Related papers: Test-Optional Admissions
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 500 US-based colleges and universities went "test-optional" for admissions and promised that they would not penalize applicants for not submitting test scores, part of a longer trend to rethink the…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
This paper proposes a novel school choice system where schools are grouped into hierarchical bundles and offered to students as options for preference reports. By listing a bundle, a student seeks admission to any school within it without…
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…
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…
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 school choice, students make decisions based on their expectations of particular schools' suitability, and the decision to gather information about schools is influenced by the acceptance odds determined by the mechanism in place. We…
In this work, we consider a school choice scenario where a student does not exactly know which college is better for her. Although it is hard for a student to obtain an exact preference, she can usually compare specific features of…
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…
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…
Motivated by studying the effects of marriage prospects on students' college major choices, this paper develops a new econometric test for analyzing the effects of an unobservable factor in a setting where this factor potentially influences…
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…
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…
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…
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…