College admissions with budget complementarities

This paper analyzes the effect of different aspects of family background such as family income, parental education, parental job, and the socioeconomic status of parents on the university admission in Iran in 2009. The Iranian university and college admission system involves prospective students listing up to one hundred majors in order of their preference in the application. Places in universities are offered to the applicants based on both their preferences and their entrance examination results. The gathered data from the Iranian university and college applications in 2009 is analyzed using data mining methods to investigate the effects of family background variables on entrance examination grades. The results of this analysis show that parental education, parental job and the socioeconomic status of family have large effects on entrance examination grades, and as a result on university and college acceptance. The proportion of acceptance in universities for high social class families are more than the proportion of candidates in the other categories. In other words, applicants who come from higher social classes have a significantly better chance of becoming admitted in university.

This study seeks to address the research question: What are U.S. White women college students' attitudes toward race-conscious affirmative action policy in college admissions since the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, and how do they relate to their racial attitudes? We qualitatively examined participants’ reasoning behind their opinions on the consideration of race as a factor in college admissions. In addition, we quantitatively examined the differences in participants’ attitudes toward race-conscious admissions based on their colorblind racial attitudes and White privilege attitudes. 159 White women undergraduates from a rural Midwestern university between the ages of 18 and 23 ( M age = 19.70; SD = 1.11) were recruited from a required diversity course at the start of the semester. They responded to survey items and short answer questions. Seven qualitative themes were identified, with the most highly endorsed being “only merit should be considered,” “considering race for equity,” and “considering race is unfair.” Short answer responses were also coded into categories to represent their support of/opposition to affirmative action for use in t-tests with racial attitude measures. Almost half of participants (48.4%) opposed the consideration of race in college admissions, while a little more than a third (37.1%) were in support. Quantitative results suggested that those in support reported lower scores on colorblind racial attitudes, and higher scores on awareness of White privilege and willingness to confront White privilege than those who reported opposing using race/ethnicity in admissions. This study has implications for how students are educated about race and racism.

ABSTRACTObjectivesThis paper examines public attitudes toward the “Ban the Box” policy in college admissions in Georgia. It investigates how exposure to framed messages affects support for or opposition to the policy, focusing on its potential impact on campus safety and overall effects.MethodsThe data are from independent survey experiments conducted on two samples: undergraduate students at a USG institution (n = 587) and adult residents in Georgia (n = 500). Participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: control, support banning the box message, oppose banning the box message, or mixed/competitive frame message.ResultsParticipants exposed to supportive messages showed increased support, while those exposed to opposing messages showed decreased support. Competitive framing had mixed effects, with no significant difference from the control group in the adult sample. Overall, positive advocacy frames counteracted the negative impact of oppositional messages.ConclusionsThe study highlights the importance of framing in shaping public opinion on banning the box policies in college admissions. Both supportive and oppositional frames effectively sway attitudes, indicating the complexity of public perception on this issue. Further research is needed to explore the persistence of framing effects and their implications in policy debates.

Abstract—In order to meet the increasing demand for clear and reliable information about college admissions, this study proposes the creation and deployment of an AI-powered chatbot that operates online. The constraints of static databases are removed by the suggested solution, which uses web scraping and Google search to dynamically extract real-time data from the internet. Using sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) techniques, the chatbot integrates multilingual support for Hindi and English. Intelligent query handling, automatic translation, and language detection are essential elements. The system is available via an intuitive web interface and was developed with Python, Flask, and a number of NLP and scraping modules. The chatbot has the ability to streamline the college admissions process for students all over India by effectively responding to questions on university rankings, course offers, costs, application deadlines, and more. Keywords—College Admission Chatbot, Multilingual NLP, Web Scraping, Google Search Automation, Hindi-English Chatbot, Educational Technology, Flask Web Application, Language Detection and Translation

Recent meta-analyses demonstrated that the observed correlation between cognitive ability test scores and performance criteria was lower for Black and Hispanic subgroups than for Asian and White subgroups in college admissions, civilian employment, and military domains (i.e., differential validity). Given mean score differences between racial/ethnic subgroups, these observed validities may have been confounded by subgroup differences in range restriction. The present study draws on data from hundreds of cognitive ability test validity studies including more than 1 million persons to investigate whether Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White subgroups have differed in amounts of range restriction. We first replicated observed differential validity results and also extended them by presenting the first meta-analytic evidence that observed cognitive ability test validity is lower for the Hispanic subgroup in civilian employment settings. All subgroups were approximately equivalently restricted in range in college admissions and civilian employment domains, but the Black subgroup was more restricted in range than the White subgroup in military studies. In all 3 domains, any differences in range restriction could not account for observed validity differences between subgroups. We also provide estimates of range-restriction-corrected validities; Black and Hispanic subgroups' corrected validities were 11.3-18.0% lower than White corrected validities across domains.

Essays on Market Design and Auction Theory Youngwoo Koh This dissertation consists of three essays on market design and auction theory. In the first chapter, we develop a model of decentralized college admissions in which students’ preferences for colleges are uncertain, and colleges must incur costs when their enrollments exceed their capacities. Colleges’ admission decisions then become a tool for strategic yield management, because the enrollment at a college depends on not only students’ uncertain preferences but also other colleges’ admission decisions. We find that colleges’ equilibrium admission decisions exhibit “strategic targeting”—colleges may forgo admitting (even good) students likely sought after by the others and may admit (not as good) students likely overlooked by the others. Randomization in admissions may also emerge. The resulting assignment fails to be efficient (among students, among colleges and among all parties including colleges and students) and leads to justified envy among students. When the colleges consider multiple dimensions of students merits, their evaluations are unlikely to be perfectly correlated. In such a case, colleges may avoid head-on competition by distorting their evaluation to place excessive weight on less correlated dimensions, such as extra curricular activities and nonacademic aspects of students’ application portfolios. Restricting the number of applications or allowing for wait-listing might alleviate colleges’ yield management problem, but the resulting assignments are still inefficient and admit justified envy. Centralized matching via Gale and Shapley’s Deferred Acceptance algorithm eliminates colleges’ yield management problem and justified envy among students and attains efficiency. It also attains the outcome that is jointly optimal among colleges, but some colleges may be worse off relative to decentralized matching. The second chapter studies a keyword auction model where bidders have constrained budgets. In the absence of budget constraints, Edelman, Ostrovsky, and Schwarz (2007) and Varian (2007) analyze “locally envy-free equilibrium” or “symmetric Nash equilibrium” bidding strategies in generalized second-price (GSP) auctions. However, bidders often have to set their daily budgets when they participate in an auction; once a bidder’s payment reaches his budget, he drops out of the auction. This raises an important strategic issue that has been overlooked in the previous literature: Bidders may change their bids to inflict higher prices on their competitors because under GSP, the per-click price paid by a bidder is the next highest bid. We provide budget thresholds under which equilibria analyzed in Edelman, Ostrovsky, and Schwarz (2007) and Varian (2007) are sustained as “equilibria with budget constraints” in our setting. We then consider a simple environment with one position and two bidders and show that a search engine’s revenue with budget constraints may be larger than its revenue without budget constraints. In the third chapter, we study the procurement of an innovation in which firms exert effort and create innovations, where the quality of innovation is stochastic. Both the effort level and the quality of innovation are unverifiable, and the procurer cannot extract up-front payment from the firms. Given the uncertainty of quality realization, there is a tradeoff regarding the number of participating firms in the procurement process: If many firms participate in the process, they may be discouraged from expending their initial investment because each of them has a small chance of winning (we call this incentive effect). At the same time, as the number of participants increases, the procurer has a growing chance of getting a higher quality because of the randomness of the quality realization (sampling effect). Therefore, the procurer faces a nontrivial problem of how many firms to invite in the procurement process. We consider two prominent contest mechanisms, a first-price auction and a fixed-prize tournament. We show that if the randomness is large enough, it is optimal for the buyer to invite as many firms as possible in both mechanisms, and the fixed-prize tournament outperforms the first-price auction. In the limit at which the randomness vanishes, inviting only two firms is optimal in both mechanisms, and the firstprice auction outperforms the fixed-prize tournament. Under the first-price auction, we show that any equilibrium converges to an equilibrium as the randomness diminishes and provide a characterization of the limit equilibrium. We also provide a constructive example of a mixed-strategy equilibrium with two firms when the randomness is moderate.

Using the arguments over college admissions as a point of departure, this article analyzes the idea of merit in education. Situating the concept of merit historically and philosophically, it advances the argument that merit should be considered not as an individual construct but as an institutional one. The debates over merit focus on which individual abilities should be privileged in college admissions. But the author argues the merit does not—indeed, cannot—exist outside the institutions that use it. The article suggests that it may be counterproductive for educators to insist upon an individual basis for merit, even when it is linked to furthering emancipatory goals. In other words, the predominant definitions of merit privilege an idea of the individual that itself should be questioned for how it justifies the institutional practices that create difference, practices that ensure that such an idea never materializes in fact.

This article examines the college scandal which revealed the influence of wealth on admission into elite institutions. Hess (2019) proposes the selection process for students into elite colleges should be upended and future students should be selected through a lottery-based system. However, such a proposal eliminates the standards of meritocracy and questions the vitality of race-based policies such as affirmative action in college admission. Preferences-based admissions give students a competitive advantage in college admission based on legacy status, race, and/or atletism—race being the most controversial. With the growing attention on the recent college scandal, this article explores the weights given to preferences-based selection into elite institutions and concludes with a consideration of race-neutral alternatives that acknowledges the influence of wealth.

Possible bias in selection procedures used for employment and college admissions is of crucial social and educational importance. However, there are many different definitions of what constitutes bias with each definition based on different values and with different implications for how selection should be accomplished. A number of these definitions of bias and their implications are examined, and a new conditional probability model of fairness based on equal opportunity for potentially successful applicants is presented. This conditional probability model is proposed as an intuitively appealing and socially desirable model for use in many selection situations in employment and college admissions.

The use of race in college admissions is one of the most contentious issues in US higher education. We survey the literature on the impact of racial preferences in college admissions on both minority and majority students. With regard to minority students, particular attention is paid to the scope of preferences as well as how preferences affect graduation, choice of major, and labor market earnings. We also examine how schools respond to bans on racial preferences and the effects these responses have on racial diversity at elite schools. With regard to majority students, we examine the evidence on the returns to attending a more racially diverse school, as well as how racial preferences affect friendship formation. Finally, we supplement studies of affirmative action in the United States with evidence from India, which provides a much more straightforward environment in which to study affirmative action owing to the use of quotas and admissions rules based solely on exam scores.

Many countries base college admissions on a centrally administered test. Students invest a great deal of resources to improve their performance on the test, and there is growing concern about the high costs associated with these activities. We consider modifying the test by introducing performance-disclosure policies that pool intervals of performance rankings. Pooling affects the equilibrium allocation of students to colleges, which hurts some students and benefits others, but also affects students’ effort. We investigate how such policies can improve students’ welfare in a Pareto sense, study the Pareto frontier of pooling policies, and identify improvements that are robust to the distribution of college seats. We illustrate the potential applicability of our results with an empirical estimation that uses data on college admissions in Turkey. We find that a policy that pools a large fraction of the lowest-performing students leads to a Pareto improvement in a contest based on the estimated parameters. A laboratory experiment based on the estimated parameters generally supports our theoretical predictions.

Undermatching continues to create barriers to access to post-secondary opportunities for low-income students from urban public high schools. According to Belasco and Trivette (2015), postsecondary undermatch occurs when students fail to enroll at a college or university that possesses a level of selectivity their academic credentials would permit them to attend. Undermatching happens across all income levels but is much higher among students from families with lower incomes and among first-generation college students (Tiboris, 2014). Undermatched students are less likely to graduate from college than those who are not undermatched, and undermatching is a problem that needs to be solved to help decrease educational inequality while improving college completion rates (Kang, 2020). Unfortunately, many educators often lack the resources needed to support and guide this population of students successfully. Access to quality information is an essential factor in bridging the information gap for these students. Undermatching, in the face of great options for financial aid, supports the idea that barriers of confidence, information, and distance stand in the way of a college education for low-income students, and many students lack solid college counseling and remain unaware of the broader world of higher education" (Hoxby & Turner, 2013). The research was guided by the following question: How do the resources and training school counselors receive affect the support and resources provided to low-income, first-generation college students during the college application process and their college selection? The research participants were current school counselors who worked with first-generation college-bound students and other K12 educators. The K12 educators who did not work directly with, nor have a direct impact on, first-generation college-bound students were invited to participate in the study to gather information about their understanding of resources provided to assist school counselors. This study revealed that with enhanced support and resources, school counselors can more effectively aid first-generation, low-income students during the college admission and application process.--Author's abstract

Pay or Prepare? How Tuition Shapes Student Effort in College Admissions

College admissions in three Chinese provinces: Boston mechanism vs. deferred acceptance mechanism

There are different characteristics of each entry route, so there will be the potential to achieve a different GPA. There are 3 types of entrance routes for public universities held by LTMPT, namely SNMPTN, SBMPTN, and SMMPTM. The achievement of student learning outcomes in tertiary institutions can be seen through the final results indicated by the GPA. Diploma and undergraduate program students have four graduation predicates, three of which are satisfactory (GPA 2.76-3.00), very satisfactory (GPA 3.01-3.50), and with honors (GPA more than 3.50). The population in this study were all PTN graduates from 2018 to 2022. The sample used in this study was at least 50 PTN graduates from 2018 to 2022 and 150 samples. This research will be tested using the Chi-Square test method. Based on the Chi-Square test on the contingency table related to the relationship between college admissions and student graduation predicates, it can be concluded that there is no relationship between college admissions and student graduation predicates. In addition, the relationship between university admissions and student graduation predicates is related to majors and campus clustering in 2020. Meanwhile, the relationship between university admissions and student graduation predicates has no relationship with gender and domicile.