#104 2003 · NYC Department of Education · School choice
New York ran its high schools like the residency match and the unmatched fell ninety percent
the problem
Thirty thousand students matched to nothing
background
Every eighth-grader applying to a New York City public high school listed five preferred schools and hoped for the best; schools made offers directly, with no coordination between them, and a student could hold multiple offers while others held none. The congestion this created was the visible failure: nearly half of students ended up assigned to a school that wasn't even on their five-school list, sent through an unpopular administrative placement instead.
In 2003-04, economists Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag Pathak and Alvin Roth — extending the same deferred-acceptance matching theory behind the medical residency Match — redesigned the process for New York City students entering high school in September 2004: one round, ranked preferences submitted once, computed centrally instead of negotiated school by school.
the move
Replaced the strategic high-school application scramble with a deferred-acceptance match designed by the same economists.
the payoff
Students left unassigned by the process fell from roughly thirty thousand to three thousand in the first year.
what came after
That 31,000-to-3,000 drop is why the NYC redesign stands alongside the residency Match and kidney exchange as one of matching theory's three flagship applications. Boston adopted a comparable redesign for its own school-choice system in 2006, using the same team's research on the trade-offs between strategy-proofness and efficiency.
filed under
references
- [1]The Design of School Choice Systems in NYC and Boston: Game-Theoretic IssuesAlvin Roth, Stanford (course slides), 2008web.stanford.edu
- [2]The Deferred Acceptance Algorithm: The Economics of Matchmaking in the High School Application ProcessCornell University (Networks course blog), 2017blogs.cornell.edu