Related papers: Test-optional Policies: Overcoming Strategic Behav…

Many U.S. colleges now use test-optional admissions. A frequent claim is that by not seeing standardized test scores, a college can admit a student body it prefers, say with more diversity. But how can observing less information improve…

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…

Recently dozens of school districts and college admissions systems around the world have reformed their admission rules. As a main motivation for these reforms the policymakers cited strategic flaws of the rules: students had strong…

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 study a two-stage model, in which students are 1) admitted to college on the basis of an entrance exam which is a noisy signal about their qualifications (type), and then 2) those students who were admitted to college can be hired by an…

Critical decisions in hiring, college admissions, and credit lending are guided by predictions made in the presence of uncertainty. While uncertainty imparts errors across all demographic groups, this paper shows that the types of errors…

U.S. state education agencies mark schools displaying achievement gaps between demographic subgroups as needing improvement. Some schools may have few students in these subgroups, such that average end-of-year test scores only noisily…

In this paper, we study university admissions under a centralized system that uses grades and standardized test scores to match applicants to university programs. We consider affirmative action policies that seek to increase the number of…

We study a game theoretic model of standardized testing for college admissions. Students are of two types; High and Low. There is a college that would like to admit the High type students. Students take a potentially costly standardized…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Information frictions can harm the welfare of participants in two-sided matching markets. Consider a centralized admission, where colleges cannot observe students' preparedness for success in a particular major or degree program. Colleges…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many institutions such as universities and workplaces implemented testing regimens with every member of some population tested longitudinally, and those testing positive isolated for some time. Although the…

A core aspect in market design is to encourage participants to truthfully report their preferences to ensure efficiency and fairness. Our research paper analyzes the factors that contribute to and the consequences of students reporting…

A growing number of college applications has presented an annual challenge for college admissions in the United States. Admission offices have historically relied on standardized test scores to organize large applicant pools into viable…

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…

The use of new technologies in higher education has surprisingly emphasized students' tendency to adopt a passive behavior in class. Participation and interaction of students are essential to improve academic results. This paper describes…

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,…