Admission Post-Bac: Match or Mis-Match? – APB

In recent years, an increasing number of countries have adopted centralized procedures to organize the placement of students to higher education programs. Because they contain rich information on students’ choices, as well as on the characteristics of programs to which students can apply, centralized placement schemes provide a unique—yet relatively unexplored—opportunity to improve our understanding of the supply of and demand for higher education. Since 2008, admissions to higher education programs in France are centrally processed through the information and application portal Admission Post-Bac (APB). Our project takes advantage of this unique data source to quantitatively analyze the student-program match quality, both in terms of its efficiency and of its distributional consequences, with the prospect of improving the regulation of university admissions.

Specifically, our research proposal aims at answering three questions:
1. How does the admission process sort students into selective and non-selective programs in higher education?
2. Does providing applicants with information on their chances of success improve the student-program match quality in higher education?
3. How do diversity-enhancing policies in higher education affect the academic outcomes of targeted and non-targeted students?

The results of this research will not only advance scientific knowledge on large-scale two-sided matching markets, but also contribute to the design of more efficient and equitable placement policies in higher education.