When instruction moved online during the COVID-19 epidemic, the grades of attractive female students deteriorated in non-quantitative subjects; however, the beauty premium persisted for males

Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching. Adrian Mehic. Economics Letters, August 6 2022, 110782. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2022.110782

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: D91I23J16Z13

Keywords: AttractivenessBeautyCOVID-19Discrimination

1. Introduction

It is well-known that physical appearance is an important predictor for success in life. Attractive people are more satisfied with their lives, earn higher wages and grades, and are less likely to engage in criminal activity (Mocan and Tekin, 2010, Hamermesh, 2011). However, the explanation for the beauty premium is subject to debate, where the traditional viewpoint according to which it is a consequence of taste-based discrimination (Hamermesh and Biddle, 1994, Scholz and Sicinski, 2015) is increasingly challenged by findings suggesting that beauty is a productive attribute (Cipriani and Zago, 2011, Stinebrickner et al., 2019). As an example of the latter, attractive individuals are likely to be more self-confident, which can positively affect human capital formation (Mobius and Rosenblat, 2006).

In this paper, I use data from mandatory courses within a Swedish engineering program to examine the role of student facial attractiveness on university grades. I first consider academic outcomes when education is in-person, and the faces of students are readily available to teachers. The results suggest that beauty is positively related to academic outcomes, however, the results are only significant in non-quantitative courses, which to a greater extent rely on interactions between teachers and students. The beauty premium on grades in non-quantitative subjects hold for both male and female students. Then, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment, and utilizing a difference-in-difference framework, I show that switching to full online teaching resulted in deteriorated grades in non-quantitative courses for attractive females. However, there was still a significant beauty premium for attractive males.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the return to facial beauty is likely to be primarily due to discrimination for females, and the result of a productive trait for males. The former result in line with the findings by Hernández-Julián and Peters (2017), while the latter is new to the literature. An advantage with the empirical strategy of this paper is that the switch to online teaching during the pandemic enables us to more credibly isolate the effect of appearance. This is because only the mode of instruction changed, and not the structure of the courses. Additionally, my identification strategy removes the problem of self-selection into courses.

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