The Role of Matching Markets in the College Admissions Process
Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secrets-of-elite-college-admissions-11598626784
The college admissions process is possibly the most stressful and nerve-wracking time of high school for students across the country and even elsewhere. High school seniors have been working towards building their applications with extracurriculars, SAT scores and good grades since freshman year and find themselves thrown into an admissions process “shrouded in secrecy and surrounded by confusion” (Selingo). In this article, Jeffrey Salingo shares some of his insight into the admissions processes of several selective colleges across the country, focusing on the ambiguity of the decision to admit or deny a student when admissions officers finish “shaping” the next freshman class. This shaping, as he describes, is the last sorting of applicants before decisions are released and as he argues, is the most unfair part of selective admissions. This is because admissions officers begin to look past just grades and test scores and consider factors such as financial situation, race, gender, and major. When building the next freshman class, admissions officers’ priority is maximizing their payoff — that is, boosting the yield rate. As Salingo states, when looking at the already narrowed down stack of applicants who could flourish at the school, when making a final decision, it depends on “what the class looks like and how much it will cost to admit the students in the ‘accepted’ bin” (Salingo).
We can think of the college admissions process through the lens of a matching market and auction. The sellers, or colleges, auction off spots in their freshman class. The buyers, or prospective students, bid for a spot at these instutitions–their bids are their applications, based on a variety of factors: grades, extracurriculars, essays, and outside criteria such as money, race, gender, major, and even parents’ employment at the institution. Applicants can also increase the value of their bids by declaring their commitment to the college through early admission. On the other side, college admissions officers accept students who they feel will not only be a good fit for the school but will also fill their quotas and help maximize the payoff (be “worth it” to accept). As we can see, both the sellers and buyers have preferences.
One thing to note about the college admission process is that the sellers are not always going to take the person with the “best” application (the best grades, test scores, extracurriculars, essays, etc). As seen in the recent college admissions scandals, colleges can be more likely to accept an unqualified applicant over a qualified applicant––it is not always a preferred-seller graph. One example of this, which is briefly mentioned in the article, is the consideration of a student’s ability to pay. Despite being highly qualified, students were denied, most likely because of their high financial needs. The college admissions process is ultimately a matching market––colleges’ as sellers have payoffs in terms of yield rate, quota, and money, and applicants as buyers have payoffs in terms of their future benefits.