The tragic series of students' suicide in KAIST, one of the leading STEM universities in Korea, concerned the Korean society immensely, and raised questions about the effectiveness of its educational policies and programs. In order to address the fund...
The tragic series of students' suicide in KAIST, one of the leading STEM universities in Korea, concerned the Korean society immensely, and raised questions about the effectiveness of its educational policies and programs. In order to address the fundamental issues, however, the whole campus environments should be carefully and in-depth examined. Ecological approach views campus as composed of various environmental factors and their interactions. Cultures of numerous dimensions detected in campus is one of the critical environmental factors exerting huge influence on students' attitude and behaviors. This study focuses on finding out unique characteristics of the campus culture in a Korean STEM(Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) university. Four interconnected themes have emerged, and the interactions of campus environmental factors contributing to the creation of the campus culture were examined from the ecological perspective. In the first half of this study, the researcher found that the so-called "academic excellence-oriented" culture and "family-like community culture", and homogeneous but closed organizational culture were dominant in the case institution. Followed by these findings, this study tried to test empirically if these cultural factors have signif