Improving Social Mobility by Helping Students Make Informed College Choices

Centralized admission mechanisms, especially the “Deferred Acceptance (DA)” algorithm, have been increasingly adopted in college admission among developing countries. For fairness, exam score is often the only determinant for admission in these systems. Using administrative data from China, which uses a constrained DA mechanism for college admission, the research team finds that conditional on exam score, poor and disadvantaged students 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, this randomized controlled trial will seek to understand why disadvantaged students make dominated choices in college application and how these suboptimal high-stakes decisions could be improved. The interventions consist in tutoring on the DA mechanism, customized presentation of college list, and providing admission probability with the aid of machine learning techniques. The general equilibrium implications of such interventions will be evaluated.