The Causal Effect of Single-Sex Schools: Random Assignment in Korean High Schools

Hyunjoon Park

Single-sex schools have long received public and scholastic interest with their potential benefits for girls’ educational advance. Along with the rising concern about underachievement of boys in the United States, reviving interest in single-sex schools gives new emphasis on single-sex school effects for boys. Despite numerous empirical studies that have found differences in educational outcomes between students in single-sex and coeducational schools, there is always the question of whether single-sex schools have direct educational benefits not attributable to the pre-existing characteristics of students who choose to attend single-sex schools. In Korea, a lottery is used to randomly distribute students to single-sex or coeducational high schools, which creates an exceptional opportunity for estimating the causal effects of single-sex schools. Exploiting the distinctive feature of Korean education, the proposed research assesses the true causal effects of single-sex schools on several educational outcomes, including national test scores, peer culture (nature of friendship and kind of activities with friends), academic interest in math and science, and self-concept, among Korean high school seniors. In addition to the average effects of single-sex schools, the research identifies for which types of students single-sex schools work, examining whether single-sex school effects vary by student’s socioeconomic background.

About Hyunjoon Park

Hyunjoon Park is a Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include sociology of education, comparative & international education, and social stratification with focus on Korea and other East Asian countries. He has been involved in projects examining how structural features of educational systems such as differentiation and standardization mediate the ways in which family background influences academic achievement. His recent research examines cross-national variation in educational gaps between immigrant and native students. Another line of inquiry investigates the implications of recent changes in family structure for children’s education in South Korea.