Students in the Maastricht University exchange program provide an ordered list of their six most-preferred schools. Despite this, because their preferences matched many other students’ preferences and/or they were far back in the queues, 47 of the 357 participating students have not yet been placed.
Is there any way to do a better job of matching? Does the path-breaking work of Alvin Roth (more here) give any guidelines to improving the efficiency of this complicated matching scheme? One possibility is a two-stage process, asking students who are unplaced after Round 1 to list their preferences over the remaining available list of unfilled places. One could even iterate additional rounds until all students are placed. Both students and those foreign universities that are not attracting enough Maastricht students would be better off. But can one do better than this simple addition to the matching process?
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The addition of rounds into student’s preferences would surely make less demanded universities better off, and unplaced students better off as well. Another thing that could be of a -little- help would be to ask students to be honest with themselves. Comparing themselves to the best student and see where they fall on the rankings. This would eliminate the best school as their number 1 choice, but would have the second best school as the #1 choice. This would place students into universities at a faster pace, since it will shorten the number of rounds necessary to place all applying students.
Perhaps extending the list to 10 most preferred?
You might ask students to weight their preferences, but that leaves you with the question of how to interact GPA and strength-of-preferences to set an allocation. Shot in the dark idea: stage 1 assignment of top 50% GPA students to their absolute preferences, thus rewarding scholastic ability; stage 2 assignment of remaining students into remaining slots by weighted preferences, to improve allocative efficiency.
I’m curious to see if Al Roth picks up this story for his blog this weekend.
I suggest using Dijkstra’s Guarded Gate. If the student does not get placed into one of their top 6 schools, then randomly place them into a slot in one of the remaining schools. This creates an incentive to make sure to pick at least one “unpopular” school. Eventually, you’ll find that no one ever gets placed randomly – enough students will pick a “safety school” for their sixth choice that it becomes unnecessary.
I like Tom’s suggestion of giving the students more slots.
I’d also give the students more information about which schools are generally oversubscribed with GPA ranges of the students who are selected for those schools. Maastricht exchange students at UCLA generally have a GPA in the range of 3.5-3.7, exchange students at the University of Minnesota have a range of 3.1-3.4 (I’m making these numbers up, obviously, but I’m guessing Minnesota wouldn’t be as popular because it’s cold here during the school year). People often make decisions based on name recognition, so give the students more information to make them aware of options and resources to learn about lesser-known options.
My brother’s currently in medical school, and he chose the schools he applied to based on which schools usually accept students with his home state, GPA, and MCAT from his undergrad school. He’s currently working through the same decision process for residency applications.
Provide students with a complete list of participating schools, and have them order them all from most preferred to least preferred.
Thumperchica, that would be rather tedious, since there are dozens of universities from which we students can choose. Furthermore, a necessary condition for it to work is that people have completely transitive preferences, which is an axiom that surprisingly often doesn’t hold in real life.
Such a tedious procedure would create huge opportunity costs, and transaction costs (it’s essentially bargaining over a contract), and thus is probably not be efficient.
No – I quite like the current system of picking 6 universities. People just need to be realistic about which universities they could actually get into. Buenos Aires is really popular this year, so, given the fact that there are 5 places available, if someone’s ranked number 200+, (s)he’s probably not going to get admitted.. But perhaps my opinion’s biased because I’m ranked 13th
Extending the ranking from top 6 to top 10 is an obvious shortcut but also not a very interesting solution in this case. In the limit you could ask students to rank all possible schools which eliminates the problem altogether, but takes a lot of time and has costs.
Doing a second round with the unassigned students and open slots is yet another obvious solution that comes with costs.
I would argue that for this set level of costs the current system works the best. Students should be aware how the system works and understand the risk of not being assigned. Those with lower GPAs should add a couple of less popular universities as a backup plan if they really want to an exchange semester.
As for the high number of unassigned students.. some might think “It’s either the best school or no exchange term at all”. They prefer not being assigned to being assigned to a subpar uni.