New research published in Economics and Human Biology suggests that taller students, on average, perform a little better on standardized tests than their shorter peers. Drawing on a large sample of students in New York City public schools, the study found that each standard deviation increase in height was associated with modestly higher scores in both English Language Arts and math across grades 3 through 8.
The researchers conducted this study to better understand why taller individuals often earn higher wages in adulthood, a pattern well-documented in prior research. One possible explanation is that taller individuals may have had academic advantages earlier in life, which could partly explain their later success in the labor market. While previous studies hinted at a link between height and early academic performance, this research aimed to examine that relationship more directly using a large, recent dataset from a major urban school district.
“There’s a well-known result in the social sciences that taller men and women have higher earnings than shorter ones in countries all over the world,” said Stephanie Coffey, an assistant professor of economics at Saint Anselm College, who conducted the research along with Amy Ellen Schwartz of the University of Delaware.
“Research has offered a few possible explanations for the phenomenon. One explanation is social channels (i.e. taller people may be more self-confident, or may be perceived more positively by others). Another is that height is positively associated with ability (taller individuals tend to score higher on tests of cognitive ability than shorter ones). So, maybe it’s ability that is rewarded on the labor market, rather than height per se.
“Since academic achievement is an important determinant of eventual earnings, we were curious whether taller children might similarly perform better on state standardized tests during school. A great dataset from the New York City Department of Education that has annual measures of height and test scores for students enrolled in NYC public schools facilitated the analysis. A huge plus of these data is that they allow us to compare students directly to their peers within the same school.”
The dataset included longitudinal data from nearly 500,000 students enrolled in New York City public schools between 2010 and 2017. It contained detailed records of student height measurements, standardized test scores in math and English Language Arts, demographic characteristics, and other information such as obesity status and school attendance. Height was standardized relative to same-sex, same-grade peers within each school to capture a student’s height standing among classmates. The researchers then used regression models to examine how differences in height related to differences in test performance.
The findings showed a consistent, though small, association between height and academic achievement. Among boys, each one standard deviation increase in height was associated with a 0.03 standard deviation increase in math scores and a 0.039 standard deviation increase in English scores. Among girls, the corresponding increases were 0.034 and 0.04 standard deviations. Although these numbers may seem small, they add up over time. For instance, the tallest 2.5% of boys and girls in their grade performed around 0.18 to 0.19 standard deviations better in English compared to the shortest 2.5%, a difference that can be meaningful in large-scale educational assessments.
“Our primary finding is that boys and girls who are taller than their grade mates score higher in math and English Language Arts in every grade between 3-8 (the years in which tests are administered),” Coffey told PsyPost. “The size of the effect is small on average, but large enough to yield substantial disparities in achievement between the tallest and shortest kids.”
“For example, after we control for some basic demographic characteristics, the tallest 2.5% of boys and girls score about 20% of one standard deviation higher in English Language arts than the shortest 2.5% of boys and girls in the same grade and school. An educational intervention is typically viewed as having a meaningful impact if it improves test scores by 10% of one standard deviation, so we consider this to be a pretty large effect.”
Interestingly, the study found that height relative to classmates, not just absolute height, also appeared to matter. Students who ranked higher in height compared to their peers tended to do slightly better in English, even after accounting for their actual height. This suggests that social perceptions tied to being taller than one’s peers might play a small role in academic performance, at least in language-related subjects.
“Something else our data allow us explore whether it is simply being tall that explains the effect, or being taller than peers specifically,” Coffey explained. “We can tease this out because the distribution of height varies between schools, so a student may be relatively tall or short for his grade depending on the heights of his peers. Essentially, our estimates show that if you compare two students of the same height in the same grade (but at different schools) the student who attends a school where he is relatively tall compared to peers will score slightly higher in English Language Arts than the same-height student who attends a school where he is relatively short. This suggests that social benefits of height are at least part of the story.”
An important part of the study was testing whether health could explain the relationship between height and achievement. Taller students might be healthier, and healthier students might perform better in school. To examine this possibility, the researchers controlled for obesity status and found that the relationship between height and achievement actually grew stronger after accounting for obesity. They also tested whether taller students were less likely to miss school, finding very little evidence that absenteeism played a meaningful role. This suggests that the observed height-achievement link is unlikely to be explained by better health among taller students alone.
To address the possibility that family background or early childhood conditions might explain both greater height and better academic performance, the researchers estimated models that controlled for each student’s fixed characteristics over time. Once they accounted for these unchanging traits, the relationship between height and test scores weakened considerably, but still remained statistically significant.
“I think what surprised us most was how robust the height achievement relationship is,” Coffey told PsyPost. “We find it in both math and English Language Arts achievement in every grade between 3-8 and for every racial/ethnic group we look at. Given social norms around height, we thought the ‘height premium’ might be larger for boys, but we found very similar effects for boys and girls.”
While the findings are robust across multiple statistical models, the study does have limitations. The researchers could not directly measure early childhood conditions, such as prenatal health or family socioeconomic status during infancy, which likely contribute to both height and academic performance. Nor could they fully separate the effects of social treatment based on height from the effects of innate ability or other factors. Although the fixed-effects models help address some of these concerns, they cannot completely rule out all potential sources of bias.
“The main caveat is that we’re limited in our ability to uncover the underlying mechanisms that drive the academic height premium,” Coffey noted. “We looked at attendance and found that shorter kids really aren’t absent more frequently than taller ones, so we don’t think it’s about health. However, it’s difficult to untangle how much of the effect might arise through early childhood advantage (that leads kids to be tall and to do well in school) vs. any social benefits of height per se.”
“We’re interested in exploring, more generally, how physical characteristics shape the way kids experience school. One way we could extend our research on height is by looking into the NYC School Climate Survey, which asks students about how they perceive the school environment, teachers and peers. We’ve also discussed the possibility of conducting similar analyses looking at childhood obesity rather than height. Something else we think might be very interesting is exploring how the switch to online schooling during Covid may have affected these relationships. Does your height matter if your peers only view you through Zoom?”
The study, “Towering Intellects? Sizing up the relationship between height and academic success,” was published March 28, 2025.
