At Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America, the fastest route from an Ivy League campus to a corner office may not pass through the career center—it might run through the athletic roster.

That is the implication of a new National Bureau of Economic Research study from researchers at Harvard, Duke, and Wharton, who tracked the first jobs of 120,306 Ivy League graduates between 1950 and 2020. The research team—Paul Gompers, George Hu, Will Levinson, and Sachin Srivastava—set out to test what Wall Street recruiters have long claimed anecdotally: that being a college athlete provides a hiring edge. The Ivy League is itself an athletic conference, formally organized in 1954 around sports competition among Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale—a fact that makes the conference's athletic identity inseparable from its academic brand.

What they found was far more specific. The team bond, it turns out, is a substantially more powerful career driver than the diploma itself, sharpening the broad narrative about elite graduates hiring one another on Wall Street into a measurable, concrete phenomenon.

"Broad school ties do relatively little; the pull comes from intensive shared experiences like a varsity team," Srivastava, a co-author and doctoral student at Wharton, told Fortune over email. "If anything, I think the old boys' club looks less like a club and more like a roster."

This paper represents the second installment of a broader research agenda. An earlier study by some of the same co-authors, covering roughly 400,000 Ivy League graduates, found that athletes out-earn non-athletes and reach the C-suite more often, even when controlling for major, graduation year, and school—a premium the authors partly attributed to skills such as leadership and teamwork.

"How well you do in your career is highly dependent upon what an economist calls human capital and social capital," Gompers, a professor at Harvard Business School and a co-author of the paper, told Fortune. Human capital is "the skills you have, what you bring to the table." This new paper, he said, "really explores potentially that second channel"—the networks and reputational effects that do not appear on a resume.

The ranks of the Fortune 500 offer ample examples of executives who competed in sports at elite institutions. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan played rugby at Brown University, while Comcast CEO Brian Roberts played squash for the University of Pennsylvania. Both have described their collegiate athletic careers as formative to their leadership development.

The 'Teammate Multiplier'

While much academic research focuses on cognitive skills or classroom performance, the NBER study quantifies a vast, previously unmeasured network: college athletics, which constitutes the most extensive extracurricular system in American higher education.

The researchers compared each graduate's actual first employer against every other firm that plausibly could have hired them, then measured how the presence of fellow Ivy Leaguers at those firms shaped where graduates ultimately landed.

Simply sharing a university with existing employees—without any overlap in a sport or team—raised a graduate's odds of being hired there by just 4.6%. Sharing a sport with employees at a different Ivy League institution raised the odds by 16.4%. But having one additional former teammate—same sport, same school, same roster—already working at a firm raised a fellow player's odds of joining that firm by 193.7%, nearly tripling the baseline. Team identity, the study concludes, "carries most of the effect."

This effect does not fade after graduation. Alumni who played on a team years before a given athlete ever arrived on campus—individuals that athlete never actually met—still boosted that athlete's hiring odds by 171.9%, nearly matching the 193.7% boost from former locker-room teammates.

Gompers argues that those similar figures likely reflect two distinct mechanisms. Recent teammates primarily function as an information pipeline, while older, non-overlapping alumni may be shaping how recruiters and HR departments assess candidates who share their team affiliation, rather than merely passing along a tip.

A Concentrated Impact in Finance

The findings land squarely in the financial sector's backyard. Ivy League athletes constituted only about 5% of the graduates in the sample, yet a disproportionate 7.08% of first jobs in finance went to athletes. Morgan Stanley and Bank of America topped the list of athlete-heavy employers; Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase led in overall Ivy League hiring. McKinsey and Bain appeared prominently on both lists.

The study's findings contribute to the ongoing debate over how elite social circles restrict access to top-tier jobs, demonstrating that Ivy League athletes are overrepresented in high-powered, high-retention industries such as finance, insurance, and consulting. Because the study spans seven decades—1950 through 2020—it captures multiple generations of Wall Street hiring practices, from the white-shoe partnership era through the rise of structured campus recruiting and algorithmic resume screening. The teammate effect persisted across all of these periods.

Wall Street's relationship with sports and gatekeeping, however, is not new. Fortune has chronicled how deeply the industry's culture is intertwined with athletics. Goldman Sachs built out a dedicated sports and entertainment group within its private wealth division, and the bank recently tapped fraud investigator Nicole Pullen Ross specifically to safeguard athletes' fortunes—evidence of how enmeshed the firm has become with the sports world from which it also recruits.

Fortune has also reported extensively on the machinery of elite-school gatekeeping more broadly, from Wall Street's secretive alumni societies to the recurring debate over whether an Ivy League degree still delivers the career premium it once commanded.

That debate has recently taken an unconventional turn. In January, a Blackstone executive told Fortune that elite degrees "aren't good enough" anymore and that new analysts need to simply work harder. Separately, Ramp's CEO told Fortune that he ignores résumés and Ivy pedigrees entirely, searching instead for people who built things themselves.

Gompers cautions against interpreting the findings as pure network capture.

"One of the reasons I'm doing this work on athletics is that I think you learn things in athletics that are hard to learn in the classroom—discipline, goal-setting, dealing with failure," he said. "Part of the nod that athletes get in hiring may actually be due to an assessment that they have skills applicable to jobs in finance or business—not because of the network."