Designing Admission Criteria in School Choice – Admission_Criteria

This research project aims to advance the market design literature by providing a new and extensive set of empirical evidence on the effects of admission criteria in school choice. These admission criteria, or, equivalently, priority rules, are an essential component of school choice policies in that they regulate the tradeoff between potentially conflicting objectives (e.g., minimizing travel times, ensuring equitable access to school quality, and promoting social mixing) and directly influence the allocation of students across schools.

We will conduct an empirical analysis of high school choice in Paris, combining state-of-the-art structural methods with reduced-form techniques. Since 2008, the placement of students to public high schools in Paris has been managed by a centralized clearinghouse called AFFELNET. This clearinghouse implements Gale and Shapley's school-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism to determine every student’s school assignment, taking as inputs students’ rank-ordered lists of schools, their priorities at each school, and schools’ capacities. Student priorities at each school are expressed in points and are based on three factors: academic performance, proximity to the school, and socio-economic background. Since its adoption, AFFELNET has undergone several major reforms that have dramatically changed how student priorities are determined. These reforms, which can be studied using rich school choice and administrative data, provide a unique opportunity to identify the effects of priority rules on an extensive set of outcomes, including school composition, residential choice, and students’ educational attainment.

To meet its research objectives, the project will be structured around three topics: (1) Promoting social mixing in school choice via low-income priorities and its consequences. (2) Designing neighborhood priorities. (3) Ability mixing in schools and students’ educational outcomes.