An empirical evaluation of Chinese college admissions reforms through a natural experiment

Abstract

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.

An Overall Evaluation of the Chinese Admission System

“…Later in 1952, it was replaced by a new admission system, namely the centralized admission system. In this system, all the highschool graduates were asked to take the National College Entrance Exam (NCEE) or sometimes called gaokao [3]. Based on their scores in this standardized examination and their preferences raking of the university, the students are assigned to the colleges through one of the three mechanisms: immediate acceptance (the sequential mechanism), deferred acceptance, and the Chinese parallel mechanism depending on the policies of the particular province they belong.…”

“…After 2000, China experienced an important reform in its college admission system. Starting with the Hunan Province, a large part of China has gradually switched from the IA mechanism (the sequential mechanism) to the Chinese parallel mechanism [3]. This brought a significant improvement in the national admission outcome.…”

Which Was Better in the Context of Bringing NCEE Back to the Country, the Deferred Acceptance Algorithm or the Boston Mechanism

“…The parallel mechanism replaced the former system and evolved over time, carefully designed by the ministry of education to prevent the same issues from striking. It is a hybrid between IA and DA [1]. It draws advantages from both IA and DA but avoids vulnerabilities of the two systems to the maximum extent.…”

Analysis on the Evolution of Inner Mongolia College Admission System

“…Two canonical mechanisms in the school choice and college admissions context are the Boston immediate acceptance mechanism (IA) and the student-proposing deferred acceptance (DA) mechanism [2]. In Chinese college admission mechanism, each province implements an independent matching process from sequential to parallel [3]. First of all, the sequential mechanism, which is also known as immediate acceptance (IA) mechanism.…”