Unlocking college potential: The role of student expectations and non-cognitive skills in college success

Abstract

Attending college is a significant human capital investment, but only about 60 % of those who start college will have a completed degree six years later. This makes identifying the skills associated with college success an important policy concern. We surveyed over 1100 entering college freshmen, majoring in business and engineering at a public university in the US, and combined this information with administrative data to create a comprehensive data set that, in addition to the usual academic performance data, cognitive ability measures, and demographics, also included measures of non-cognitive skills, personality traits, student expectations about college grades and performance at graduation. With this information, we analyzed whether students’ subjective expectations about their future grades at graduation are related to non-cognitive skills and whether these expectations align with their actual college performance. We then study factors associated with overperformance and underperformance, beyond what was expected based on past grades and student-observed demographic characteristics, both at the end of their freshman year and at graduation. We also study factors associated with graduation outcomes. We find that non-cognitive skills related to conscientiousness are associated with subjective grade expectations and objective grade performance in college, even after controlling for cognitive ability. However, they do not help predict eventual graduation or on-time graduation. Nevertheless, many students enter college with subjective grade expectations that do not align with their actual performance, which can influence their on-time graduation.