds/have equal mental firepower and academic interest depending on how you want to define nerd.
I wonder where is the root cause that evolves into everything else.
Hypothetical example:
conscientiousness + willpower -> athletic ability -> $ ?
It's funny that people think this is a meritocracy. Nope, those student athletes get special treatment because they are student athletes. Or else, maybe those student athletes had NO athletic ability, but got athletic scholarships via fraud. https://abcnews.go.com/US/mastermind-varsity-blues-college-c... “Among those prosecuted were ... Ivy League coaches who opened sham spots on their rosters for Singer's clients in exchange for bribes”
Unless you have backing data, this sounds like sour grapes
Like income and dark triad traits. :-(
You still need talent, but at least there won't be roadblocks stopping you from expressing your talent (same reasons top musicians, actors etc. also tend to come from at least upper middle class)
[0] https://feed.georgetown.edu/access-affordability/what-impact...
I won't hold myself up as any kind of Adonis, but on a philosophical/idealistic level, what ever happened to the Classical ideal of mens sana in corpore sano?
Also, having served in the military and worked in the private sector, a well-functioning team will beat the brakes off a lone wolf any day and twice on Sundays. And oftentimes athletics fosters a level of sociability on that front which serves people well in other walks of life. And I say that as someone who in high school was a stereotypical "nerd" who hadn't learned that lesson yet.
isolated, awkward, with 'weird' interests (e.g. 4chan, H-games, trolling). less of a pure "loser" implication than 1980s nerd.
more of a "loser, but also creepy, and an outside chance of them shooting up the place"
Yes, I'm familiar with the existence of the weirdo subculture that coined the term. But there's a lot of technically "involuntarily celibate" straight men in the world who are just between relationships, haven't met Ms. Right yet and don't want to cat around, or aren't regularly getting laid for any number of other reasons, but who just do what normal people do and deal with it.
Using the term "incel" to describe the weirdo losers who feel entitled to women's attentions and affections without any effort on their part is arguably legitimizing their creepy argument.
Also Thucydides said “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.”
In practice, today it's all about discipline. Lots of very smart technologists or financiers are also in great physical shape. The two correlate. (And by extension, if you look at the demographics that are least physically fit, they also tend to be the least educated.)
Being fit does not equal being an athlete in my view, much like being literate does not equal being a writer.
Precisely. I am quite fit but only a decent athlete. Two different things.
Many of the sports and physical activities I participate in actually have a disproportionately high number of software engineers relative to the general population.
Ryan Van Duzer vs. SBF
If we assume that being a successful high school athlete gets you an admission percentage bump, they might be a little bit dumber on average than their stereotypical nerd dweeb counterparts, but we're talking about good students here.
anyway, the dichotomy might exist at all schools; If schools are at all selective, they let you in for a reason. If you are an athlete, that would be your reason; if not then your reason is more likely to be other gifts as a student.
"In terms of industry choice, athletes are far more likely to go into business and Finance related jobs than their non-athlete classmates. In terms of advanced degrees, Ivy League athletes are more likely to get an MBA and to receive it from an elite program, although they are less likely to pursue an M.D., a Ph.D., or an advanced STEM degree. "
So, not so much that Ivy League athletes out earn their peers, but that they are more likely to prioritize money and choose careers that pay more in the first place.
I have only read the abstract, but does the paper control for networking? (Is that even possible? I presume by "resume data" the authors mean LinkedIn, but surely they mean individual profiles; I doubt they persuaded every single Ivy graduate to reveal linked profiles.) It's well known that Ivy League athletic teams are very effective referral networks for jobs, and that Wall Street is always a popular destination.
That said, I am an Ivy League graduate who did not play a sport in school. I learned after the fact that among those I had beaten out for my first job, at an investment bank's technology group,[1] was an Ivy League QB who had transferred from a Division I school. (I'd even read about him in the Wall Street Journal.)
I am an immigrant and my family had zero connections to Wall Street. I still don't know how I did it.
[1] Not the IT department
Physical fitness, IQ and income are all positively correlated.
Real life isn't an RPG where you only have so many stat points to assign, being healthy or living well are going to improve all of the above.
Well, but there are only so many hours in a day. If you're lucky, then you don't have to work so hard on one or more of the aspects you mentioned (smarts, looks, income, etc.), but if you're not then you may have to put in effort in all three or more.
Maybe that's not true for al (although a 35 minute bike ride with existing fitness gets you a long way surprisingly fast). But one can lift while watching TV. One can do squats while doing laundry. Etc.
Of course, in each case, one of those two options is far less comfortable. For commuting that's particularly true in the winter. But WRT physical fitness, the barrier is almost always "discomfort" and almost never "time".
a lot of people that optimize for beauty as their only marketable skill self identify under the bimbo moniker to find goods, services, community and to be found
there is market demand for differentiators, and many cater to that
being on the demand side or merely acknowledging those in the supply side of that market doesnt make someone sexist so its not enough information from simply using the term
As far as I was ever aware, bimbo always meant pretty and stupid. In the same way that nerd is awkward and smart, or jock is fit and dumb.
Discipline in the physical often benefits discipline in the mental.
If they repeated this study for a mid-tier schools (top 50-500 universities) with division 1 program like Michigan State or Gonzaga. I'm sure the results would be totally different and the academics at the school would show much better results.
However, I do give NBER full credit for scoring high on the clickbait metric. If you download the actual paper, the word "nerd" only appears in the title of the pdf.
(curiously, and as evidence that nerds don't really go to Harvard, they list Aerospace Engineering as an offered major, but with a participation rate of 0.00% across male/female, athlete/non.)
"Nerd" is typically associated to be deeply into scientific topics and rather introverted (if they are rather extraverted, they are typically geeks), but also often (though not always) socially unsecure (sometimes even awkward) and also sometimes (though not always) unathletic (if nerds are athletic, they often have a tendency to be rather attracted to sometimes obsure, and often non-mainstream forms of sport).
Thus, I would rather be surprised if there were many athletes who are nerds.
It would be interesting to see the statistics for sports that pay extremely well (NFL, Soccer, etc) compared to the Tier-2 sports (Volleyball, Track and Field, etc).
Tier-2 athletes have always had to juggle the prospect of never earning enough money with their sport and hence have had to focus on education too.
It's not surprising that after sporting careers the skills of being at the top of your sport (ambition, adversity, etc) transfer to Business and Finance.
To me, the revenge of the nerds is not that Ivy League athletes should become miserable. It's the fact that a lot of top brass in huge companies is now people with STEM degrees, and a practical experience of working as an engineer.
Let's list a few: Bill Gates (once the wealthiest person on the planet); Andy Grove and Pat Geslinger (CEOs of Intel), Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Marc Andreesen, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. All these guys achieved considerable power and real financial success by starting and working as engineers, and applying science and engineering, not MBA skills, to win a colossal market.
That would be hard to imagine in 1930s, and even in 1960s.
Business is all about impressions. People respond much more positively towards people on the high end of all the mentioned traits vs the low end. If a company wants to make a good impression, they'll send a 6'2" handsome athlete over a 5'8" underweight introvert. Life is the continuous compounded realization of opportunities afforded by the luck your preexisting circumstances allow you to have.
One simply has to browse through the headshots of C-levels and VCs vs engineers and researchers. People tend to gravitate towards the fields that affirm where they "ought" to be by our biological and cultural biases. You'll notice that even among those in more stereotypically "nerdy" fields, those who make a bigger name for themselves and gain more social status tend to be physical exceptions to the negative stereotypes ascribed to their group.
Once someone is know from an entertainment role, maybe that enhances their ability to be admitted into MBA or similar programs.
But there have to be far fewer total people in athletics than in all of STEM, and I wonder how it works out when considering everyone.