California Bans Legacy Admissions at Private Universities.

 The NYT has the story:

California Bans Legacy Admissions at Private Universities. The change will affect Stanford University, the University of Southern California and other private colleges in the state. By Shawn Hubler and Soumya Karlamangla, Sept. 30, 2024

"California will ban private colleges and universities, including some of the nation’s most selective institutions, from giving special consideration to applicants who have family or other connections to the schools, a practice known as legacy admissions.

"Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation on Monday that will prohibit the practice starting in the fall of 2025.

...

"The University of California, the California State University System and other public California campuses have banned legacy admissions for decades. But private colleges continued to give some preference to the descendants of alumni or major donors.

...

"Only one other state, Maryland, bans legacy preferences at both private and public institutions. Illinois, Virginia and Colorado ban legacy admissions, but only at public universities and colleges.
...

"After the Varsity Blues scandal in 2019, in which parents seeking to win spots in top-ranked schools for their children were found to have paid bribes and falsified their children’s credentials, Mr. Ting tried to push through a bill banning legacy preferences in California. That effort fell short.

"But he did succeed with a measure requiring private colleges to report to the Legislature how many students they admit because of ties to alumni or donors. Those reports showed that the practice was most widespread at Stanford and U.S.C., where, at both schools, about 14 percent of students who were admitted in the fall of 2022 had legacy or donor connections. At Santa Clara University, Mr. Newsom’s alma mater, 13 percent of admissions had such ties.

"Republicans as well as Democrats in the California Legislature voted for Mr. Ting’s latest proposal, which will punish institutions that flout the law by publishing their names on a California Department of Justice website. An earlier version had proposed that schools face civil penalties for violating the law, but that provision was removed in the State Senate."

AI in college admissions

 College admissions staff must expect to be seeing a lot of personal essays written and edited by chatbots.

Here's a company, Kollegio.AI that is offering more kinds of help than that in applying to college.

They say: "Kollegio is a 100% AI and data-driven college counseling platform helping students with every aspect of the college admissions process. We pride ourselves in using ethical AI to help level the playing field."

Centralized assignment mechanisms that don't include all the relevant choices, by Kapor, Karnani and Neilson in the JPE

 One of the issues in organizing a centralized matching mechanism is to make the market thick, by including all or most of the relevant choices in the centralized system.  If not, there will be transactions outside of the centralized marketplace, and some of them may be costly to the system.

Here's a paper that explores that in the context of  college admissions in Chile.

Aftermarket Frictions and the Cost of Off-Platform Options in Centralized Assignment Mechanisms, by Adam Kapor, Mohit Karnani, and Christopher Neilson, Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming.

Abstract: "We study the welfare and human capital impacts of colleges’ (non)participation in Chile’s centralized higher-education platform, leveraging administrative data and two policy changes: the introduction of a large scholarship program and the inclusion of additional institutions, which raised the number of on-platform slots by approximately 40%. We first show that the expansion of the platform raised on-time graduation rates. We then develop and estimate a model of college applications, offers, wait lists, matriculation, and graduation. When the platform expands, welfare increases, and welfare, enrollment, and graduation rates are less sensitive to off-platform frictions. Gains are larger for students from lower-socioeconomic-status backgrounds."

"in virtually every practical implementation there exist many off-platform options that are available to participants of the match. In primary and secondary education, these include private schools or charter schools that do not participate in the centralized system. In other cases, such as higher education, some providers may be excluded from the platform by regulation, while others may choose not to participate. When off-platform options exist, applicants may renege on their assigned matches in favor of programs that did not participate in the centralized process. In turn, these decisions lead to the use of wait lists and aftermarkets, which may be inefficient due to the presence of congestion and matching frictions and can be inequitable if some students are better able to navigate this partially decentralized process, negating some of the benefits of the match.

"In this paper, we study the empirical relevance of the configuration of on- and off-platform options for students’ welfare and for persistence and graduation in higher-education programs. We document the importance of negative externalities generated by off-platform options and quantify a measure of aftermarket frictions that contribute to generating them in practice. Our empirical application uses data from the centralized assignment system for higher education in Chile, which has one of the world’s longest-running college assignment mechanisms based on the deferred-acceptance (DA) algorithm.2 We take advantage of a recent policy change that increased the number of on-platform institutions from 25 to 33, raising the number of available slots by approximately 40%. We first present an analysis of the policy, which shows that when these options are included on the centralized platform, students start college sooner, are less likely to drop out, and are more likely to graduate within 7 years. Importantly, these effects are larger for students from lower-socioeconomic-status (SES) backgrounds, suggesting that the design of platforms can have effects on both efficiency and equity.

...

"We find that when students are allowed to express their preferences for a larger variety of options on the platform, welfare increases substantially, as does the share of students graduating on time.

...

"Intuitively, when a desirable program is not on the platform, it can cause some students who would have placed in that program to instead receive a placement in a different program available on the platform. These students may then decline that placement in favor of the off-platform program, creating vacancies that in turn lead to increased reliance on wait lists, which may be subject to frictions. Moreover, the absence of a particular program may distort the placements of other students, even if the students whose placements are affected would never enroll in that program. These students may also be less satisfied and more likely to decline their placement.

"Taken together, our results show empirically that the existence of off-platform options affects the equity and efficiency of centralized assignment systems. "

############

Earlier (with some links to still earlier papers):

Monday, May 9, 2022

School choice with outside options , by Akbarpour, Kapor, Neilson, van Dijk, and Zimmerman in J.Pub.E.

Interviews by lottery at Queens University School of Medicine

 Overwhelmed by large numbers of applications, and concerned about fairness, Queens University will set admissions thresholds (on grades and exam scores) and then determine by lottery which applicants move to the interview stage.

New admissions process improves equitable access to the Queen’s MD Program

"Queen’s Health Sciences (QHS) is adapting its MD Program admissions process to create a more inclusive entry point for all applicants, minimize systemic barriers to becoming a doctor, and increase student diversity.

"The renewed medical student admissions process will launch this fall, for 2025 admissions, and includes a pathway for lower socioeconomic status (SES) applicants and adjustments to the current Indigenous pathway. A new comprehensive approach to support the recruitment of Black students will launch in a second phase of this admissions change.  

...

"The MD Program will set admissions thresholds for grade point average (GPA), Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), and Casper (a situational judgment test) at levels that align with the potential for predicting success in medical school, without concern for the number of applicants who meet these thresholds. While the MD Program already posts GPA thresholds, as part of this change, MCAT thresholds will be posted as well. All applicants who meet these thresholds will be entered into a lottery to determine who will be invited to interviews. "

HT: Jonah Peranson (of National Matching Services)

Affirmative action in Brazilian universities: guest post by Inácio Bó

 Recent legislation in Brazil addresses university admissions with affirmative action that targets multiple characteristics that individuals may have (in different combinations), namely income, ethnicity, and the type of institution at which they studied. Early attempts to implement such a system produced undesirable outcomes, but recent legislation, informed by market design, is on the path to correcting this. Below, Inácio Bó brings us up to date:

Guest blog post by Inácio Bó

For many decades, Brazilian’s federal universities were—and still are— the top higher education institutions in the country. They had, however, a contradictory combination of circumstances: all of them were public-funded and tuition-free, but their students were overwhelmingly from a minority white higher socio-economic class. In response to that, in 2012 congress passed legislation mandating affirmative action in the access of all such institutions.

Orhan Aygün and I were at that time classmates pursuing our PhD in economics at Boston College. We spent days and weeks looking at the details of the structure of the rules for implementing the law, trying to better understand it. While working on some examples, we noticed that there could in principle be situations that were at odds with the intended objective of the law. Under some circumstances, black and low-income candidates would be rejected from positions where white and high-income candidates would be accepted, despite the former having higher entry-level exam grades than the latter. This  would be an outcome that goes in the opposite direction from the intended objective of helping black and low-income students attend these institutions.

The reason for this problem lies on the method used for implement the affirmative action law in the universities. Seats in each program in each university were split into groups of seats, including “open seats”, “black candidates”, “low-income candidates”, and “black and low-income candidates”. When applying for a program, a candidate would choose one of the alternatives for which she is eligible. The top candidates among those applying for each set of seats, ranked by their grade in a national exam, would be accepted. This method might, however, result in different levels of competition for different seats in the same program, resulting for example in tougher requirements for acceptance for “black and low-income” candidates than for “black” candidates, even if on average low-income candidates have lower grades overall.

In a paper published in the AEJ:Micro in 2021 (Aygün, Orhan, and Inácio Bó. 2021. "College Admission with Multidimensional Privileges: The Brazilian Affirmative Action Case." American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 13 (3): 1-28.), we showed how this problem can be solved while still satisfying the text and spirit of the affirmative action law in Brazil with small changes in the way by which candidates are selected. (The idea is to order slot-specific priorities so that candidates with protected characteristics can compete for all of those slots for which their characteristics qualify them.) The paper also shows “smoking gun” evidence that these “unfair rejections” were taking place, showing that programs where the cutoff grades for acceptance for each subset of seats were compatible with these rejections constituted almost half of the programs offered across the nation.

While the article gained praise in the academic economic community, our hopes that it would reach the policymakers in Brazil were initially dashed. Despite having the chance of personally visiting the Ministry of Education in 2015 for two weeks, my attempts to talk with those in power were unsuccessful, and people to whom I explained some of our findings deemed its contents “critical of the government”.

 Especially in light of the political developments that took place in Brazil in the years that followed, I had mostly moved on from my hopes of seeing the changes we proposed being implemented.

Things started to change, however, around May of 2022. The staff from the office of representative Tábata Amaral, who is a prominent young politician with a focus on education, were having talks with Ursula Mello, now a professor at the Department of Economics at PUC-Rio in Rio de Janeiro, about some aspects of the affirmative action law related to her work. Given her knowledge about the AEJ:Micro paper, Ursula suggested that I join the discussions. A meeting where this happened even ended up in the press (https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/educacao/2022/05/pesquisadores-defendem-novo-algoritmo-no-sisu-para-nao-prejudicar-cotistas.shtml).

Adriano Senkevics, her co-author in related papers who works at the INEP—an agency connected to the Brazilian Ministry of Education in charge of evaluating educational systems—also joined.

In these discussions, it became clear that if we wanted our ideas to have any chance of gaining traction, we needed to write a policy-oriented paper, focused on the current Brazilian specifics, in Portuguese, and with policy-makers as the audience—not academics.

Adriano and I worked together in that project, now with a much more detailed dataset. We tailored the proposal to the updated law, which also included reservations for candidates with disabilities, and were finally able to quantify the negative impact of the failures we identified. Our estimates indicate that, in the selection process of 2019, at least ten thousand students were “unfairly rejected” from their applications, with more than 8 thousand being left unmatched to any university despite having an exam grade high enough to be accepted for less restrictive reserved seats. These numbers greatly exceeded our expectations, and made a clear political case for a change. The working paper went out in January of 2023 (“Proposal to change the rules for the occupation of quotas in the student entrance to federal institutions of higher education,” by Inácio Bó and Adriano Souza Senkevics).

While the theoretical arguments were already in the AEJ:Micro paper, the proposal had a greater and faster impact in the corridors of the Brazilian capital. Articles in the main newspapers in the country reported on the findings and the proposal (https://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/educacao/enem-e-vestibular/noticia/2023/03/quase-650-candidatos-para-uma-vaga-maiores-concorrencia-do-sisu-estao-entre-os-alunos-cotistas.ghtml

, https://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/antonio-gois/coluna/2023/02/reformar-o-sisu.ghtml

, https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/rodrigo-zeidan/2023/04/desenhando-mercados.shtml )

People were openly sharing the article on twitter with members of the ministry of education

(https://twitter.com/thiamparo/status/1621189953785839617?s=20 ,

https://twitter.com/mgaldino/status/1621008428763332612?s=20 ). We could feel the momentum.

In the months that followed, I started having regular interactions with members of the Ministry of Education. The text and zoom discussions involved technical and political aspects of changes in the law, which extended beyond the specific changes we suggested.

Different variations of the changes and some alternative proposals were considered. I had to run simulations while flying to deliver them before a meeting that the secretary had with the minister. I also had the incredible experience of joining a meeting at the “Casa Civil”—a department somewhat comparable to the prime minister in a parliamentary system—with the presence of secretaries from multiple ministries , where I presented our proposal and discussed some details and scenarios. Around that time, and without our knowledge, a senator presented a bill explicitly based on our proposal (https://www25.senado.leg.br/web/atividade/materias/-/materia/156995 ).

By the end of June, our belief that the changes would be implemented became stronger. Since our proposal was (by design) already compatible with the quotas law, its implementation could be done even in the absence of new legislation, and there was clear interest on the part of those in charge for making it happen.

A momentous event in this journey, however, took place on August 9th.

Because of a series of political circumstances, an urge to pass a renewed law for the affirmative action led to a bill proposed by Representative Dandara—the first member of congress who herself benefitted from the quotas law—to be brought to the floor for a vote.

Among other changes, it made the affirmative action policy permanent, changed the order in which seats are filled, and included text that should, in the following secondary legislation, include text that describes our proposal. As if emotions were not high enough, we had urgent calls to send the text of our proposal to members in the floor of congress minutes before the vote took place. And this resulted in the photo below, showing Dandara giving a speech before the vote, with a page from our paper in her hand.

The journey is not yet over. The bill must still pass the senate, and the legislation with the implementation details will follow. But I learned that these changes are made of so many steps that one has to choose one as the turning point. We believe that this is a good one.

The INEP (National Institute of Educational Studies and Research) thinks so too: (https://www.gov.br/inep/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/linha-editorial/inep-contribui-com-atualizacao-da-lei-de-cotas)

Affirmative action in India

 Here's an interesting paper by Orhan Aygün and Bertan Turhan. It comes with something of a backstory, which accounts for its quite delayed publication (delays both in initial acceptance and then in publication after acceptance*). I gather it will appear in the next issue of Management Science.

How to De-Reserve Reserves: Admissions to Technical Colleges in India by Orhan Aygün and Bertan Turhan, Management Science (forthcoming),  Published Online:11 Nov 2022 https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4566

Abstract: "We study the joint implementation of reservation and de-reservation policies in India that has been enforcing comprehensive affirmative action since 1950. The landmark judgment of the Supreme Court of India in 2008 mandated that whenever the OBC category (with 27% reservation) has unfilled positions, they must be reverted to general category applicants in admissions to public schools without specifying how to implement it. We disclose the drawbacks of the recently reformed allocation procedure in admissions to technical colleges and offer a solution through “de-reservation via choice rules.” We propose a novel priority design—Backward Transfers (BT) choice rule—for institutions and the deferred acceptance mechanism under these choice rules (DA-BT) for centralized clearinghouses. We show that DA-BT corrects the shortcomings of existing mechanisms. By formulating India’s legal requirements and policy goals as formal axioms, we show that the DA-BT mechanism is unique for the concurrent implementation of reservation and de-reservation policies."

*This paper spent a long time waiting to be published, because of what seems to have been a priority dispute that, after the paper was accepted for publication,  was pursued through  allegations of research misconduct. The editorial office of Management Science conducted an investigation that determined that there was no reason not to proceed with publication.

#######

Update: here's the citation to the published version

Orhan Aygün, Bertan Turhan (2022) How to De-Reserve Reserves: Admissions to Technical Colleges in India. Management Science 69(10):6147-6164.

https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4566

Limiting congestion by limiting applications, or making them costly

 Here's a paper that investigates two alternatives to limiting congestion in college admissions: one is to limit applications, and the other is to add a small cost for each additional application. (This is a current topic of discussion in a number of other applications, including matching of new doctors to residencies.)

Application Costs and Congestion in Matching Markets by YingHua He and Thierry Magnac, The Economic Journal,  https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueac038 (online early)

Abstract: "A matching market often requires recruiting agents, or ‘programmes’, to costly screen ‘applicants’, and congestion increases with the number of applicants to be screened. We investigate the role of application costs: higher costs reduce congestion by discouraging applicants from applying to certain programmes; however, they may harm match quality. In a multiple-elicitation experiment conducted in a real-life matching market, we implement variants of the Gale-Shapley deferred-acceptance mechanism with different application costs. Our experimental and structural estimates show that a (low) application cost effectively reduces congestion without harming match quality."

"Our empirical strategy is novel. It begins with a multiple-elicitation field experiment that enables us to directly evaluate the effects of application costs. The experiment involves the real-life matching of 129 applicants to the seven master’s programmes at the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), and was conducted in May 2013 for admission in the 2013–4 academic year. The experimental market designs are three variants of the Gale-Shapley deferred-acceptance (DA) mechanism encountered in practice: the traditional DA mechanism, under which applicants can apply to all programmes without any cost; the DA mechanism with truncation (DA-T), under which applicants can apply to no more than four programmes (hence, DA-T-4); and the DA mechanism with cost (DA-C), under which applicants must write a motivation letter for each additional application beyond the first three applications. Under each mechanism, every applicant is required to submit a rank-ordered list of programmes (ROL). As applicants are informed that one of the mechanisms will be implemented, they have incentives to behave optimally under each mechanism.

"To evaluate the performance of a matching procedure, we focus on two dimensions of a matching outcome: the congestion and match quality. The former is measured by screening costs and approximated by the number of applicants to screen; the latter is measured by the welfare of both sides, the number of unmatched applicants, as well as the number of blocking pairs. A pair comprising applicant and programme blocks a matching if both would be better off by being matched together after leaving their current matches. The stability of a matching, defined as the absence of any blocking pair, is the key to the success of matching markets (Roth, 1991). Importantly, stability implies Pareto efficiency when both sides are endowed with strict preferences (Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez, 2013)."

Affirmative action at Harvard and elsewhere, by Roland Fryer

 As the Supreme Court starts to hear arguments about affirmative action in college admissions, at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Roland Fryer, a Black professor of Economics at Harvard, shares some thoughts--including stories from his own experience--about how affirmative action might be reformed.

Affirmative action in college admissions doesn’t work — but it could, By Roland G. Fryer Jr.,  Washington Post.

"On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in an affirmative action case involving Harvard, where I am a professor. Many people who are concerned about racial representation at elite institutions fear that the justices will end the practice as we know it. But if they do, they could provide an opportunity to create a new, data-based system that would truly help level the playing field for disadvantaged kids.

"I was raised, in part, by my father, who was sentenced to eight years in prison when I was in my teens. 

...

"But for my college professors’ willingness to look beyond my past performance — but for affirmative action — I would not have benefited from twice-weekly 7 a.m. meetings with the economics professor who showed me how science could be used to help people. Or the statistics professor who marveled at my stories of my favorite uncle — a wino with sophisticated strategies of betting on Greyhound races — and helped me use formal models to explain his behavior. Or a spot at the American Economic Association’s summer school for minority students.

"But affirmative action is very often not targeted at individuals who, because of disadvantage, are achieving below their potential. Seventy-one percent of Harvard’s Black and Hispanic students come from wealthy backgrounds. A tiny fraction attended underperforming public high schools. First- and second-generation African immigrants, despite constituting only about 10 percent of the U.S. Black population, make up about 41 percent of all Black students in the Ivy League, and Black immigrants are wealthier and better educated than many native-born Black Americans.

...

"The Supreme Court seems poised to strike down the explicit use of race in university admissions. My hope is that it will still leave room for data-driven approaches to affirmative action that ensure real meritocracy."

Reducing the costs of preparing for high stakes exams by reporting scores coarsely

 In many countries, national exams serve as the gateway to college admissions and other prizes, and many applicants incur great costs in time and treasure preparing for these exams.  Here's a recent NBER working paper that suggests that reporting the grades in intervals rather than by individual scores has the potential to reduce the costs devoted to exam prep sufficiently to be a Pareto improvement for students, i.e. to make them all better off, even those who obtain the highest grades, if the cost of doing so is sufficiently high.

Pareto Improvements in the Contest for College Admissions by Kala Krishna, Sergey Lychagin, Wojciech Olszewski, Ron Siegel & Chloe Tergiman, NBER WORKING PAPER 30220, DOI 10.3386/w30220, July 2022

Abstract: "College admissions in many countries are based on a centrally administered test. Applicants invest a great deal of resources to improve their performance on the test, and there is growing concern about the large costs associated with these activities. We consider modifying such tests by introducing performance-disclosure policies that pool intervals of performance rankings, and investigate how such policies can improve students’ welfare in a Pareto sense. Pooling affects the equilibrium allocation of studentso colleges, which hurts some students and benefits others, but also affects the effort students exert. We characterize the Pareto frontier of Pareto improving policies, and also identify improvements that are robust to the distribution of college seats.

"We illustrate the potential applicability of our results with an empirical estimation that uses data on college admissions in Turkey. We find that a policy that pools a large fraction of the lowest performing students leads to a Pareto improvement in a contest based on the estimated parameters. We then conduct a laboratory experiment based on the estimated parameters to examine the effect of such pooling on subjects’ behavior. The findings generally support our theoretical predictions. Our work suggests that identifying and introducing Pareto improving performance-disclosure policies may be a feasible and practical way to improve college admissions based on centralized tests."

The paper notes that:

" In many Asian countries, including China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, students attend specialized “cram schools,”1 which focus on improving students’ performance on the tests. This often consists of rote learning, solving a large number of practice problems, and practicing test-taking strategies tailored to the specific test. In other countries, students hire tutors, buy books, and take specialized courses, all geared entirely toward improving their test scores. These activities likely improve students’ performance on the test, but are far less likely to generate substantial long-term improvements in students’ productive human capital. These activities do, however, carry significant costs in terms of time, money, and effort. In South Korea, for example, it is not uncommon for high school students to spend several hours a day in cram schools, and the high stakes competition for college admissions is seen as one of the main causes for the high rates of unhappiness and suicide among teenagers.2 Similar concerns have also been raised in the United States.3"

The paper explains that:

"We are interested in performance-disclosure policies that benefit all students, and refer to such policies as Pareto improving. In particular, we do not need to consider welfare tradeoffs across students. A key finding of our analysis is that Pareto improving policies often exist. This may seem surprising, since a fixed set of college seats implies that a student can be admitted to a better college only if another student is admitted to a worse college. The crucial element that makes Pareto improvements possible is that test preparation is costly. The costs students incur, as well as the resulting college assignment, are determined in equilibrium, and the equilibrium is affected by the performance-disclosure policy. Relative to the baseline contest with no coarsening, introducing a performance-disclosure policy leads to some students being admitted to better colleges; this makes them better off even if they incur higher costs, as long as the cost increase is not too large. Other students are admitted to worse colleges; if they also incur lower costs they are made better off as long as the reduction in the costs is large enough."

**********

I'm reminded of a paper that suggests that the very best students may not pay the highest costs for exam prep:

Feltovich, Nick, Richmond Harbaugh, and Ted To. "Too cool for school? Signalling and countersignalling." RAND Journal of Economics (2002): 630-649.

Who Benefits from Meritocracy? by Diana Moreira & Santiago Pérez

 Exams for U.S. civil service positions apparently started for some positions in 1883, and here's an NBER working paper that looks at the difference that made in the composition of people hired, by socioeconomic status.

Who Benefits from Meritocracy?  by Diana Moreira & Santiago Pérez

NBER WORKING PAPER 30113 DOI 10.3386/w30113 June 2022

Does screening applicants using exams help or hurt the chances of lower-SES candidates? Because individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds fare, on average, worse than those from richer backgrounds in standardized tests, a common concern with this "meritocratic" approach is that it might have a negative impact on the opportunities of lower-SES individuals. However, an alternative view is that, even if such applicants underperformed on exams, other (potentially more discretionary and less impersonal) selection criteria might put them at an even worse disadvantage. We investigate this question using evidence from the 1883 Pendleton Act, a landmark reform in American history which introduced competitive exams to select certain federal employees. Using newly assembled data on the socioeconomic backgrounds of government employees and a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that, although the reform increased the representation of "educated outsiders" (individuals with high education but limited connections), it reduced the share of lower-SES individuals. This decline was driven by a higher representation of the middle class, with little change in the representation of upper-class applicants. The drop in the representation of lower-SES workers was stronger among applicants from states with more unequal access to schooling as well as in offices that relied more heavily on connections prior to the reform. These findings suggest that, although using exams could help select more qualified candidates, these improvements can come with the cost of increased elitism.

From the conclusions:

"Our findings have implications for the broader debate on exams and meritocracy. Allocating opportunities based on exams is sometimes described as an equity-efficiency panacea, helping select the most qualified candidates while simultaneously increasing the representation of lower SES individuals. Our results challenge this view: although using exams could, in principle, help select more qualified candidates, we show that these improvements can also come with the cost of increased elitism. More generally, our findings show that adopting less discretionary selection criteria might not necessarily help the chances of lower-SES individuals.

...

"Importantly, while we investigate how exams shaped the social origins of government officials, an important question that remains unanswered is whether the poor themselves were on net made worse off by the reform. The answer to this question is not an obvious one for a variety of reasons. For instance, individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds might benefit the most from having a well-functioning state, even if achieving this efficiency implies that they might lose direct access to government jobs. "

***

This paper makes me think of an earlier paper, about the historical introduction and then abandonment of a national exam-based school choice system in Japan, where the result of national exams was that urban students filled more of the places...

Friday, February 21, 2020

School choice, centralized and decentralized, in Japan, a century ago, by Tanaka, Narita and Moriguchi

MIT reinstates standardized tests, to increase diversity

 Here's the MIT announcement:

We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles by Stu Schmill '86 in order to help us continue to build a diverse and talented MIT

"After careful consideration, we have decided to reinstate our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles. Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT. We believe a requirement is more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy."

...

"not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education,

"⁠04 Although our analysis is specific to MIT, our findings directionally align with a major study conducted by the University of California’s Standardized Testing Task Force, which found that including SAT/ACT scores predicted undergraduate performance better than grades alone, and also helped admissions officers identify well-prepared students from less-advantaged backgrounds. It is also consistent with independent research compiled by education researcher Susan Dynarski that shows standardized testing can be an effective way to identify talented disadvantaged students who would otherwise go unrecognized. Of course, there may be institutions for whom this research does not hold true, but the findings are very robust for MIT, and have been for many, many years.relative to having them, given these other inequalities"

Is applying to college too hard?

 While there are concerns that electronic application services like the common app have led to an explosion of applications, there are also concerns in the opposite direction, that applying to college remains a barrier particularly to students who don't automatically think of college as an option.

Here's a story from the Chronicle of Higher Ed about an initiative to ease the application process.

Rethinking the Act of Applying to College. A tedious process that puts the onus on students may need an overhaul.  By Eric Hoover

"On Thursday, the Coalition for College, a membership group of 162 institutions with a shared online application, announced a plan to ease the challenge of applying. As part of a new partnership, the organization will embed its application process into Scoir, an online college-advising platform used by students at more than 2,000 high schools nationwide.

"Instead of creating a Coalition application and typing information into a separate website, students with a Scoir account will soon be able to apply to any Coalition college by transmitting an admission form prepopulated with information — demographic data, grades, test scores, and so on — that would already reside under the same virtual roof.

...

"The more complex the application process, the less equitable it becomes."

"That was a key line from a report published in January by the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. The report, which imagined what the college-application process would look like if racial equity were the main objective, included findings and recommendations drawn from interviews with a panel of admissions and financial-aid experts, as well as students."

Multiple offer mechanisms in school choice, when information gathering is costly

 When it's costly to gather information needed to inform yourself about your own preferences, having a guaranteed offer in hand may justify the effort to gather necessary information.  Here's a paper that considers that as a first order issue:

The Case for Dynamic Multi-offer Mechanisms, by Julien Grenet YingHua He Dorothea Kübler

January 2022, (Forthcoming: The Journal of Political Economy)

Abstract: We document quasi-experimental evidence against the common assumption in the matching literature that agents have full information on their own preferences. In Germany’s university admissions, the first stages of the Gale-Shapley algorithm are implemented in real time, allowing for multiple offers per student. We demonstrate that non-exploding early offers are accepted more often than later offers, despite not being more desirable. These results, together with survey evidence and a theoretical model, are consistent with students’ costly discovery of preferences. A novel dynamic multi-offer mechanism that batches early offers improves matching efficiency by informing students of offer availability before preference discovery.

**********

Update: the paper appears as

Grenet, Julien, YingHua He, and Dorothea Kübler. "Preference Discovery in University Admissions: The Case for Dynamic Multi-offer Mechanisms." Journal of Political Economy, volume 130, number 6, June 2022, 1427-1476,  https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/718983

College as a Marriage Market, by Lars Kirkebøen, Edwin Leuven, Magne Mogstad

Here's a recent working paper about college and marriage in Norway:

College as a Marriage Market, by Lars Kirkebøen, Edwin Leuven, Magne Mogstad

Abstract: Recent descriptive work suggests the type of college education (field or institution) is an important but neglected pathway through which individuals sort into homogeneous marriages. These descriptive studies raise the question of why college graduates are so likely to marry someone within their own institution or field of study. One possible explanation is that individuals match on traits correlated with the choice of education, such as innate ability, tastes or family environment. Another possible explanation is that the choice of college education causally impacts whether and whom one marries, either because of search frictions or preferences for spousal education. The goal of this paper is to sort out these explanations and, by doing so, examine the role of colleges as marriage markets. Using data from Norway to address key identification and measurement challenges, we find that colleges are local marriage markets, mattering greatly for whom one marries, not because of the pre-determined traits of the admitted students but as a direct result of attending a particular institution at a given time.

 Here's a summary from the Becker-Friedman Institute:

College as a Marriage Market, by Larn Kirkebøen, Edwin Leuven, Magne Mogstad

"The context of the authors’ study is Norway’s postsecondary education system. The centralized admission process and the rich nationwide data allow them to observe not only people’s choice of college education (institution and field) and workplace, but also if and who they marry (or cohabit with), and to credibly study effects of college enrollment. The authors find the following:

"The type of postsecondary education is empirically important in explaining whom but not whether one marries. 

"Enrolling in a particular institution makes it much more likely to marry someone from that institution. These effects are especially large if individuals overlapped in college, are sizable even for those who studied a different field and are not driven by geography.

"Enrolling in a particular field increases the chances of marrying someone within the field but only insofar as the individuals attended the same institution. Enrolling in a field makes it no more likely to marry someone from other institutions with the same field. 

The effects of enrollment on educational homogamy (or marriage between people from similar backgrounds) and assortativity vary systematically across fields and institutions, and tend to larger in more selective and higher paying fields and institutions. 

Only a small part of the effect of enrollment on educational homogamy can be attributed to matches within the same workplace.

Lastly, the effects on the probability of marrying someone within their institution and field vary systematically with cohort-to-cohort variation in sex ratios within institutions and fields. This finding is at odds with the assumption in canonical matching models of large and frictionless marriage markets.

Taken together, these findings suggests that colleges are effectively local marriage markets, mattering greatly for the whom one marries, not because of the pre-determined traits of the students that are admitted but as a direct result of attending a particular institution at a given time."

College admissions: Oxford and Cambridge

 The Financial Times has the story:

How Britain’s private schools lost their grip on Oxbridge. As state-school admissions rise at elite universities, some parents who shelled out for private education regret it.  by Brooke Masters

Strategic issues with (combined) early and late matching, by Mumcu and Saglam

  Here's a paper on early decision in college admissions. I read it with particular interest because of related discussions going on right now about early and late matching to medical residencies in the U.S. In their model, early matching introduces either or both strategic behavior and instabilities.

Strategic Issues in College Admissions with Early Decision by Ayse Mumcu and Ismail Saglam, Economics Bulletin, Volume 41, Issue 1, 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we consider college admissions with early decision (ED) using a many-to-one matching model with two periods. As in reality, each student commits to only one college in the ED period and agrees to enroll if admitted. Under responsive and consistent preferences for both colleges and students, we show that there exists no stable matching system, consisting of ED and regular decision (RD) matching rules, which is nonmanipulable via ED quotas by colleges or ED preferences by colleges or students. We also show that when colleges or students have common preferences and each student applies early only to the top-ranked college with respect to her RD preference, then no college has a strict incentive to offer a single-choice ED program. On the other hand, if students compromise in the ED market and make early application to colleges that are not top-ranked, then colleges may become better off when they offer ED programs than when they do not.

The common app and the growth of applications to selective colleges, by Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff

A pair of papers study the Common App, how it is used disproportionally by selective universities and liberal arts colleges, to which applications have increased over time.  The papers focus on how this has increased student choice. 

There's a parallel set of arguments made elsewhere, particularly in connection with application to medical residencies, that too many applications increase congestion in the admissions process. 

The Common Application and Student Choice, By Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff, AEA Papers and Proceedings 2021, 111: 460–464, https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20211042

And here's a longer companion paper:

Reducing Frictions in College Admissions: Evidence from the Common Application by Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff, April 17, 2020

Abstract: College admissions in the U.S. is decentralized, creating frictions that limit student choice. We study the Common Application (CA) platform, under which students submit a single application to member schools, potentially reducing frictions and increasing student choice. The CA increases the number of applications received by schools, reflecting a reduction in frictions, and reduces the yield on accepted students, reflecting increased choice. The CA increases out-of-state enrollment, especially from other CA states, consistent with network effects. CA entry changes the composition of students, with evidence of more racial diversity, more high-income students, and imprecise evidence of increases in SAT scores.

********

For a look at applications through the other end of the telescope, see

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

The surge in exam-optional applications for college admissions

The surge in exam-optional applications for college admissions

 Covid forced lots of colleges to make standardized tests optional in admissions, and that seems to have jolted the growth in college applications to new highs.  The Chronicle of Higher Education has the story:

The Endless Sensation of Application Inflation  By Eric Hoover

"consider a big-deal development: the suspension of standardized-testing requirements. After most of the nation’s big-name colleges adopted test-optional policies for the 2020-21 cycle, they all but guaranteed a surge in applications from students who otherwise wouldn’t have applied. When that surge came, some admissions deans publicly expressed surprise that their testing requirements apparently had been suppressing applications from underrepresented students all along, just as critics of ACT and SAT requirements have been saying for decades.

...

"there are some drawbacks to having an overwhelming number of choices, Brennan says: “In admissions, you don’t get a 20-percent increase in staff to account for a 20-percent increase in applications.”

Exploding offers of admission to Notre Dame Law School

Notre Dame Law School has apparently sent out more acceptance letters than it has positions, and the offers will expire automatically once sufficiently many students have accepted them by making a binding deposit.  Read on and see that there was also a threat to students who had been offered financial aid.  (I wonder if this will work out the way Notre Dame wants, or if enough law students are rich enough to make more than one deposit...)

 The blog "Above the Law' has the story:

Chaos Reigns: Notre Dame Law School Tells Non-Wealthy Students ‘Thanks, But No Thanks’ By Kyle McEntee and Sydney Montgomery

"Notre Dame makes application decisions on a rolling basis instead of a pre-selected date. Once an applicant is admitted, the school requires two deposits to confirm enrollment. Law schools have used this process (more or less) without incident for decades.

"Most law schools ask applicants to deposit by a certain date, traditionally mid-April to early May. Notre Dame’s first deadline was April 15 and required a $600 non-refundable deposit. Notre Dame’s offer letter, however, increased the pressure with an unusual warning. The school informed applicants that they had until the deadline or “when we reach our maximum number of deposits.”

...

"For the applicants who received a scholarship offer, pressure mounted with a second warning.

"While most law schools frown on double-depositing (holding seats at more than one law school), Notre Dame warned scholarship recipients that they may lose their scholarship offer if the applicant also deposits at another school.

...

"In other words, if you want to come to our school at the price we’re offering, you’d better send us a non-refundable deposit now."

HT: Paul Kominers, Parag Pathak

********

I recall that decades ago, a certain midwestern Economics department (just) once made more offers of graduate fellowships than it had, with the fellowship offer expiring when enough acceptances had been received. No binding deposits were involved in that episode, however.

College admissions, exam optional

 The WSJ has a report focusing on post-covid, exam optional college admissions:

College Admission Season Is Crazier Than Ever. That Could Change Who Gets In.  By waiving SATs and ACTs, highly selective schools invited an unprecedented wave of applications, upending the traditional decision process.  By Melissa Korn and Douglas Belkin

"Ivy League schools and a host of other highly selective institutions waived SAT and ACT requirements for the class of 2025, resulting in an unprecedented flood of applications and what may prove the most chaotic selection experiment in American higher education since the end of World War II.

...

"Harvard University received more than 57,000 freshman applications for next fall’s entering class, a 42% year-over-year jump. Yale, Columbia and Stanford universities were so overwhelmed they also pushed back the date to announce admission decisions. The University of Southern California’s applications pool beat the prior record by 7%. And New York University topped 100,000 applications, up 17% from last year.

...

"Testing isn’t the only conundrum admissions officials are confronting. Grade-point averages—normally a key data point—were complicated by last year’s spring semester, when many high schools offered pass-fail options to students who were suddenly finishing junior year online. Sports and other extracurricular activities were canceled in pockets of the country, stripping teens of leadership opportunities to boast about on applications.

"Still, tests are the biggest single X-factor this year. Test administrations for the SAT and ACT across much of the country were canceled because of public-health concerns about crowding teens into auditoriums. More than 1,600 four-year colleges didn’t require that applicants submit standardized test scores this admissions cycle, since so many students couldn’t take the exams as scheduled. The movement behind test-optional policies had gained some high-profile backers over the past decade, but the trickle turned to a tsunami when 600 more joined the roster since last March.

...

"With the gates to many more selective schools no longer guarded by standardized tests, tens of thousands of additional students applied. In a year when nothing was certain, anything seemed possible—so what the heck, seniors thought, why not apply to Harvard?

...

"Data from the Common App, a standard application used by more than 900 schools, show that applications through March 1 were up 11% nationwide. But the number of applicants rose by just 2.4%, meaning roughly the same number of students are just sending out more applications. The flurry of applications was concentrated at more selective colleges."