The current study seeks to identify variables that affect the career decision-making of high school graduates with respect to the choice of university (re-)entrance in South Korea where education has great importance as a tool for self-cultivation and social prestige. For pattern recognition, we adopted a support vector machine with recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) with a big-data of survey of Korean college candidates. Based on the SVM-RFE analysis results, new enrollers were mostly affected by the mesosystems of interactions with parents, while re-enrollers were affected by the macrosystems of social awareness as well as individual estimates of talent and aptitude of individual systems. By predicting the variables that affect the high school graduates’ preparation for university re-entrance, some survey questions provide information on why they make the university choice based on interactions with their parents or acquaintances. Along with these empirical results, implications for future research are also presented.

This study aims to identify research trends in student experience in higher education through analyzing the topics around which research on university students’ experiences has been conducted. Using the topic modeling technique, the Scopus database for studies published up to 2017 containing the terms “student experience” and either “higher education” or “tertiary education” in their titles, keywords, and abstracts was searched. After excluding overlapping studies, a total of 1211 studies were extracted. The articles were then classified into a total of 21 topics on university student experience, including “Learning with online technologies”, “Practice at the university”, and “Diversity in college”. The results of the current study indicate that it will be possible to offer various programs to support more valuable and better student experience at the university level. Thus, this study elucidates the ways in which research fields regarding student experience have been constructed and the ways in which the main research trends have changed.