다중비교 인과포레스트를 활용한 대학입학전형에 따른 대학생활 성과 분석

Abstract

Over the years, university admission types have primarily been the subject of social discussions on the
 dimension of fairness. However, considering the original purpose of university admissions system, it is also
 crucial to evaluate how well each type performs in selecting students who can successfully navigate academic
 life at each university. Accordingly, this study aimed to analyze the university life outcomes (sense of
 belonging, adaptability, intention to reselect the university, intention to reselect the major, GPA) according
 to different university admissions types: the admission officer(AO) system, high school grade-focused(HSG)
 selection system, and College Scholastic Ability Test-focused(CSAT) selection system, using the data from the
 Korea Education Longitudinal Study(KELS) 2013 collected in ’20~’21(N=2,011). Assuming the effects may
 vary according to the baseline characteristics, the study employs the Conditional Average Treatment Effects
 (CATE) perspective through the Multi-arm Causal Forest technique(Athey, Tibshirani, & Wager, 2019). The
 main findings are summarized as follows: First, on average, students admitted through AO system exhibit
 superior outcomes across all considered aspects of college life, with a notable emphasis on higher intentions
 to reselect both the university and major. Second, it appears that parental income and education, high
 school academic achievement levels and their university-level average were significant conditioning variables
 predicting heterogeneous treatment effects on college life outcomes. Last, the effect heterogeneity of CSAT
 system, depending on the values of major conditioning variables, was more prominent compared to that of
 AO system. Based on these findings, suggestions for interpreting the research results and directions for
 future studies were provided.