# Causal Inference in Higher Education: Building Better Curriculums

## TL;DR

This paper applies causal inference techniques to analyze the relationships between courses in higher education, aiming to improve curriculum design and student decision-making based on historical performance data.

## Contribution

It introduces a causal inference methodology using doubly-robust matching and regression to uncover causal course relationships, validated against existing prerequisites and through cross-validation.

## Key findings

- Causal relationships between courses can be identified using the proposed method.
- The approach aligns well with existing prerequisite structures.
- The methodology demonstrates robustness and sensitivity analysis.

## Abstract

Higher educational institutions constantly look for ways to meet students' needs and support them through graduation. Recent work in the field of learning analytics have developed methods for grade prediction and course recommendations. Although these methods work well, they often fail to discover causal relationships between courses, which may not be evident through correlation-based methods. In this work, we aim at understanding the causal relationships between courses to aid universities in designing better academic pathways for students and to help them make better choices. Our methodology employs methods of causal inference to study these relationships using historical student performance data. We make use of a doubly-robust method of matching and regression in order to obtain the casual relationship between a pair of courses. The results were validated by the existing prerequisite structure and by cross-validation of the regression model. Further, our approach was also tested for robustness and sensitivity to certain hyperparameters. This methodology shows promising results and is a step forward towards building better academic pathways for students.