Personality and Cognitive Skills in On-Time College Graduation and Other Indicators of College Success
Stephen Burks, Paul Kivi, Connor Lewis, Kim Rocha and others (analytic work currently in progress)
Abstract
We collected data on demographics and personality, and used incentivized economic experiments to gather information on cognitive skills and economic preferences, from 1,065 trainee truckers in 2005-6. We used the same data collection protocol with a parallel group of 100 undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota, Morris, in 2007. We followed the truckers on the job, and have just updated follow-up data on the students, now that 6-year graduation rates are available for even those who were freshmen in 2007. The predictors of trucker success—defined as satisfying a training contract (which made their training free if they completed one year of service)— were analyzed in Burks, Carpenter et al. (2009) and Rustichini, DeYoung et al. (2012). In the present paper we ask: what factors predict student success, such as completion of a degree in four years (the standard time) or in six years, and grade point average (GPA), and how does the pattern of predictive power compare to that for similar factors among truckers? Fifty-nine percent of our student subjects (not all of whom were freshmen at study entry) graduated in four years, and our preliminary findings show that, controlling for demographics, IQ and the proactive facet of Conscientiousness predict success, while Agreeableness is weakly associated with reduced success. This compares to a positive role for IQ and a negative one for the inhibitive side of conscientiousness in trucker training contract completion. Perhaps more interesting, among truckers we found that the cognitive skill most predictive of contract completion was not actually IQ but the “Hit 15,” a backward induction computer task which we interpret as a measure of planning ability. We now find that this measure is even more strongly predictive of student degree completion in four years. We suggest that a common thread in these two patterns is the need to self-manage one’s effort over time in the face of partially competing and partially stochastic demands on effort.