Analysis of University Admission Types’ University Life Outcomes Using Multi-Arm Causal Forest

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.