The role of recruiting in hiring and career choice

Matching is the part of economics that studies who gets what, for things that are not allocated entirely by price. So, if there's an application or admission or recruitment or selection process, we're probably in the domain of matching.

A recent article by Marina Keegan, a Yale undergraduate, points out that the high percentage of Ivy undergrads who go into consulting and finance may have to do with how well those places recruit: Another View: The Science and Strategy of College Recruiting.

She writes:
"Sometime between freshman fall and senior spring, an insane number of students decide – one way or another – that entering the banking industry makes a whole lot of sense. A few weeks ago I interviewed over 20 Yalies to try to figure out why.

"What I found was somewhat surprising: the clichéd pull of high salaries is only part of the problem. Few college seniors have any idea how to “get a job,” let alone what that job would be. Representatives from the consulting and finance industries come to schools early and often – providing us with application timelines and inviting us to information sessions in individualized e-mails. We’re made to feel special and desired and important."
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Vikram Rao, who brought the article to my attention, writes
"... I thought one of the interesting points of the article is that these companies do a very good job of getting to the best students quickly (seems like an unraveling market) by recruiting in the fall, spending lots of money on recruiting, and presenting students with a well-defined process. I know from personal experience having gone to Princeton that they also do a very good job of outlining the parameters of the job market (i.e. if you intern with us/apply for full time with us at this time, then you will receive an offer at time X for Y dollars with roughly Z probability). Their interview process is also extremely efficient. The article makes the point that most college students don't really know how to find a job. These companies eliminate a lot of this uncertainty by having such well-established recruiting timetables and processes.

"Having just gone through the post-collegiate job market, I can say that this alone is worth a lot. In addition to lower salaries, the majority of other professions do not present such a clean-cut "do this, then this, then this" approach to recruiting and instead require that you go through contacts or wait long periods of time without much certainty to get a job. The banks and consulting firms also do a good job of convincing applicants that "if you work here, you can do a, b, or c afterwards", whereas many other industries do not make such claims. This is an interesting market design perspective on I-banking and consulting recruiting - I don't think America's youth is suddenly much greedier than it once was and is drawn by large salaries. Certainly some people are, but not all. I think what the I-banking and consulting firms really offer is 1) they recruit early, 2) they offer a very well-understood process towards getting a job, and 3) a clear vision of your future (I make no claim as to whether or not this vision is accurate or not). Graduates of top schools are used to getting results when they put their minds to something and tend not to like uncertainty. "
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A similar view, from the point of view of what career counseling offices do, is expressed by Peter Bozzo, writing in the Harvard Crimson: Profits and Bridges

"The more intriguing question is why students—many of whom, like me, were inspired to create during their years at Harvard—eschew careers in the more “creative” professions and pursue work in the financial world. Why are we creating profits instead of bridges?

I think that much of the answer has to do with the resources devoted to career counseling for students whose interests point them toward occupations outside the world of finance and consulting. Certainly some students enter this world because of the financial benefits, but for others it’s simply the most visible and defined career path after graduation. Students can meet with recruiters and interview on campus; the Office of Career Services provides extensive counseling for undergraduates pursuing finance or consulting careers. Many students work in internships during the summer after their junior year; by the end of the summer some have job offers in hand and can go through senior year with defined post-graduation plans while their friends frantically search for job listings and interview opportunities.

"Searching for a career outside finance or consulting often comes with more uncertainty than searching for a career within this profession. As a result, students often need to be counseled extensively when searching for opportunities in non-finance fields. Opportunities for such counseling currently exist at Harvard, but they often aren’t advertised extensively and can be overshadowed by the highly visible recruiters who descend on campus each year. The OCS could more effectively highlight its counseling opportunities for students interested in engineering, politics, or academia and could more aggressively reach out to students interested in these fields. Currently, OCS’s extensive finance career counseling services are not an example of a response to students’ demand for careers in these fields; instead, the supply of these services inflates demand for careers that might not otherwise be as attractive to students.

"As seniors near their thesis deadlines and eventually their graduation dates, thoughts of post-college plans inevitably hang over their heads. Right now, the ease of enter the consulting and finance fields means that students with diverse interests and creative impulses are streamlined into these professions, even if they’re more willing—and more suited—to entering other occupations. So why are we creating profits instead of bridges? It’s not because we’re uncreative; it’s because profits—and the careers associated with them—simply come easier."
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The Occupy Harvard movement seems to agree: Occupy Harvard Rally for Free Speech Targets Goldman Sachs Recruiting Event

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Of course, recruiting isn't something that can only be done by some kinds of employers.Teach for America is also known for the good job it does: see my recent post on that...

Teach for America's recruiting at Harvard

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And here's a report by Bryan Caplan on a paper about what hiring looks like (in contrast) at firms whose recruiters look at applications while commuting on the train and in other stolen moments :
How Elite Firms Hire: The Inside Story

The blackest of kidney black markets

Can some black markets be blacker than others? Two longtime observers of black markets for kidney transplants nominate some.

Ethan Gutmann writes chillingly of The Xinjiang Procedure: Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.

"Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution would probably ruin the heart. 

"With the acceleration of Chinese medical expertise over the last decade, organs once considered scraps no longer went to waste. It wasn’t public knowledge exactly, but Chinese medical schools taught that many otherwise wicked criminals volunteered their organs as a final penance. 

"Right after the first shots the van door was thrust open and two men with white surgical coats thrown over their uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was laid down, he went to work. "

*****

And Nancy Scheper-Hughes writes of The Rosenbaum Kidney Trafficking Gang, and of kidney black markets more broadly (as well as of her difficulties in getting others to see these things as she sees them).

"Some of the victims of US organs trafficking are bonded servants from Syria and Jordan brought into the US to provide kidneys to their patron royal families from the Gulf States. The Cleveland Clinic has a transplant wing that for many years has catered to these so-called “transplant tourists.” UCLA had its heyday with wealthy Japanese Yakuza crime “family members” who were given priority for liver transplants from the UNOS waiting list, livers that technically belonged to US citizens.

"So, Rosenbaum’s network, though extensive, represents only one of many forms of transplant trafficking into and out of the United States. Transplant trafficking is a public secret within the transplant profession, something that everyone knows about but which within the corporatist culture of the transplant profession — as secretive as the Vatican — is never discussed.
...
"Caught in the dragnet Rosenbaum admitted that he charged a lot to set up these illegal transplants in some of the best hospitals on the east coast, including Mount Sinai in NYC , Albert Einstein in Philadelphia, and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
...
"Nobody cared about, or even believed in, human trafficking for organs. I went to the media, to CBS, to 60 Minutes and then to 48 Hours which did send an investigative reporter, Avi Cohan, to meet me in Israel where we spoke to patients who had had “undercover” transplants at hospitals in NYC Philadelphia, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles. CBS decided not to do the exposé. I was stumped. No one wanted to accuse surgeons, or prevent a suffering patient from getting a transplant, even with an illegally procured kidney from a displaced person from abroad. The Israeli origins of the trafficking network did not help either. It smacked of bias, blood libel, or worse. “Don’t Indians and Pakistanis broker more kidneys than Israelis”, I was asked? Why pick on Israel?
...
"What I imagine is that the complicit surgeons loved the Rosenbaum option because they didn’t have to go through UNOS, the United Network for Organ Sharing, which until 2007, had nothing to do with living donors, related or unrelated. Hospital administrators loved it because foreign patients paid cash so there was no waiting for Medicare or insurance premiums. And there was minimal responsibility for the aftercare of the recipients or their kidney providers. Both were speedily returned to their respective communities and countries. Should they ever get caught red-handed, surgeons can cite patient confidentiality (their privacy oath), the hospitals could pretend they had been duped, the transplant coordinators could say that they followed the transplant protocols for living donors, but they are not, after all, detectives. Everybody wins. Lives were ‘saved’, transplant surgeons got to do what they do best, poor people got a ‘bonus’ for being charitable with their ‘spare’ kidneys, and everybody was happy.
...
"Meanwhile, complicit transplant doctors collude and protect each other, while the best ones tried to fix the problem from inside the profession without the help of the DOJ or the courts getting involved. Bioethicists argue endlessly about the “ethics” of what is in fact a crime and a medical human rights abuse. Economists and moral philosophers launch arguments based on rational choice theory for regulation rather than prosecution, as if prosecutions were going on every day. In fact, as the Rosenbaum history shows so well, human trafficking for organs is a protected crime. It is protected by the charisma and awe-inspiring ‘ miracle’ of transplant. The Rosenbaum guilty plea is the first prosecution in the United States for organs trafficking. On February 2nd Rosenbaum could be sentenced to five to 12 years in prison and a fine for illegally brokering organs in New Jersey. But the larger and deeper story of his international kidney dealings, his hired traffickers, kidney hunters, ‘enforcers’, money laundering operations, false charity organizations, Medicare fraud is yet to be told. And in the meantime, “life saving” for some at the cost of diminishing the lives of others ,the invisible kidney sellers of Chernobyl, Kiev, Nazareth, or the Negev desert, will continue undeterred.

Kidney sales and trafficking

There have been a number of recent stories about criminal organ-trafficking rings around the world.  Here's a long quote from the one that seems most credible, from Bloomberg (in which Frank Delmonico is among those quoted), followed by links to two related stories.

Organ Gangs Force Poor to Sell Kidneys for Desperate Israelis
"Aliaksei Yafimau shudders at the memory of the burly thug who threatened to kill his relatives. Yafimau, who installs satellite television systems in Babrujsk, Belarus, answered an advertisement in 2010 offering easy money to anyone willing to sell a kidney.

He saw it as a step toward getting out of poverty. Instead, Yafimau, 30, was thrust into a dark journey around the globe that had him, at one point, locked in a hotel room for a month in Quito, Ecuador, waiting for surgeons to cut out an organ, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its December issue.

...

"Organ trafficking is on the rise, as desperate people seek transplants in a world that doesn’t have enough donors. About 5,000 people sell organs on the black market each year, according to Francis Delmonico, an adviser on transplants to the World Health Organization.

It’s against the law to buy or sell an organ in every country except Iran, says Delmonico, who is president-elect of the Montreal-basedTransplantation Society, which lobbies governments to crack down on illicit procedures.

‘Exploit Shortages’

“There have been successes fighting organ trafficking around the world,” Delmonico says. “But organ trafficking continues to flourish because criminals exploit shortages of organ donors.”

Bloomberg Markets reported in June that U.S. citizens and others from the Americas suffering from kidney failure were going to Nicaragua and Peru to buy organs in a shadowy trade that injured and killed donors and recipients.

That U.S.-Latin American connection is dwarfed by a network of organ-trafficking organizations whose reach extends from former Soviet Republics such as Azerbaijan, Belarus and Moldova to Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa and beyond, a Bloomberg Markets investigation shows.

Many of the black-market kidneys harvested by these gangs are destined for people who live in Israel.

...

"Delmonico, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, has spent the past six years lobbying governments and doctors around the world to combat organ trafficking. He says Israel’s government is cracking down.

The Knesset, Israel’s legislative body, passed the Organ Transplant Law in 2008, setting penalties, including imprisonment of up to three years, for buying and selling organs and requiring hospitals to scrutinize transplants by nonrelatives and foreigners.

Breaking up Gangs

In an effort to draw more legal organ donors, the law also offers volunteers compensation for lost wages and travel expense and provides them with additional health insurance. Israeli police have been among the most aggressive in the world against organ traffickers, breaking up three international gangs since 2008.

The government has also banned insurers from funding most transplants outside Israel.

The dearth of available organs in Israel has spawned a new class of criminals, mainly immigrants from the former Soviet Union, says Jerusalem Police Superintendent Gilad Bahat.

Investigators on five continents say they have uncovered intertwining criminal rings run by Israelis and eastern Europeans that move people across borders -- sometimes against their will -- to sell a kidney.

“The criminal here is the middleman who profits from the sick and the poor,” says Bahat, who investigated an organ- trafficking ring in Jerusalem. “It touches my heart that people will sell part of their body because they need money to live.”

...

"The Brazilian case is still wending its way through international courts. In November 2010 in Durban, Netcare Ltd. (NTC) -- South Africa’s largest hospital company -- pleaded guilty to violating the Human Tissue Act, which prohibits buying and selling organs.

Netcare paid 7.8 million rand ($848,464) in fines and penalties. It admitted to allowing 92 transplants in which donors from Brazil, Israel and Romania sold kidneys to Israeli patients. Four doctors are awaiting trial on trafficking charges.

In Brazil, 12 people connected to the Netcare case were convicted and jailed, with sentences from 15 months to 11 years.

In Kosovo, Ratel, who has dual citizenship in Canada and Great Britain and was appointed by the European Union to help restore the country’s criminal justice system, is overseeing a pivotal organ-trafficking case. It includes participants and victims from Belarus, Moldova, Turkey and four other countries.

Center for Trafficking

The EU has administered the courts in Kosovo since 2008, the year the country the size ofConnecticut declared independence from Serbia after a civil war. Ratel, who arrived in March 2010 as part of the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, says the country has become a center for organ trafficking.

Ratel built a case against nine doctors, hospital administrators and recruiters on charges of buying and selling kidneys for patients in Georgia, Germany, Israel, Poland and Ukraine, as well as Canada and the United States.

...

"“This is organized crime,” Ratel says. “There is significant coercion and threats of violence.”

Organ traffickers search the world for hospitals willing to perform illicit transplants. Sometimes, sellers are flown to cities just to wait for procedures, and then traffickers move them to other parts of the globe when they find a recipient and a hospital willing to cooperate.

While the illegal organ trade may be run by seasoned criminals, it depends on the complicity of doctors and hospitals, says Oleg Liashko, a member of Ukraine’s parliament.

“I doubt this could happen without the hospital and doctors knowing about it,” says Liashko, who has investigated organ trafficking and is calling for more-severe criminal penalties in organ transplant laws. “They either know or look the other way because of the money involved. This is corruption, pure and simple.”

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Here's a story that follows up on the U.S. side: Kidney Broker Said to Use Johns Hopkins in Organ-Traffic Case
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And here's a graphic (but probably less credible) story from Egypt: Refugees face organ theft in the Sinai

Lectures on market design by Clayton Featherstone, Eduardo Azevedo, and Jacob Leshno

Good market designers aren't necessarily good teachers, but three recent lectures in our market design class (two of them yesterday) revealed that some of them are great. Here are three who you could get to teach your students next year:

Clayton Featherstone

Eduardo Azevedo

Jacob Leshno

Seattle backs away from transparent (strategy-proof) school choice

It appears that, after a decade of using a school choice system based at least in part on a deferred acceptance algorithm, in the course of making some other changes, Seattle schools may have backed into using a non-strategy-proof immediate acceptance algorithm instead.

Here's a Q&A on How to Rank Schools for the Seattle Public Schools Choice Process for 2010-2011

"My true first choice option school is very popular and hard to get in to. If I list it first on my School Choice form, am I throwing away my chances of getting in?

"For the 2010-2011 school year, you would not be throwing away your chances.

"This year the district is using what it refers to it as the Barnhart/Waldman processing algorithm, named after the school board members who suggested it. It is more properly called the Gale/Shapley “Stable Marriage” algorithm. This algorithm is well studied and understood by computer scientists and mathematicians. It has been specially designed so that there is never an advantage to listing your school choices in any order other than your true preference. The Gale-Shapley paper referenced below is highly recommended. It is well written and does not require special software or mathematics skills to understand. In addition to being used for school assignments in many districts, a variation of this algorithm is used for the yearly matching of graduating medical students to residency programs.

"Note that this will change when the NSAP is complete. The final plan calls for using a simpler algorithm in which families who list a school as their first choice have priority over families who list the school second choice or later. This can result in cases where your best chance for getting into one of your choices is to “lie” and list your second choice first."
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And here's an analysis by a concerned parent, Chris MacGregor, who happens to be a software engineer and took the trouble to examine the school district's school choice algorithm source code: Serious Problem With New Student Assignment Plan
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It sounds like the plan may have been passed hastily, with the change in algorithm being a detail in a more politically charged discussion: Student-assignment plan passed behind closed doors.
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Here's some background on school choice in Seattle, in the form of court documents from 2001, about the use of race as a tie-breaker in school assignment.
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Here's a 1998 story about the adoption of the deferred acceptance algorithm, with some discussion touching on strategy-proofness and making it safe to submit true preferences: New Student-Assignment Plan Set
"The change, devised by board members Scott Barnhart and Nancy Waldman, will extend the district's "hold harmless" rule to all choices. Currently, when students apply to alternative schools, they don't lose their place in line for a regular school.

But, when students apply to popular regular schools and don't get in, the computer bumps them down the list until it finds a school with a vacancy - even though they may have siblings in their second-choice school or may live right across the street.

Barnhart and Waldman's system will ensure that more students get their real second choice and eliminate bumping down to lower and lower choices, which has discouraged parents and driven some to send their children to private schools, according to Waldman.

At last night's meeting, Waldman said that had happened to her.

Space wasn't available at her first-choice kindergarten, so her daughter was assigned to a school Waldman hadn't even listed. So, Waldman put her daughter in private school for three years."

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Note that Scott Barnhart is a medical prof at U. of Washington, who was matched to a number of residency positions, and so would have been familiar with the medical match.
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And here's a 1996 story (short on detail, but gives some of the political atmosphere) about the run-up to the adoption of the deferred acceptance algorithm that is apparently on its way out: Vote On Reform Plan -- School Board To Tackle Student-Assignment System
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For those of you new to discussions of making school choice simple and safe for parents to reveal their preferences over schools, see the papers here about New York and Boston, and see the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice which has more recently been involved in the design of school choice programs in Washington D.C., Denver, and New Orleans.

HT: Parag Pathak

Paying bone marrow donors is now legal (depending on how it's done)

Joshua Gans forwards me this, just in on the AP wire from the Washington Post: Court says some bone marrow donors can be paid, overturning law that made compensation a crime

But the ruling makes for some odd distinctions:

"A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that most bone marrow donors can be paid, overturning a decades-old law that made such compensation a crime.

"In its ruling Thursday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a technological breakthrough makes donating bone marrow a nearly identical process as donating blood plasma. It’s legal — and common — to pay plasma donors. Therefore, the court ruled, bone marrow donors undergoing the new procedure can be paid as well and are exempt from a law making it a felony to sell human organs for transplants.

"The unanimous three-judge panel of the court did say it remains a felony to compensate donors for undergoing the older donation method, which extracts the marrow from the donors’ bones.

"The ruling overturns a lower court decision barring compensation for all bone marrow donations."
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See my previous post on that lawsuit here.

What does the NSF do? What should it do? Reports from and about the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, and Dec 1 Webinar

What should the National Science Foundation division of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences be doing? They asked and we answered, and now they're having a webinar to report the results: here's the email announcement.

Dear Colleague:

Just a year ago, we stopped accepting SBE 2020 white papers.  The papers were released to the public in February and now we have completed a report, Rebuilding the Mosaic, which briefly describes the process, some of the themes we identified, and the programmatic implications of what we learned.  The report is available at: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sbe_2020/index.cfm, and we expect to host a webinar/town hall on December 1.  The login details are below.

All of your papers contributed to our thinking about the future of research in the SBE sciences, and we continue to be amazed at and grateful for your participation.  I hope that you will take a moment to read the report – all of the papers are listed in Appendix 5.  For the foreseeable future, we also expect to maintain the website (http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sbe_2020/index.cfm), where the papers can be individually found and downloaded, since the report cannot substitute for the many ideas that you have shared with us and with the American people.

Although I have written to you before to express my appreciation, one more time, let me say:

Thank you.

Myron Gutmann

Directorate for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences

National Science Foundation

Details for participating in the webcast:

Date: December 1 at 11 a.m.

Webcast Title: Rebuilding the Mosaic: Listening to the Future in the SBE Sciences

Dial-in phone number:  888-469-1936

Verbal Passcode: Mosaic

Webcast URL:  http://live.science360.gov/    (will be active on Dec. 1.)

Webcast username: webcast

Webcast password: mosaic (case sensitive)

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Earlier, in a statement to Congress, Dr. Gutmann highlighted some of the tangible benefits derived from market design work that the NSF has supported:

Statement of
Dr. Myron P. Gutmann,
Assistant Director, Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences 
National Science Foundation

Before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science EducationUnited States House of Representatives

"3.1 SBE research has resulted in measurable gains for the U.S. taxpayer

Matching markets and kidney transplants. Researchers in economics at Harvard University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Boston College have applied economic matching theory to develop a system that dramatically improves the ability of doctors to find compatible kidneys for patients on transplant lists. Organ donation is an example of an exchange that relies on mutual convergence of need. In this case, a donor and a recipient. This system allows matches to take place in a string of exchanges, shortening the waiting time and, in the case of organ transplants, potentially saving thousands of lives.¹⁰ Similar matching markets exist in other contexts, for example, for assigning doctors to residencies.

Spectrum auctions. Spectrum auctions have generated $54 billion for the U.S. Treasury between 1994 and 2007 and worldwide revenues in excess of $200 billion. Researchers at Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology, supported by grants from SBE, developed the simultaneous ascending auction mechanism as a technique for auctioning off multiple goods whose values are not fixed but depend on each other. The mechanism was then tested experimentally and further refined before being implemented by the Federal Communications Commission. In this auction, all of the goods are on the selling block at the same time, and open for bids by any bidder. By giving bidders real-time information on the tentative price at each bid stage, bidders can develop a sense for where prices are likely to head and adjust their bids to get the package of goods they want. This process enables "price discovery," helping bidders to determine the values of all possible packages of goods. These auctions not only raise money, but ensure efficient allocation of spectra so that the winners of the auction are indeed the individuals who value the spectra the most. Applied with great benefit for the U.S. taxpayer in the FCC spectrum auctions, this method has also been extended to the sale of divisible goods in electricity, gas, and environmental markets.^11"

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Here's an earlier post on congressional testimony:

NSF Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences--attack and defense

School Choice and Education Reform at Brookings

The Brookings Institute hosts a session on School Choice and Education Reform, featuring Joel Klein, who was chancellor of New York City schools when the high school choice plan there was revamped.

"Large numbers of parents choose where their children are educated by moving to a school district or neighborhood that gives them access to good public schools, but school selection through residential choice is not an option for parents who are poor or unable to relocate. These parents are forced to take whatever is available to them through their local school district, and the schools that serve them do not have to worry about competition. While some districts are satisfied with this status quo, others have embraced policies that make school choice widely available and expose schools to the consequences of their popularity.

"On November 30, the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings will host a discussion exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform. Senior Fellow and Brown Center Director Russ Whitehurst will preview the Education Choice and Competition Index – an interactive web application that will score large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice – and announce the Index’s initial rankings of the 25 largest school districts in America. 

"Following his remarks, Joel Klein, the executive vice president of News Corporation and the former New York City Schools chancellor, will deliver a keynote address offering his reflections on the successes and challenges surrounding the expansion of public school choice in New York City"
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The Brookings Institute has also published a companion website and report: The Education Choice and Competition Index: Background and Results 2011. The report contains a ranking of school choice plans around the country.

One of the criteria is the "Assignment Mechanism

Our framework places considerable emphasis on the processes by which students are assigned to schools, treating it as a major category for evaluating choice and competition.  The antithesis of choice is an assignment mechanism based on residence, with little or no chance of parents being able to enroll their child in a school other than the one in their neighborhood. In contrast, the paragon of assignment systems is one in which students are assigned to schools through an application process in which parents express their preferences and those preferences are maximized.  We score districts based on where they stand with respect to these two poles. "

The report is here: The Education Choice and Competition Index: Background and Results 2011.

And it's conclusion (drumroll....) is

"The high score overall goes to New York City, with Chicago in second place.
Both received letter grades of B. The low score goes to Orange County, Florida,
which received a grade of  D. New York  performed  particularly  well in  its
assignment mechanism,  its provision of relevant performance data,  and  its
policies and practices for restructuring or closing unpopular schools.  Chicago, in
contrast to New York, has more alternative schools, a greater proportion of
school funding that is student-based, and superior web-based information and
displays to support school choice.  If the best characteristics of Chicago were
transferred to New York and vice versa, both would receive letter grades of A."

Early admissions and early decision

A number of stories follow this year's trends in early admissions (with Harvard back in the early game).

Early applications on rise at colleges
"High school seniors hoping for an advance nod from Harvard University have swamped it with an unusually large group of early applications that represent the most economically and ethnically diverse set of students in the school’s history.

"Harvard canceled its early action program in 2006 because of worries that privileged applicants were getting an edge and holding back attempts to recruit a more diverse student population, a fear backed up by studies showing that early deadlines tend to draw a whiter, richer applicant pool than conventional winter and spring cutoff dates do.

"But the school reinstated the program this year and announced yesterday that it drew 4,245 applicants, an increase from the 4,010 who applied in 2006. Almost 72 percent of this year’s applicants need financial aid, and numbers of African-American, Latino, and Native American students are all up."
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see also

The Flock of Early Birds Keeps Growing
"In the end, the story of early-action in 2011 is not really about what happens at the most-selective colleges (they will be just fine, by any measure). The story’s really about how, in the wild ecosystem of enrollment, one institution’s actions and policies will affect another—and what that will mean for individual students down the line.

"At Georgetown, Mr. Deacon suspects that Harvard and Princeton siphoned many early applicants out of his institution’s pool this year. So he expects that Georgetown’s yield for early-action applications, which dropped from 60 percent to 46 percent back in 2007, will go back up to where it used to be, which would be good news for the university."
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Harvard College Receives 4,245 Early Applications
"“Early admission programs tend to advantage the advantaged,” then-Interim University President Derek C. Bok said in a statement in 2006. “Students from more sophisticated backgrounds and affluent high schools often apply early to increase their chances of admission, while minority students and students from rural areas, other countries, and high schools with fewer resources miss out.”

Harvard and Princeton retreated from that stance earlier this year, with each announcing the return of early admissions within hours of each other. Though Harvard administrators had hoped other colleges and universities would follow suit in eliminating early admission, that trend never materialized.

In the February announcement of early admission's return, Fitzsimmons argued that the circumstances had changed and that a broader group of students sought to apply early."

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This story in the NY Times Choice blog starts with a good table listing schools with binding early decision (including some universities with two rounds of binding early decision), non-binding early action, and restrictive/single-choice early action. (They even have a printer-friendly version of their chart.)

Quick links to economics job market candidates, from the NBER

If you are hiring new Ph.D. economists this year, it's time to begin inviting them to interviews at the ASSA meetings in January. If you haven't started doing your homework yet, this big list of candidates from the NBER might help. It lists Ph.D. Candidates in Economics, in alphabetical order from Alabama (1) to Yale (18) (where the numbers in parenthesis are the number of candidates, by my count).

(Some of the NBER's links seem to be from last year, here's Penn State's list for this year (7).)

Sampling from the NBER's big list yields some big producers of new Ph.D.s (and I have surely missed some). But see the ones below, with ten or more new Ph.D.s on the market.
I wouldn't have guessed this order.

Harvard (31), of whom I'm particularly fond of these 5);
NYU (25);
Northwestern (25);
Cornell (24)
MIT (23);
UCLA (21);
UC Davis (20)
Maryland (20):
OSU (20)
Chicago (19);
Columbia (19);
Wisconsin (19);
LSE (18);
Michigan (18);
Yale (18);
Princeton (16);
Stanford (16);
UCSD (15):
BU (14);
Berkeley (13);
Brown (13)
Duke (12);
Penn (12);
Illinois (10);
Minnesota (10);
Rochester (10):
Cal Tech (9) [I know, 9 isn't double digits...]

Matching in Practice conference: 28 November, Budapest

Peter Biro writes:
Hi Al,
the European research network on Matching in Practice will have its third workshop on 28 November, this time in Budapest. You can find the program and other details at
Third Workshop on Matching in Practice

Third Workshop on Matching in Practice

Following the first two workshops in Berlin and Brussels, the Matching in Practice network will meet in our institute on 28 November 2011.

Organisers Péter Biró (IEHAS), Estelle Cantillon (ULB, Brussels) and Dorothea Kübler (WZB, Berlin)

Program

10:00-10:15 welcome and presentation

10:15-11:00 Tamás Fleiner and Naoyuki Kamiyama: A Matroid Approach to Stable Matchings with Lower Quotas

11:00-11:30 coffee break

11:30-12:15 Sebastian Braun, Nadja Dwenger, Dorothea Kübler and Alexander Westkamp : Implementing quotas in university admissions: An experimental analysis

12:15-13:00 lunch

13:00-13:30 discussion on the network
13:30-13:50 László Kóczy and Zsolt Szelíd: Resident matching in Hungary
13:50-14:35 Caterina Calsamiglia and Antonio Miralles: All about priorities: No school choice under the presence of bad schools

14:35-15:00 coffee break

15:00-15:45 John Kennes, Daniel Monte and Norovsambuu Tumennasan: The Daycare Assignment Problem

15:45-16:15 coffee break

16:15-17:00 Heinrich Nax and Peyton Young: The Evolution of Core Stability in Decentralised Matching Markets

Gift registries for everything

Are people starting to think what gifts to buy you?

US Airways sends me the following email:

Don’t just wish for the miles you want…Ask for them!
Create your Dividend Miles Gift Registry today.

Dreaming of a trip but don't have enough miles? Create your Dividend Miles Gift Registry so your friends and family can help you. Whether it’s a special event like your honeymoon or birthday, or just the vacation you’ve wanted to take – ask and you shall receive.

Here’s how:

• Create your Gift Registry
• Invite friends and family to gift or share miles
• Track your progress
• Book your award trip!

• Miles Gift Registry

Liver transplants for alcoholics?

Here's hoping you didn't drink too much yesterday: Study stirs debate over transplants for alcoholics

"Some gravely ill alcoholics who need a liver transplant shouldn't have to prove they can stay sober for six months to get one, doctors say in a study that could intensify the debate over whether those who destroy their organs by drinking deserve new ones.

"In the small French study, the vast majority of the patients who got a liver without the wait stopped drinking after their surgery and were sober years later. The study involved patients who were suffering from alcohol-related hepatitis so severe that they were unlikely to survive a six-month delay.

"The findings, reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, could boost demand for livers, already in scarce supply, and reopen a bitter dispute over whether alcoholics should even get transplants.

"The controversy peaked in the 1990s when celebrities with drinking problems Larry Hagman, David Crosby and Mickey Mantle got liver transplants. More recently, British soccer star George Best received a new liver in 2002, started drinking again and died three years later.

"Alcohol can cause lethal, liver-destroying diseases such as cirrhosis and hepatitis. Nearly one in five liver transplants in the U.S. go to current or former heavy drinkers. Transplant hospitals commonly require patients waiting for a new liver to give up drinking for six months as a way of assuring doctors they are serious about staying sober after the operation.

"Drinkers severely ill with hepatitis account for a very small share of patients needing transplants. The French study suggests that dropping the six-month rule for these patients would increase demand for livers by only about 3 percent.

"The study's lead author, Dr. Philippe Mathurin of Huriez Hospital in Lille, France, said a strict application of the six-month rule may be unfair to such patients. He said they are just as deserving as other liver patients, many of whom have diseases caused by poor lifestyle choices such as drug use or obesity.

"Mathurin said he favors keeping the rule for other alcoholics with liver disease, noting that some can recover liver function simply by staying sober.

"Dr. Robert S. Brown Jr., transplant director of New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, agreed it is time to rethink the six-month rule. "The challenge of this paper is to come up with better ways, both to treat alcoholism as a disease and to predict who will succeed with transplantation," he said.

"Mathurin acknowledged that such a change could put more patients on the waiting list for organs, and said: "It means we have to increase the number of donors."

Raising turkeys for Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving y'all:)

Here's timely advice from North Carolina Cooperative Extension if you're thinking of starting a small turkey operation for next year: Raising Standard Turkeys for the Holiday Market.

The first two points sound like the voice of experience:

"a. Identify processing plant before obtaining poults
...
"b. Identify feed source before obtaining poults"
***********

And here's a report about a somewhat larger operation: In This Town, Turkey Picks Up Bill for Dinner, concluding with this:
"“You look at it every day, and you get to where you don’t really care for turkey,” Mrs. Farmer said. “That’s why I get a ham.”"

College admissions and searchable data

A slightly breathless but interesting story in The Washington Monthly about college admissions, and how it may be transformed by data mining (and focused on the company Connectedu): "The End of College Admissions As We Know It: Everything you’ve heard about getting in is about to go out the window."

"Because the information that might help them is entombed in file folders, colleges resort to an expensive, inefficient, scattershot strategy. A typical midrange private college looking to enroll 1,200 freshmen might buy a list of 350,000 names from the College Board. An expensive but poorly targeted direct-mail campaign leads to 11,000 applications. They accept 5,000, of whom only 1,200 choose to enroll. Of those, more than half drop out or transfer, leaving the college struggling to bring in enough tuition revenue to pay their bills and left with no option other than buying another 350,000 names.

"Students have a similar problem. It’s hard to choose the right college. Higher education is what economists call an “experiential good,” something you can’t fully understand until after you purchase and experience it. As parents of college age children know, students often assemble a list of prospective schools through a frighteningly arbitrary process of hearsay, peer misinformation, and fleeting impressions gained during slickly produced college tours. Or, worse, they don’t assemble a prospective list at all and default to inexpensive, nearby institutions. Some of those local colleges are terrible places to go to school. (See “College Dropout Factories,” September/October 2010.) Too many students don’t find out until it’s too late.
...
"There are other players in this market, including the Common Application and a company called Naviance, which offers electronic college planning tools for high school students. The virtue of ConnectEDU, though, is that it spans the entire process, from late middle school into college and beyond. The company’s first foray into the market came in 2006, when it signed up three colleges and fifteen high schools. In 2007, it was up to thirty-five high schools and 300 colleges. It began signing up school districts instead of individual schools, then moved to contracts with entire states, starting with Michigan. The number of high schools increased to 700 in 2008, 1,700 in 2009, and 2,500 in 2010. That amounts to about 2.5 million students. The Miami-Dade County school system joined the network last year. The state of Hawaii signed up in May 2011.

"The number of colleges using the service has also increased, to 450, representing a decent—though not quite commanding—subset of the schools that receive large numbers of applications. Yale signed up in 2008."

HT: Stephanie Hurder

Surrogacy as a business

Excerpts from The Red Market: Cash on Delivery

"India legalized surrogacy in 2002 as part of a larger effort to promote medical tourism. Since 1991, when the country’s new procapitalist policies took effect, private money has flowed in and fueled construction of world-class hospitals that cater to foreigners. Surrogacy tourism has grown steadily here as word has gotten out that babies can be incubated at a low price and without government red tape. Patel’s clinic charges between $15,000 and $20,000 for the entire process, from in vitro fertilization to delivery, whereas in the handful of American states that allow paid surrogacy, bringing a child to term can cost between $50,000 and $100,000, and is rarely covered by insurance.
...
"Dependable numbers are hard to come by, but at minimum, Indian surrogacy services now attract hundreds of Western clients each year. Since 2004 Akanksha alone has ushered at least 232 babies into the world through surrogates. By 2008 it had forty-five surrogates on the payroll, and Patel reports that at least three women approach her clinic every day hoping to become one. There are at least another 350 fertility clinics around India, although it’s difficult to say how many offer surrogacy services, since the government doesn’t track the industry. Mumbai’s Hiranandani Hospi- tal, which boasts a sizable surrogacy program of its own, trains outside fertility doctors on how to identify and recruit promising candidates. A page on its website advertises franchising opportunities to entrepreneurial fertility specialists around India who might want to set up surrogacy operations with an endorsement from Mumbai. India’s Council on Medical Research (which plays an FDA-like role—except that it has far less power to actually enforce its edicts) predicts that medical tourism, including surrogacy, could generate $2.3 billion in annual revenue by 2012. “Surrogacy is the new adoption,” says Delhi fertility doctor Anoop Gupta.

"Despite the growth projections, surrogacy is not officially regulated in India. There are no binding legal standards for treatment of surrogates, nor does state or national authority have the power to police the industry. While clinics like Akan- ksha have a financial incentive to ensure the health of the fetus, there is nothing to prevent them from cutting costs by scrimping on surrogate pay and follow-up care, or to ensure they behave responsibly when something goes wrong.

Matching and market design session at SAET in Australia in July

Fuhito Kojima writes:
Call for submissions: I am organizing a session on matching and market design in SAET 2012: http://www.saet.illinois.edu/event-07.html

which will be held in Queensland, Australia, from June 30th to July 3rd.

Al is scheduled to give a plenary talk (Sir John Hicks Lecture) and Tayfun already offered to come to the session, and it will be an interesting conference for us!

So I would like to encourage your submission:

If you are interested, you please send a message directly to me by December 25th this year with the paper draft (if not yet available, please send me the abstract and/or slide if available).

I will get back to you about the decision by January 15th.

Hope that I can pique your interest!

Thanks for reading this. A happy thanksgiving.

Best,

Fuhito

--
Fuhito Kojima
fuhitokojima1979@gmail.com

Schools' choices and school choice in England

In the U.S., charter schools are typically not allowed to be choosy: they often have to offer admission strictly by lottery. In England, there's controversy over religious schools, and the following story illustrates some of the issues.

Catholic school in new row over school admissions

"Coloma Convent Girls' School in Croydon was reported to the official admissions watchdog by the local diocese amid claims its entry rules are “discriminatory”.

The over-subscribed school – which is rated outstanding by Ofsted and regularly appears towards the top of league tables – gives more “points” to families who take part in parish activities.

But the Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark complained that the system discriminated against single parents who were unable to find the time to take part in parish work.

It also said it was unfair on immigrants who did not share the same “tradition of community service” and struggled to provide written evidence of volunteering because English was not their first language.

The move comes after Diocese of Westminster shopped the hugely popular Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School to the admissions watchdog, complaining that its entry rules were too elitist and effectively penalised the less devout.