Do Former College Athletes Earn More at Work?: A Nonparametric Assessment

This paper investigates how students’ collegiate athletic participation affects their subsequent labor market success. By using newly developed techniques in nonparametric regression, it shows that on average former college athletes earn a wage premium. However, the premium is not uniform, but skewed so that more than half the athletes actually earn less than nonathletes. Further, the premium is not uniform across occupations. Athletes earn more in the fields of business, military, and manual labor, but surprisingly, athletes are more likely to become high school teachers, jobs that pay relatively lower wages to athletes.