School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109;
Department of Economics, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Dec 15;117(50):31696-31705. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2009282117. Epub 2020 Nov 24.
College admissions policies affect the educational experiences and labor market outcomes for millions of students each year. In China alone, 10 million high school seniors participate in the National College Entrance Examination to compete for 7 million seats at various universities each year, making this system the largest centralized matching market in the world. The last 20 y have witnessed radical reforms in the Chinese college admissions system, with many provinces moving from a sequential (immediate acceptance) mechanism to some version of the parallel college admissions mechanism, a hybrid between the immediate and deferred acceptance mechanisms. In this study, we use a natural experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of the sequential and parallel mechanisms in motivating student college ranking strategies and providing stable matching outcomes. Using a unique dataset from a province that implemented a partial reform between 2008 and 2009, we find that students list more colleges in their rank-ordered lists, and more prestigious colleges as their top choices, after the province adopts the parallel mechanism in its tier 1 college admissions process. These listing strategies in turn lead to greater stability in matching outcomes, consistent with our theoretical prediction that the parallel mechanism is less manipulable and more stable than the sequential mechanism.
高校招生政策每年都会影响数以百万计的学生的教育经历和劳动力市场的结果。仅在中国，就有 1000 万高中毕业生参加全国高考，每年竞争各大学的 700 万个名额，这使得该系统成为世界上最大的集中匹配市场。过去 20 年来，中国高校招生制度发生了根本性的改革，许多省份从顺序（即立即录取）机制转变为某种形式的平行高校招生机制，这是即时录取和延迟录取机制的混合体。在这项研究中，我们使用自然实验来评估顺序机制和并行机制在激励学生的大学排名策略和提供稳定的匹配结果方面的有效性。利用一个省份在 2008 年至 2009 年实施部分改革的独特数据集，我们发现，在该省采用平行机制进行第一批次高校招生后，学生在他们的排序名单中列出了更多的高校，而且更有声望的高校成为他们的首选。这些列表策略反过来又导致了匹配结果更加稳定，这与我们的理论预测一致，即平行机制比顺序机制更不易操纵，也更稳定。
