Student Characteristics, Institutional Factors, and Outcomes in Higher Education and Beyond: An Analysis of Standardized Test Scores and Other Factors at the Institutional Level with School Rankings and Salary

When seeking to explain the eventual outcomes of a higher education experience, do the personal attributes and background factors students bring to college matter more than what the college is able to contribute to the development of the student through education or other institutional factors? Most education studies tend to simply ignore cognitive aptitudes and other student characteristics—in particular the long history of research on this topic—since the focus is on trying to assess the impact of education. Thus, the role of student characteristics has in many ways been underappreciated in even highly sophisticated quantitative education research. Conversely, educational and institutional factors are not as prominent in studies focused on cognitive aptitudes, as these fields focus first on reasoning capacity, and secondarily on other factors. We examine the variance in student outcomes due to student (e.g., cognitive aptitudes) versus institutional characteristics (e.g., teachers, schools). At the level of universities, two contemporary U.S. datasets are used to examine the proportion of variance accounted for in various university rankings and long-run salary by student cognitive characteristics and institutional factors. We find that depending upon the ways the variables are entered into regression models, the findings are somewhat different. We suggest some fruitful paths forward which might integrate the methods and findings showing that teachers and schools matter, along with the broader developmental bounds within which these effects take place.