Improving Social Mobility by Helping Disadvantaged Students Make Informed College Choices

Deferred Acceptance Algorithms (DA) are widely used in centralized college admission systems. For fairness, exam score is often the only determinant for admission in these systems. Using administrative data from China, researchers find that conditional on exam score, disadvantaged students more frequently use dominated strategies (put unambiguously more selective colleges in lower-ranked positions) in college application, resulting in substantially worse admission outcomes. In collaboration with an influential research center at Peking University, researchers propose an RCT to understand why disadvantaged students make dominated choices, and how these high-stakes decisions could be improved. The interventions consist in tutoring on the mechanism, customized presentation of college list, and providing information about admission probability. Supported by a previous J-PAL PPE grant, the research team successfully conducted a small-scale experiment in 2019, the findings of which motivated them to submit this updated proposal to scale up the intervention, and better pin down the underlying behavioral-economic mechanisms.