Quality measures in higher education: Norwegian evidence

•Assessing the quality of higher education institutions is challenging.•Students and institutions are matched to obtain quality measures in a value-added approach.•Institutional quality differs.•Subjective student assessments do not correlate with our quality estimates. We exploit rich administrative matched data for students and institutions to obtain quality measures across higher education institutions in Norway. Our primary quality indicators are based on individual income after leaving higher education within a value-added approach. Estimated quality indicators reveal significant differences in student outcomes across institutions, although the differences are much lower than raw income differences. “Old” and traditional universities appear in the upper part of the estimated quality distribution, while most of the smaller regional university colleges appear in the lower part. Students’ migration is challenging to handle appropriately, but we show that the estimated quality distribution is fairly robust to different assignments of students to institutions. Simple correlational analyses demonstrate that publicly available indicators based on subjective student assessments do not give reliable information about quality in higher education. This confirms earlier findings in the literature.