by Nicole Torres | 9:00 AM September 2, 2014
Parents who spend a good chunk of the week shuttling kids to and from soccer practice or drama club might be comforted by new research that suggests this effort is not in vain – as long as their kids are good at math, too.
A recent paper from UCSB found that the return on being good at math has gone up over the last few decades, as has the return on having high social skills (some combination of leadership, communication, and other interpersonal skills). But, the paper argues, the return on the two skills together has risen even faster.
What does all that have to do with soccer practice? The research compared two groups of white, male U.S. high school seniors – the class of 1972 and the class of 1992 – to see how earnings associated with social and math skills have changed over time. Using two National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) surveys, it looked at senior year math scores on standardized tests, questions about extracurricular participation and leadership roles, and individual earnings seven years after graduating high school. And it corroborated the findings with Census and CPS data.
The analysis found that while math scores, sports, leadership roles, and college education were allassociated with higher earnings over the 1979-1999 period, the trend over time in the earnings premium was strongest among those who were both good at math and engaged in high school sports or leadership activities. In other words, it pays to be a sociable math whiz, more so today than thirty years ago.
Some may be skeptical that high school sports participation or club leadership (the study also includes publications and performing arts groups) are accurate indicators of “social skills” – perhaps rightfully so. But these extracurriculars, which typically involve teamwork, communication, and general interaction with others, have long been associated with the development of social skills. (Whether these activities foster these skills or attract already social kids is another question.) And the paper looked at how they tend to affect future careers:
The sports/leadership group is likely to be employed in an occupation requiring higher levels of responsibility for direction, control and planning, even after controlling for high school math scores, psychological measures, and college completion. This is compelling evidence that participation in high school sports or leadership activities – a behavioral indicator of social skills – can be linked to … complex interpersonal skills.
The other justification for using sports and clubs as a proxy for social skills was methodological. In order to measure how the price of social skills has changed over time, comparable metrics were needed. They may not be perfect, but these categories stayed available and consistent over time.
The analysis was restricted to white men for the same reason – their test scores and activity levels remained the same, while a lot of things were changing for other groups. According to the paper, “Math scores were stable across cohorts among white men, but not among black students – and women’s participation in high school roles and activities changed dramatically during these years.”
But the author argues that the findings are still likely generalizable – and help to explain the changing demand in the labor market for different skills.
According to the data, while people focused on the surge in demand for math skills in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there was a concurrent (and underappreciated) increase in demand for both math and social skills. Employment in high-skill occupations increased between 1977 and 2002, but the paper found that, among the groups studied, all of that growth was in jobs that required both analytic and social skills. Employment in jobs requiring just one or the other didn’t increase over time. And this growing importance for “multiskilled” individuals in the labor force can be seen in the higher earnings for those who played sports or led in high school.
Why the increasingly valuable relationship between the two skills? Cathy Weinberger, the author, says answering that requires further research. But others have studied how technological innovations affect workforce skill requirements. Weinberger mentioned one study that found that adopting new technologies not only resulted in technical training for workers, but also in training to develop their complex communication skills and teamwork. So this rise in demand for social skills, happening alongside the rise in demand for math skills, could be the result of technological progress.
The data suggests that today’s economy rewards the balance of quantitative and social skills more than ever. That has ramifications for how we educate children – calling into question schools’ heightened focus on standardized testing, as opposed to a broader view of skills development – as well as for our own careers. In an era even more defined by rapid technological innovation, we’re increasingly expected to bring technical savvy and interpersonal know-how to the table. Quantitative reasoning is understandably in high demand, but so too are the skills learned on the sports field.
NICOLE TORRES
Nicole Torres is an assistant editor at Harvard Business Review.
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