Chinese college admissions reform: some consequences, by Yan Chen, Ming Jiang and Onur Kesten in PNAS

 An empirical evaluation of Chinese college admissions reforms through a natural experiment by Yan Chen, Ming Jiang, and Onur Kesten

PNAS first published November 24, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2009282117

Abstract: College admissions policies affect the educational experiences and labor market outcomes for millions of students each year. In China alone, 10 million high school seniors participate in the National College Entrance Examination to compete for 7 million seats at various universities each year, making this system the largest centralized matching market in the world. The last 20 years have witnessed radical reforms in the Chinese college admissions system, with many provinces moving from a sequential (immediate acceptance) mechanism to some version of the parallel college admissions mechanism, a hybrid between the immediate and deferred acceptance mechanisms. In this study, we use a natural experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of the sequential and parallel mechanisms in motivating student college ranking strategies and providing stable matching outcomes. Using a unique dataset from a province that implemented a partial reform between 2008 and 2009, we find that students list more colleges in their rank-ordered lists, and more prestigious colleges as their top choices, after the province adopts the parallel mechanism in its tier 1 college admissions process. These listing strategies in turn lead to greater stability in matching outcomes, consistent with our theoretical prediction that the parallel mechanism is less manipulable and more stable than the sequential mechanism.

Large cores in college admissions markets: the case of Hungary by Biro, Hassidim, Romm, Shorrer and Sovago

 Here's a paper that tells us something about stable college admissions, and also something more general about large cores in matching with contracts.

Need versus Merit: The Large Core of College Admissions Markets*

by Péter Biró, Avinatan Hassidim, Assaf Romm, Ran I. Shorrer, Sándor Sóvágó

Abstract: This paper studies the set of stable allocations in college admissions markets where students can attend the same college under different financial terms. The stable deferred acceptance mechanism implicitly allocates funding based on merit. In Hungary, where the centralized mechanism is based on deferred acceptance, an alternate stable algorithm would change the assignment of 9.3 percent of the applicants, and increase the number of assigned applicants by 2 percent. Low socioeconomic status applicants and colleges in the periphery benefit disproportionately from moving to this non-merit-based algorithm. These findings stand in sharp contrast to findings from the matching (without contracts) literature.

Who Gets In, and Why--an inside look at college admissions

Here's an essay from the WSJ, adapted from a forthcoming book with an evocative title, “Who Gets In and Why, by Jeffrey Selingo. The subtitle is A Year Inside College Admissions

The Secrets of Elite College Admissions: In the final ‘shaping’ of an incoming class, academic standards give way to other, more ambiguous factors by By Jeffrey Selingo, Aug. 28, 2020

"The year I was inside Emory University’s admissions office, the school received a record 30,000 applications for fewer than 1,400 spots in its incoming class. In early March, just weeks before official notices were scheduled to go out, the statistical models used by Emory to predict enrollment indicated that too many applicants had been chosen to receive acceptances. In the span of days, teams of admissions officers covering five geographical areas had to shift 1,000 applications from the thin “admit” stack to the much larger “deny” or “wait list” piles.

Admissions to polytechnics in Finland, by Kristian Koerselman

Here's a paper that gives a very clear description of the centralized application process for Finnish polytechnics (applied universities), which gives applicants a complicated strategic problem, and results in many applicants re-applying in subsequent years.

Assignments are by a (school proposing) deferred acceptance algorithm, but applicants get extra points in a school's preferences by listing it first, they can only list four programs, and they must choose which exams to take.

Why Finnish polytechnics reject top applicants
Kristian Koerselman
Education Economics, July 2020

"The Finnish polytechnic assignment provides us with an example where applicants are asked to strategize in their applications while having poor prior information on the set of programs that would admit them. These features should in and of themselves already be expected to cause a poor assignment outcome. I highlight the additional role which entrance exams appear to play in creating what should arguably be seen as a misrepresentation of true admission criteria analogous to a misrepresentation of applicants' true preferences. Because applicants take and retake different entrance exams in different years, programs rank the same applicants differently in different years, giving applicants an incentive to reapply even if they were originally assigned to their within-year most preferred feasible program.
...
"Finland provides 9 years of compulsory, comprehensive education, after which almost all students continue in approximately equal proportions to either an academically-oriented high school or to a vocational school. High school concludes with a set of nationally standardized and externally graded matriculation exams. Though students have a reasonable amount of freedom in choosing the subjects they want to take an exam in, they have to take into account that different higher education programs value matriculation exam grades in different subjects differently.

Higher education is provided by polytechnics, also called universities of applied sciences, and by universities. The former mainly offer bachelor programs, and the latter mainly combined bachelor/master programs. About half of each birth cohort ever enrolls in higher education, with total yearly admissions somewhat larger at polytechnics than at universities. Although it is not uncommon for vocational school graduates to apply to a polytechnic, high school graduates are the largest group of polytechnic applicants.
...
"Higher education applications are extremely competitive, with for example only about one-third of polytechnic applicants being admitted nationally each year. Rejected applicants are likely to reapply, often multiple years, and even admitted applicants often reapply. Re-applications are an important reason why the numbers of applicants per seat are so large. Applicants effectively queue into higher education, likely causing them to be admitted at an unnecessarily old age, and therefore also to graduate at an unnecessarily old age. The 2011 polytechnic applicants on which this study is based for example had on average graduated from high school already two and a half years earlier, and many of them would be older still when they were finally admitted to the higher education program they would eventually graduate from.

"All higher education applications are made to a national clearinghouse. Polytechnic admission decisions are generally made centrally by the clearinghouse itself, while university admission decisions are generally not. In this paper, I analyze the 2011 centralized assignment of high school graduates to Finnish polytechnics. In total, 50,894 high school graduates applied to 16,655 seats in 440 programs, divided over 8 fields.

"The application process starts in March, when applicants can apply to up to four programs in order of preference. Applicants must then choose which entrance exams to prepare for and take, typically in May or June. After the entrance exams have been graded, an admission score is calculated for each application. This score is mainly based on applicants' matriculation exam grade point averages and entrance exam results. The weights assigned to different matriculation exam subjects are typically shared within each field, and entrance exams tend to be shared as well. Extra points are awarded for the first listed choice, as well as for factors like relevant labor market experience. The relative weight of the different admission score components in determining the admission score can be seen in Table 2.

"Based on their submitted preference ordering and on their admission scores, applicants are assigned to programs through a centrally run program-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm, each applicant either being admitted to a single program or not being assigned at all. Admitted applicants then either accept their seat or reject it. A much smaller second round of offers is sent out by the programs themselves to make up for first-round rejections. The second round of the process ends at the start of the fall term in September.
...
"Applicants have multiple reasons to strategize in choosing which programs to apply to. Among others, the fact that applicants receive extra points for their first listed choice implies that they will want to list a program first where they have a chance to actually be admitted. Similarly, the four-program limitation means not only that there may be programs acceptable to the applicant which the applicant is not allowed to list, but also that the applicant will need to use the four allowed applications wisely. Third, the applicant faces a strategic choice in which entrance exams to prepare for and take, typically concentrating all effort on a single application. Fourth, the use of a program-proposing algorithm may in and of itself already give applicants an incentive to strategize."
...
"Though applicants receive good indications of their matriculation exam grades before they apply, and may be aware of previous years' admission score cut-offs, they however necessarily learn their entrance exam scores only after choosing where to apply and which entrance exams to take, adding a considerable degree of uncertainty to their application.
...
"When classifying applicants into thirds based on their program-specific matriculation exam GPA, as many as 54% of top third applicants remain unassigned anywhere. Even using the actual admission score, 34% of top third applicants remain unassigned.
...
"Even if applicants do apply to more than one program, their admission chances are relatively low for programs listed second, third and fourth, with the probability of being assigned to a program being 27% for the program listed first, but only between 3 and 4 per cent for programs listed lower. This is partly due to the extra points given for the first listed program, but is probably also related to applicants' strategic choices on which entrance exams to take. "

College admissions, late in the season

Each year, around this time of year, as the main round of college admissions comes to a conclusion, NACAC (the National Association for College Admissions Counseling) publishes a list of colleges that still have positions for qualified students.  Here's this year's listing:

COLLEGE OPENINGS UPDATE: OPTIONS FOR QUALIFIED STUDENTS

"NACAC’s annual College Openings Update: Options for Qualified Students (formerly the Space Availability Survey) is a voluntary listing of NACAC member postsecondary institutions that are still accepting applications from prospective freshman and/or transfer students for the upcoming fall term. Now in its 33rd year, the College Openings Update is designed as a tool for counselors, parents and others assisting students who have not yet completed the college admission process. Typically, colleges will continue to join the update after the May 5 public release date, so check back periodically to see additional colleges still accepting applications."

College Admissions--the musical (casting call)

Here's the casting call, from Playbill. (College admissions is interesting, and so is the labor market for theatrical performances...)

College Admissions Scandal Musical Ranked Now Accepting Submissions
BY DAN MEYER  FEB 21, 2020
 The casting call seeks performers ages 18–early 20s.

"The new musical Ranked, which follows the 2019 college admissions scandal, is now accepting video submissions for an upcoming industry presentation to be filmed by HBO for a documentary.

"The casting call seeks Non-Equity/Non-SAG-AFTRA performers ages 18–early 20s (to play 14–18 years old). To submit, send a video singing 32 bars of a contemporary pop or rock song (i.e. Pasek & Paul, Tom Kitt, Sara Bareilles), headshot and résumé to RankedCasting@gmail.com before February 26 at noon ET.

"Stephanie Klapper Casting will screen the audition tapes prior to an in-person casting call on March 2. Performers must be available for the entire rehearsal and presentation time period, March 16–20. A March 20 industry presentation at The Daryl Roth Theatre will be filmed by HBO."

Early admissions for medical residencies? An anguished response to the increasing numbers of applications and interviews.

Here's a proposal to introduce something like the early admissions programs that have become common in college admissions (where they cause new problems while partially addressing the issue of too many applications...)

Improving the Residency Application and Selection Process
An Optional Early Result Acceptance Program
Maya M. Hammoud, MD, MBA1; John Andrews, MD2; Susan E. Skochelak, MD, MPH2
JAMA. Published online January 23, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2019.21212

"from 2011 to 2019, applications per applicant increased from 15.2 to 34.8 for family medicine, from 30.5 to 61.3 for obstetrics and gynecology, and from 21.6 to 51.9 for psychiatry.1 Similarly, the number of applications received by each program also has increased across all specialties, some by more than 200%. For example, from 2011 to 2019, the mean number of applications received by family medicine programs increased from 76 to 251 and received by psychiatry programs increased from 115 to 446.1

"A cycle involving increased numbers of applications and increased reliance on standardized testing has resulted in behavioral changes in both applicants and residency programs. Currently, senior medical students spend large amounts of time and money during the last year of medical school applying to an increasing number of programs and meeting the demands of the residency application process.
...
"Meanwhile, to process the high volume of applications received, programs are likely relying more on quantitative metrics, such as United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1 scores, for screening.
...
"A new approach to help decrease the number of applications by giving students the option of an early application and expeditious result match program may be helpful. One possible approach might be an early result acceptance program (ERAP), in which students would be permitted to apply to a maximum of 5 programs, and programs would be limited to filling half of all their available spots."

Congestion and competition in college admissions (in the WSJ)

Is college admissions ripe for re-design?  (The problems outlined are real, but I'm skeptical that there's the consensus needed for a major overhaul...)

How to Fix College Admissions
Getting into a top school is a stressful, unpredictable process. Here are 10 ways to make it fairer and more transparent.  By Melissa Korn

"We asked college admissions officers, high school and private counselors, parents, students and others for ways to make the system fairer, more transparent and less painful for everyone involved. Here are 10 of their ideas—some easy to implement, others just meant to start a conversation—to reform the status quo.
...
"2. Limit the number of colleges to which students may apply. Thanks in part to the ease of applying online—especially through the Common Application, which allows applicants to use one basic form for hundreds of colleges—36% of students submitted seven or more applications in 2017, up from 10% in 1995. “The number of clicks you can make on the Common App causes congestion in the system,” says Alvin Roth, a Nobel Prize-winning Stanford University economist who helped to design the system that matches new doctors with residency programs.

"Schools pursue aggressive outreach, urging even fairly unqualified applicants to apply, then boast every spring about how many they rejected, as if exclusivity is proof of quality. Ballooning application numbers, combined with stagnant class sizes, cause acceptance rates to slide even lower into the single digits at places like Columbia and Pomona. As a result, high-school seniors apply to more schools just in case, and the vicious cycle continues—creating havoc for schools that can’t predict their yields. The overall yield rate for new freshmen at U.S. colleges fell to 34% in 2017 from 48% in 2007.
...
"Almost nobody needs to submit 20 applications; a reasonable limit would be as low as a half dozen, assuming that students receive meaningful counseling. High schools could enforce the cap by only agreeing to submit a certain number of official transcripts to colleges. The College Board and ACT could also limit distribution of SAT and ACT results, but they have little incentive to do so, since they make money from sending scores.
...
"9. ...Even more radical, schools could try some version of the algorithm used to determine matches for medical residency programs, which involves programs and medical students ranking one another and then being paired up by a computer system. This would be a heavy lift, however, as colleges would need to coordinate their procedures to rank candidates, run the computer program and inform all parties about the outcomes."

The Department of Justice opposes limits on early admissions, and other admissions agreements among colleges

Forbes has the story:

The Department Of Justice Aims To Unravel The College Admission Market
 Brennan Barnard

"Thanks to a two-year, ongoing investigation by the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), the wheels are about to come off in college admission. As the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) prepares to meet later this month for their annual conference, the leadership reached out to members last week about proposed changes to the Association’s Code of Ethics and Professional Practice (CEPP). These potential amendments are a direct result of fruitless conversations with the DOJ, which have left NACAC with few options.
...
"Specifically the DOJ has taken issue with ethical guidelines that prevent colleges from “offering exclusive incentives for Early Decision, recruiting first-year undergraduates who have committed elsewhere, and recruiting transfer students.”
**********

Regarding early admissions, the DOJ wants colleges to be able to compete more vigorously through early admissions, e.g. by offering special access to dormitories, or other perks to students who commit early.  It will be interesting to see where this leads, but it could easily lead to more unraveling of admissions, making more admissions decisions earlier.

Here's the relevant page from NACAC, the National Association for College Admissions Counseling:

2019 Assembly Meeting Background
NACAC’s Code of Ethics and Professional Practices and Antitrust Provisions
Kentucky International Convention Center
Saturday, September 28, 2019

The common app: reduced friction and increased congestion by Knight and Schiff

Reducing Frictions in College Admissions: Evidence from the Common Application

Brian G. Knight, Nathan M. Schiff

NBER Working Paper No. 26151
Issued in August 2019

Abstract: "College admissions in the U.S. is decentralized, with students applying separately to each school. This creates frictions in the college admissions process and, if substantial, might ultimately limit student choice. In this paper, we study the introduction of the Common Application (CA) platform, under which students submit a single application to all member schools, potentially reducing frictions and increasing student choice. We first document that joining the CA increases the number of applications received by schools, consistent with reduced frictions. Joining the CA also reduces the yield on accepted students, consistent with increased student choice, and institutions respond to the reduced yield by admitting more students. In line with these findings, we document that the CA has accelerated geographic integration: upon joining, schools attract more foreign students and more out-of-state students, especially from other states with significant CA membership, consistent with network effects. Finally, we find some evidence that joining the CA increases freshmen SAT scores. If so, and given that CA members tend to be more selective institutions, the CA has contributed to stratification, the widening gap between more selective and less selective schools."

"The CA began with just 15 colleges in 1975 but grew rapidly thereafter, with increases in member-ship in every year since 1975 and a significant acceleration of membership starting around 2000(Figure 1). It currently includes over 700 institutions, which, taken together, receive approximately4 million applications from 1 million students annually."

Contracts can be more than salaries: Hassidim, Romm, and Shorrer in EL

Not all matching with contracts is simple: here's a recent paper that helps put that in perspective.

Assaf Romm writes: "despite the insightful embedding results of Echenique (2012), Schlegel (2015) and Jagadeesan (2019), some real-life matching with contracts markets cannot be represented as markets with salaries. Specifically,  college admissions markets often contain schools that have preferences that do not satisfy unilateral substitutability, but do satisfy bilateral substitutability (Hatfield and Kojima, 2010) and/or hidden substitutes (Hatfield and Kominers, 2015). In this kind of markets the student-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm always concludes with a stable matching, but the existence of a student-optimal stable matching is not guaranteed, and this rules out any embedding into a Kelso-Crawford type of market (in which a student-optimal stable matching does exist)."

Economics Letters

Volume 181, August 2019, Pages 40-42

Contracts are not salaries in the hidden-substitutes domain☆

Author links open overlay panelAvinatan HassidimaAssaf RommbcRan I.Shorrerd

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2019.04.025

Highlights

•

Real-life two-sided matching with contracts markets may not be embeddable into labor markets.

•

Hidden substitutes and bi-lateral substitutes preferences do not assure embeddability.

•

We provide examples of centralized college admissions markets that fall under this category.

Abstract

We show that many-to-one matching markets with contracts where colleges’ preferences satisfy the hidden substitutes condition of Hatfield and Kominers (2015) may not be embedded, in the sense of Echenique (2012) into a Kelso and Crawford(1982) matching-with-salaries market. Our proof relies on a configurations of preferences that is observed in many college admissions markets.

Early admissions update at University of Virginia

Forbes has an article, by a college admissions counselor:

The Debate Over Early Decision In College Admission: Who Is It Good For?
by Brennan Barnard

"The University of Virginia (UVA) recently announced that they are adding a binding Early Decision (ED) application option with an October 15 deadline, under which students agree to attend if admitted. This news has once again struck the beehive of debate within the admission profession.

"A School Counselor’s Take

"October 15th is simply too early for many seventeen-year-olds to decide where they want to go to college. I feel the same way about this as back to school sales at the end of June, snow blowers for sale in August, or Halloween decorations in stores before Labor Day. Everybody is eager to move product, but let’s face it, early deadlines for college admission really are designed to benefit colleges, not students. Sure, it is nice for some kids to know early in their senior year that they have a college acceptance locked in. But that nicety is far outweighed by the myriad reasons why the creep of early applications is detrimental. Binding Early Decision policies are the worst of these evils, raising issues of both access and anxiety.
...
"If we absolutely want to keep the binding nature of ED and the ability for a student to send a strong message of commitment, perhaps we should have a universal deadline of January 1 and create a simultaneous Binding Decision (BD) option. Like many aspects of admission, we are faced with the increasing tension of doing what is best for the institution versus what is best for the student. There has to be a better system that can protect students and serve schools.

Colleges harvest signals of interest in more ways

Congested markets--those in which there are more potential transactions than can be easily processed--promote signaling, and the search for signals, about which transactions to pursue.  College admissions is a famously congested market, particularly since it became easy for students to submit many applications. So all but the most elite colleges have long searched for signals of "demonstrated interest."  The WSJ has an update on how technology is changing that search.

The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants
To determine ‘demonstrated interest,’ some schools are tracking how quickly prospective students open email and whether they click links  By Douglas Belkin

"Enrollment officers at schools including Seton Hall University, Quinnipiac College and Dickinson College know down to the second when prospective students opened an email from the school, how long they spent reading it and whether they clicked through to any links. Boston University knows if prospective students RSVP’d online to an event—and then didn’t show.
...
"At Seton Hall University, in South Orange, N.J., students receive a score between 1 and 100 that reflects their demonstrated interest, said Alyssa McCloud, vice president of enrollment management. The score includes about 80 variables including how long they spent on the school’s website, whether they opened emails and at what point in high school they started looking on the website (the earlier the better).
...
"In 2017, 37% of 493 schools surveyed by the National Association of College Admission Counseling said they consider demonstrated interest to be of moderate importance—on par with teacher recommendations, class rank and extracurricular activities. It carried less weight than grades, class rigor or board scores.
...
"Colleges also have low-tech means to help determine demonstrated interest. Last year, one third of students who applied to American University either visited its Washington, D.C., campus or attended an information session about the school, said Andrea Felder, assistant vice provost for undergraduate admissions. Two thirds of those admitted took part in either the campus tour or offsite information session.
...
"Mary Hinton, a senior at Dickinson College, benefited from demonstrated interested without knowing it. After she toured Dickinson in high school, she sent a thank-you note to her tour guide, at her mother’s suggestion.

Now a tour-guide herself, Ms. Hinton has learned those notes are forwarded from tour guides to admissions officers. Her advice to prospective students about thank-you notes: “Write them. It just takes a minute and it can make a difference.”

College admissions: early decision stats for this season

The Washington Post looks in on early decision (and early action) college admissions:
Early applications surge at prestigious colleges. So does early heartache.

"Early applications have been expanding for years, but last month some big-name schools reported record-setting spikes. Totals were up 9 percent at Dartmouth College, 19 percent at Duke University, 21 percent at Brown University.
"Some counselors worry the trend is widening the divide between haves and have-nots because early application programs often require those admitted to enroll. That proviso, known as “early decision,” tends to help the affluent.
Many students need to compare financial aid offers and weigh whether to take out loans.
...
"Still, highly selective colleges and universities often fill a third to half of their first-year classes through early rounds — which makes the regular round even more competitive. To address equity concerns, schools typically pledge to give students in need the same financial aid they would have received if they had been admitted in the regular cycle."

Harvard admissions on trial--dualing economist expert witnesses, interesting details

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has the story:
Dueling Economists: Rival Analyses of Harvard’s Admissions Process Emerge at Trial
There are many strands to this story (and it seems to be ungated), but here I'll just note a few interesting admissions stats.

"Of the 37,000 applicants for admission to the Class of 2019, for instance, 8,200 had perfect grade-point averages, and more than 2,700 had perfect scores on the verbal section of the SAT. But Harvard had only about 1,700 spots to offer. Even if the university wished to consider only grades and test scores, it would be hard-pressed to select a freshman class using those variables alone.
...
"The two economists’ analyses vary in several ways. Perhaps most significant, their respective models include different kinds of applicants. Arcidiacono excludes recruited athletes, the children of alumni, the children of Harvard faculty and staff members, and students on a special list that includes children of donors.

"Card includes them. Though the total number of students who fit those descriptions represents a small fraction of the applicant pool (5 percent), they account for a large proportion of accepted students (29 percent).

Centralized Admissions for Engineering Colleges in India

Yesterday I had the opportunity to hear Yash Kanoria discuss the implementation and operation of a centralized college admissions system for engineering colleges in India.  It replaces a semi-centralized process that left some seats unfilled (when IIT and non-IIT seats were allocated to the same people).

There are some novel constraints that have to be satisfied, some of which can theoretically present intractable problems, but in practice they don't.

An appendix on history and background is a quick education in Indian education.

Below is a link to the paper, which seems to be a fine example of market design as economic engineering, which solved some important problems and has now operated successfully for several years. There are also problems (e.g. concerning vacancies in non-IITs) left to solve...:

Centralized Admissions for Engineering Colleges in India
by Surender Baswana, Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, Sharat Chandran, Yashodhan Kanoria, Utkarsh Patange

Abstract We designed and implemented a new joint seat allocation process for undergraduate admissions to over 500 programs spread across 80 technical universities in India, including the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Our process is based on the well known Deferred Acceptance algorithm, but complex affirmative action seat reservations led us to make a number of algorithmic innovations, including (i) a carefully constructed heuristic for incorporating non-nested common quotas that span multiple programs, (ii) a method to utilize unfilled reserved seats with no modifications to the core software, and (iii) a robust approach to reduce variability in the number of reserved category candidates admitted, while retaining fairness. Our new seat allocation process went live in 2015, and based on its success, including significant and provable reduction in vacancies, it has remained in successful use since, with continuing improvements.

College admissions "customer relations management" software, and the marketing of Slate

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a story about customer-relations management systems (CRMs) used by colleges to organize their marketing and admissions, focusing on one called Slate and how it sells itself to admissions officers:

A Tech Whiz Is Conquering College Admissions. It Takes Charm, Innovation, and Dancing Sharks.

"What is Slate? Technically, it’s a customer-relations management system, or CRM, which many colleges use to track data about prospective students and serve them customized information. Imagine a big virtual file cabinet full of such data, with a built-in brain that tells you how to act on it, responding to students’ interests and behaviors.

"Many admissions offices of all stripes rely on Slate for just about everything they do. Enrolling a freshman class requires relentless grunt work, and the system automates a great deal of it. An admissions officer who’s about to visit a high school can use Slate to send a text message to the cellphones of 20 prospective applicants there all at once.

Why aren't clearinghouses used in college admissions?

I recently had an email from  Professor Deepak Hegde, at NYU's Stern School who asked me a question that led to the following exchange (edited for brevity and reproduced with his permission):

"Why are admission decisions in a broader set of settings (e.g., Phd applicants-programs, MBA applicants-to-business schools and so on)  not cleared through matching programs as is done with medical schools and residency applicants (or in some cases public schools matching)?   Are there a general set of conditions that one could develop to understand the contexts in which the matching algorithm that have helped advance could be implemented effectively?"

I replied as follows:

"I certainly don’t have a complete answer, but one obvious piece is that setting up a centralized clearinghouse for a whole market involves getting a lot of parties to coordinate and cooperate.  So I would guess that MBA admissions have a better chance of getting organized than, say Ph.D. admissions, since MBA programs are more alike one another than are Ph.D. programs (e.g. in Physics and Philosophy, or Chemistry and Chinese).

"And since wide scale cooperation is hard, I think it mostly happens in market in which people are very dis-satisfied with the existing system, and not just somewhat irritated.

"Is it your sense that MBA admissions is in a crisis of some sort?"

His reply: "In my assessment ... MBA admissions is not facing such a crisis, yet."

So...I think the MBA Match isn't something we'll hear about in the near future.

A look inside Harvard's admissions process

College admissions is a matching process--you can't just study at an elite university, even if you can afford the tuition--you first have to be admitted.

Harvard's admissions process is the subject of a lawsuit, and the discovery process is shedding some light on the deliberations that go on behind the closed doors of the admissions committee.  Here's an account from the NY Times:

‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions Secrets

Now you know some Harvard admissions jargon: "tips" are aspects of a candidates case that might tip him or her over the bar to admission. "Lops" are people tentatively admitted who get lopped off the admit list as it is trimmed to create a class that is balanced the way the admissions office wants.  And the "Z-List" consist of people admitted at the last minute, and required to defer admission for a year, who often have family connections to Harvard.

A cri de cœur against assortative matching for French college admissions

A French op-ed discusses the new college admissions system, 'Parcoursup':

Derrière l’algorithme de Parcoursup, un choix idéologique.  Par Hugues Bersini.
Gtranslate: Behind Parcoursup's algorithm, an ideological choice

The objection seems to be to assortative matching, which results when students largely agree on the desirability of universities, and universities largely agree on the desirability of students.  As a result, few students from poor neighborhoods are matched to top college programs.