Related papers: Reducing the Filtering Effect in Public School Adm…
Discovery program (DISC) is a policy used by the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) to increase the number of admissions of students from low socio-economic background to specialized high schools. This policy has been…
We study the problem of selecting the top-k candidates from a pool of applicants, where each candidate is associated with a score indicating his/her aptitude. Depending on the specific scenario, such as job search or college admissions,…
Many schools in large urban districts have more applicants than seats. Centralized school assignment algorithms ration seats at over-subscribed schools using randomly assigned lottery numbers, non-lottery tie-breakers like test scores, or…
We study the role of information and access in capacity-constrained selection problems with fairness concerns. We develop a statistical discrimination framework, where each applicant has multiple features and is potentially strategic. The…
Motivated by school admissions, this paper studies screening in a population with both advantaged and disadvantaged agents. A school is interested in admitting the most skilled students, but relies on imperfect test scores that reflect both…
Colleges and universities use predictive analytics in a variety of ways to increase student success rates. Despite the potential for predictive analytics, two major barriers exist to their adoption in higher education: (a) the lack of…
This paper uses and recycles data from a third-party digital marketing firm, to explore how targeted ads contribute to larger systems of racial discrimination. Focusing on a case study of targeted ads for educational searches in New York…
Most approaches in algorithmic fairness constrain machine learning methods so the resulting predictions satisfy one of several intuitive notions of fairness. While this may help private companies comply with non-discrimination laws or avoid…
We study how the design of admissions policies affects the ability of students admitted to universities. In our model, applicants have a multi-dimensional ability, which is a combination of a "type" and a "soft skill." Universities may…
Each year, selective American colleges sort through tens of thousands of applications to identify a first-year class that displays both academic merit and diversity. In the 2023-2024 admissions cycle, these colleges faced unprecedented…
We examine Illinois educational data from standardized exams and analyze primary factors affecting the achievement of public school students. We focus on the simplest possible models: representation of data through visualizations and…
We study the role of correlation in matching markets, where multiple decision-makers simultaneously face selection problems from the same pool of candidates. We propose a model in which a candidate's priority scores across different…
There is debate over whether Asian American students are admitted to selective colleges and universities at lower rates than white students with similar academic qualifications. However, there have been few empirical investigations of this…
Artificial intelligence systems, especially those using machine learning, are being deployed in domains from hiring to loan issuance in order to automate these complex decisions. Judging both the effectiveness and fairness of these AI…
Many important decisions in societies such as school admissions, hiring, or elections are based on the selection of top-ranking individuals from a larger pool of candidates. This process is often subject to biases, which typically manifest…
A fundamental component in the theoretical school choice literature is the problem a student faces in deciding which schools to apply to. Recent models have considered a set of schools of different selectiveness and a student who is unsure…
Assessments such as standardized tests and teacher evaluations of students' classroom participation are central elements of most educational systems. Assessments inform the student, parent, teacher, and school about the student learning…
We consider the problem of designing affirmative action policies for selecting the top-k candidates from a pool of applicants. We assume that for each candidate we have socio-demographic attributes and a series of variables that serve as…
Implicit bias is the unconscious attribution of particular qualities (or lack thereof) to a member from a particular social group (e.g., defined by gender or race). Studies on implicit bias have shown that these unconscious stereotypes can…
This paper introduces a novel revealed-preference approach to ranking colleges and professional schools based on applicants' choices and standardized test scores. Unlike traditional rankings that rely on data supplied by institutions or…