Elsevier

Economics Letters

Volume 219, October 2022, 110782
Economics Letters

Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2022.110782Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • I examine the relationship between university students’ appearance and grades.

  • When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades.

  • The effect is only present in courses with significant teacher–student interaction.

  • Grades of attractive females declined when teaching was conducted remotely.

  • For males, there was a beauty premium even after the switch to online teaching.

Abstract

This paper examines the role of student facial attractiveness on academic outcomes under various forms of instruction, using data from engineering students in Sweden. When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades in non-quantitative subjects, in which teachers tend to interact more with students compared to quantitative courses. This finding holds both for males and females. When instruction moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic, the grades of attractive female students deteriorated in non-quantitative subjects. However, the beauty premium persisted for males, suggesting that discrimination is a salient factor in explaining the grade beauty premium for females only.

JEL classification

D91
I23
J16
Z13

Keywords

Attractiveness
Beauty
COVID-19
Discrimination

Data availability

Data will be made available on request.

Cited by (0)

I am grateful to the Editor, as well as one anonymous referee. I thank Annette Brondin, Ivan Premovski, Hanna M. Stålhammar, and Sara Swartling for providing assistance in recruiting raters. This work has benefited from discussions with Niclas Berggren, Andreas Bergh, Joakim Westerlund, and numerous seminar participants. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Arne Ryde Foundation .