Virtual Market Design Seminar

School Assignment By Match Quality

Atila Abdulkadiroglu (Duke University)

Oct 14, 2024, 16:00

 

Abstract:

Parental school choice is a central education reform tool. Yet various policy objec-tives cannot be addressed in the standard model that guides the design of centralizedadmissions in school choice programs. We introduce student-school specific match qual-ity and formalize such policy objectives as maximizing aggregate match quality subjectto stability constraints. We characterize subsets of stable assignments through admis-sible schools, and maximize match quality within these subsets with a minimum-costflow solution. In comparison to the widely used Deferred Acceptance with a randomtie-breaking algorithm, match quality optimization in New York City public school as-signment reduces average traveling distance for high school students by about 1 mile,increases estimated Math and English standardized test scores for middle school ap-plicants by about 3-5% of a standard deviation, and assigns around 7 percentage pointmore applicants to one of their two most preferred schools.

Joint work with Umut Dur and Aram Grigoryan