University student talent: the real driver for performance?

Investigation about the university student performance, and its measurement, are very crucial issues for any policy maker. Since the economic crisis, jobs market requires even higher skills and competences. Literature offers a lot of papers about the university student quality and performance, in order to identify the main determinants of them. Often, results are very different, and they seems to hold just in a specific context. This paper aims to investigate the role of a latent variable that can take into account the student motivation, aptitude, and abilities, here conveniently called talent. A random effect Quantile Regression on a new measure of Italian student performance has been adopted, and results seem to highlight the main role of the talent.