Implementing Quotas in University Admissions: An Experimental Analysis

Dwenger, Nadja; Braun, Sebastian; Kübler, Dorothea; Westkamp, Alexander

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Paper

Implementing Quotas in University Admissions: An Experimental Analysis

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons51179

Dwenger, Nadja
Public Economics, MPI for Tax Law and Public Finance, Max Planck Society;

External Resource

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1977421
(Preprint)

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Dwenger, N., Braun, S., Kübler, D., & Westkamp, A. (2011). Implementing Quotas in University Admissions: An Experimental Analysis. Working Paper of the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, 2011-22.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-000F-46A8-F

Abstract

Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently employed by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions, which first allocates seats in the quota for top-grade students before allocating all other seats among remaining applicants. The second is a modified version of the student-proposing deferred acceptance (SDA) algorithm, which simultaneously allocates seats in all quotas. Our main result is that the current procedure, designed to give top-grade students an advantage, actually harms them, as students often fail to grasp the strategic issues involved. The modified SDA algorithm significantly improves the matching for top-grade students and could thus be a valuable tool for redesigning university admissions in Germany.