Abstract
In Taiwan, the educational selection mechanism for entering college has undergone a comprehensive revolution for several decades. This education policy reform aims to improve effectiveness of matching students and colleges. The main purpose of this paper is to extensively investigate the college students' performance between application-based and exam-based methods, with different outcomes, including academic and non-academic perspectives. Utilizing three waves (2012--2014) undergraduate students data at National Tsing Hua University, we collect students' official records along with versatile survey items for our empirical analysis. The control function approach is employed to alleviate the potential endogeneity issue on choosing college entrance methods. The main findings are: (1) Students admitted by application-based method have better academic performance in terms of class ranking than that of students by exam-based method, after controlling possible endogenous problem, their socio-economic background, personal background variables and attitude variables. (2) Holding other variables constant, the students from application-based channel enjoy better satisfaction level and learn more abilities in both scientific and humanity fields. (3) Students admitted by application-based method spend less time in association activities and part-time job, but have no difference on participating foreign exchange program and international volunteer activity compared to those admitted by exam-based method.