Higher education plays a key role in national economic development. According to statistics from the Ministry of Education (MOE), there were 166 higher education institutions (HEIs) in Taiwan in 2014. This form of mass education provides more educational opportunities for students, but also causes problems like low teaching quality and competitiveness which decrease students' learning outcomes. Using multilevel models, this study examined the strength of the association between student engagement and the development of student learning outcome based on data from 1,226 students. This study examined how learning and institutional scales contribute to the narrative on academic rigor at a medium, private teaching institution. The results indicate that a specific type of engagement is linked to a particular learning outcome, which means that not every engagement type has an equal impact thereon.