Wall Street's hidden recruiting pipeline isn’t an Ivy League diploma—it’s the teammate who triples your odds of getting hired

Photo of two Harvard football teammates at the Harvard v. Yale game (Credit: Adam Glanzman–Getty Images)

At Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America, the fastest route from the Ivy league to a corner office might not run through the career center at all, but through the football roster.

That’s the implication of a new National Bureau of Economic Research study from Harvard, Duke, and Wharton researchers who tracked the first jobs of 120,306 Ivy League graduates between 1950 and 2020. The team—Paul Gompers, George Hu, Will Levinson and Sachin Srivastava—set out to test something Wall Street recruiters have long insisted anecdotally, namely that being a college athlete is a hiring edge.