Improving Social Mobility by Helping Rural Students Make Informed College Choices Country Proposed Start Date

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, we find 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, we propose a randomized controlled trial 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.