Analyses & Alternatives (분석과 대안)

Korea Consensus Institute(KCI) (사단법인 코리아컨센서스연구원)
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Factors shaping the identity of South Korean college students during the COVID-19 pandemic: Does the "college experience" matter?

  • Received : 2025.01.09
  • Accepted : 2025.02.10
  • Published : 2025.02.28
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Abstract

This research analyzes the effect of online instruction and the resulting lack of an in-person campus experience during the COVID-19 pandemic on the importance of one's university for college students' identity. While previous research, mainly from the United States, underlines the importance of the "college experience" for fostering strong connections between university students and their alma mater, much less is known about the mechanisms at play in other academic systems. Using a sample of students from a South Korean university-Yonsei University Mirae Campus-that switched to exclusively online instruction in March 2020 and stayed entirely online for four consecutive semesters, we explore the importance of college experience for students' identity. We compare the importance of their university and their department for students with and without in-person campus experience using two-sample hypothesis testing as well as ordered probit regressions, and find no differences between the two groups and no effects of the length of a student's offline experience on the importance of their alma mater for their identity. These findings limit the scope of the social interaction thesis for university students' identity formation and underline the importance of further research on the topic, drawing on data from non-U.S. contexts and diverse academic systems.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work has been supported by Ministry of Education and National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5C2A03091469).

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