A Study on Freshmen Adaptation and Influence Factors to College Life During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study aims to categorize the types of adaptation to colleges of the freshmen who entered universities during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the study also discovered the factors that affected the students’ adaptation of college life. For the analysis, we used statistical methods such as latent profile analysis (LPA) and the random forest (RF). The data for the analysis is from the 9th group (college freshman, 2021) of the KELS2013 cohort. As a result of analyzing the freshmen’s college adaptation types during the COVID-19 pandemic, the latent group was categorized into four types: low adaptation level to college life, below average adaptation level, above average adaptation level, and high adaptation level. It was found that college culture and learning and relationship experiences provide critical influence on the students’ adaptation to school life as a result of studying factors based on relative importance. Based on these findings, practical implications to foster the adaptation of freshman are suggested.