Unlocking College Potential: The Role of Student Expectations and Non-Cognitive Skills in College Success

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 1,100 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 success and performance at graduation. With this information, we analyzed if students’ subjective expectations about their future success in college are related to non-cognitive skills and whether they are realistic, compared to student’s performance at graduation. We identify students performing below and above objective expectations, both at the end of their freshmen year and at graduation, and study non-cognitive skills related to their objective performance. We find that non-cognitive skills are associated with academic subjective expectations of college success and objective performance in college, even after controlling for cognitive ability. However, many students enter college with unrealistic subjective expectations about their future performance and this could influence their on-time graduation.