Who Matters in College? Familiarity, Ability Signals, and Student Achievement

This study examines how social influences on academic performance evolve during transition to university when students encounter new social environments and publicly observable signals of academic ability. Using administrative data from a large, elite, and linguistically and culturally heterogeneous public university in Uganda and exploiting random assignment of students to dormitories, we examine how exposure to coethnic peers and peers with scholarship status affects academic performance. We find that greater exposure to peers from similar linguistic and cultural backgrounds improve academic achievement early in university, but these effects fade over time. In contrast, exposure to scholarship peers generates persistent gains in academic performance that increase in magnitude over time. Our setting allows us to distinguish between peers’ underlying academic ability and publicly observable signals of ability since scholarship status is visible, while underlying academic preparation is not. We find that exposure to scholarship peers improves academic performance regardless of those peers’ underlying ability, while exposure to high-ability peers without a scholarship signal has no detectable effect. These results suggest that students respond more strongly to observable signals of academic standing than to peers’ underlying academic preparation. Taken together, our findings indicate that the sources of academic influence evolve over time.