Determine what data, does certain column have in common
A good place to start would be to look at the Spearman's Rank Correlation between your dependent variable (academic level) and your individual independent variables (other columns). This should give you a basic indication of whether any of your columns are correlated with academic level.  This should be straightforward to implement in both Excel and SPSS.

If you wanted to go a step further you could set the problem up as one of Multinomial Logistic Regression. This would allow you to build a model to directly attempt to predict academic level from your other variables. I'm certain there's probably some way to do this in Excel, but SPSS can definitely handle it.