Towering Intellects? Sizing up the relationship between height and academic success

Stephanie Coffey and Amy Ellen Schwartz

Economics & Human Biology, 2025, vol. 57, issue C

Abstract: Do tall students do better in school? A robust literature documents higher earnings among taller people and suggests that differences in adult labor market outcomes may reflect prior differences in academic outcomes. In this paper, we use unique student-level longitudinal data from New York City (NYC) to examine the link between height and achievement, shedding light on underlying mechanisms. The centerpiece of our empirical work is a regression linking test scores to height, measured as a z-score normalized to same grade/sex peers within schools. We estimate a meaningful height gradient for both boys and girls in English Language Arts (ELA) and math achievement in all grades 3–8. Controlling for observed student characteristics, a one standard deviation (sd) increase in height for grade is associated with .03 and .039 sd higher performance in math and ELA, respectively, for boys and .034 and .04 sd in math and ELA, respectively, for girls. While the average gradient is small in magnitude, it is sufficiently large to generate meaningful differences in achievement between the tallest and shortest students. For example, the tallest 2.5 % boys and girls within grade perform .18 and .194 sd better in ELA, respectively, than the shortest ones. We also find evidence that ordinal height rank relative to peers may have a small effect on ELA achievement conditional on cardinal height. Thus, there is an academic height premium for both absolute and relative height.

Keywords: Height; Achievement; Academic height premium; Academic height gradient (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X25000218
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:57:y:2025:i:c:s1570677x25000218

DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2025.101488

Access Statistics for this article

Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten

More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().