Two-stage Chinese College Admission

Topic：Two-stage Chinese College Admission

Speaker：ZHANG Jun（Professor, School of Economics, Nanjing Audit University）

Host：XU Xinyi, Assistant Professor, Lingnan College

Time and Date：14:30, Mar. 17, 2023

Venue: Wang Daohan Conference Room, Lingnan Hall

Language: English + Chinese

Abstract:

The college admission system of China has used a two-stage procedure for decades: the first stage sends each student’s application to at most one college; the second stage assigns each college’s applicants to its majors. Students who are rejected in the second stage cannot go back to the first stage to apply for other colleges, which incentivizes students to accept options called major transfer in their rank-order lists.  This incentive can distort students’ preferences and cause strategic reports. We demonstrate the deficiencies of the two-stage procedure and for the currently used procedure called Chinese Parallel Mechanism (CPM) we propose an improvement (RPM) by combining the two stages into one stage. We also document the most recent reform in the system and notice that a new mechanism (IPM) that essentially runs the deferred acceptance algorithm has been used by some provinces of China. However, most provinces still prefer CPM over IPM, which is probably because they want to avoid radical changes in the reform. We run lab experiments to compare the three mechanisms (CPM, RPM, IPM). Experiments support RPM as an appealing mechanism for both students and colleges and as a practical solution for provinces: the three mechanisms are close in efficiency, while RPM lies between IPM and CPM in fairness; RPM corrects students’ incentive regarding major transfer options, and avoids cutoff diversification of majors within a college relative to IPM; RPM is a minimalist redesign of CPM.

Profile of the speaker:

Academic Position:
· Assistant professor of Economics, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Nanjing Audit University, 2017.9--

Education:
· Ph.D in Economics, California Institute of Technology, 2017.5
· B.S. in Information & Computing Science , Nanjing Univ. Science & Technology, 2008.6

Research Fields:
· Microeconomics, Game Theory, Market Design, Behavioral Economics