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  5. Market Design in College Admissions
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Market Design in College Admissions

Paper Session

Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (PST)

Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Union Square 11
Hosted By: Econometric Society
  • Chair: Evan Riehl, Cornell University

College Application Mistakes and the Design of Information Policies at Scale

Anaïs Fabre
,
Toulouse School of Economics
Tomas Larroucau
,
Arizona State University
Christopher Andrew Neilson
,
Princeton University
Ignacio Rios
,
University of Texas-Dallas

Abstract

In this paper, we present the results of a multi-year collaboration with policymakers to design and evaluate whether information policies implemented at scale can effectively improve students’ outcomes. Using a series of nationwide surveys, we find that 40% of students do not apply to their preferred college and major, and 10% of these students would have strictly benefited by including these programs. Upon these results, we implemented with the Ministry of Education of Chile a large-scale field experiment for college admissions, which included personalized information about program characteristics, students’ admission probabilities, and alternative major recommendations. The intervention significantly reduced application mistakes, increasing the probability of assignment for unmatched students by 20% and the probability of improving the assignment of undermatched students by 38%. After scaling up the policy, the intervention approximately doubled the matching probability for unmatched and undermatched students and tripled the enrollment likelihood for initially unmatched students.

Inequity in Centralized College Admissions with Public and Private Universities: Evidence from Albania

Iris Vrioni
,
University of Michigan

Abstract

Centralized assignment systems are a popular policy tool to improve fairness and efficiency in allocating students to public college seats. In most implementations, however, private college admissions remain decentralized, which may give high socio-economic status (SES) students a strategic advantage in the centralized public match because high-SES students derive higher value from expensive private alternatives. I empirically study application behavior and the allocation of students in markets where only public college seats are centrally assigned with new data from the college match in Albania. Using a policy change that incorporated all private colleges in the centralized platform, which differentially shifted outside alternatives by SES, I find that when private colleges operate outside the match, high-SES students apply to more selective portfolios and enroll in more selective public programs, but the selectivity gap in applications shrinks after the policy change. I build and estimate a model of applications and matriculation that uses the unique institutional features of the Albanian college admissions to disentangle the effects of heterogeneous beliefs, preferences, and outside options on choice, and evaluate the distributional consequences of counterfactual admissions design. I find that removing outside options reverses the welfare gap in favor of lower-SES students but at the expense of overall market efficiency. This is driven by the fact that outside options dampen the distortionary effects of list size restrictions and incorrect beliefs on choice.

Stakes and Signals: An Empirical Investigation of Muddled Information in Standardized Testing

Germán Reyes
,
Middlebury College
Evan Riehl
,
Cornell University
Ruqing Xu
,
Cornell University

Abstract

We examine a natural experiment in Brazil in which similar students took the same standardized test as either a low-stakes school accountability exam or a high-stakes admission exam for the country's top universities. Using administrative data and a difference-in-differences design, we find that test score gaps between high- and low-income students expanded on the high-stakes exam, consistent with wealthy students engaging in test prep. Yet the increase in stakes made scores more informative for students' college outcomes. Thus the "muddling" of information on natural ability and test prep improved the quality of the score signal, although it also exacerbated inequality.
JEL Classifications
  • I2 - Education and Research Institutions