Centralized Assignment of Students to Majors: Evidence from the University of Costa Rica

Many countries use a centralized admissions process by which students are admitted to universities. That said, little is known about how changes to the centralized admissions process impacts the allocation of students to... [ view full abstract ]

Many countries use a centralized admissions process by which students are admitted to universities. That said, little is known about how changes to the centralized admissions process impacts the allocation of students to colleges. This paper uses a novel dataset from the University of Costa Rica (UCR) to address this question. A central challenge in doing so is recovering students' preferences over final assignments. Much like many centralized admissions processes, UCR restricts the number of options a student can report. This gives students an incentive to manipulate their reports.  I propose a new methodology to recover a minimal set of preferences from the manipulated reports. I apply this methodology to the UCR dataset and use the recovered preferences to address counterfactuals.  I show that 72% of the students receive a different allocation than what they would receive if they reported their full preference ranking.  I also show that a mechanism based on ascending auctions does not generate large distortions.  Under that mechanism, only 5% of the students receive a different assignment from what they would receive if they reported their full preference ranking.