This paper studies whether the alignment between instructors’ research agendas and the content of the courses they teach affects student outcomes in higher education. Using administrative data from a large Italian university linked to publication records, we construct a novel text-based measure of research–teaching alignment that captures topic similarity between course syllabi and abstracts of instructors’ recent publications.

Our empirical strategy exploits within-student and within-instructor variation to address selection concerns. We find that greater research–teaching similarity is associated with higher student performance, with stronger effects in advanced courses and among less-prepared students.

Moreover, alignment positively affects graduation rates and final scores, as well as employment probability and wages one year after graduation. We provide suggestive evidence that these effects operate through increased exposure to frontier knowledge and methodologies and through higher perceived teaching quality, as students report greater satisfaction when courses are more closely aligned with instructors’ research.