A Study In China’s College Admission Mechanisms

China’s college admission system (CAS) is one of the largest and most influentialcollege admission systems in the world. Since2003, there has been a reform in CASthat transforms the Boston mechanism to the so called “parallel mechanism” whichcorresponds to the serial dictatorship (SD) mechanism. The school-choice literature haspredicted that the Boston mechanism is not strategy-proof and can deliver unfairmatching outcomes. The serial dictatorship mechanism can help address these problems.However, there is little empirical evidence based on the field data. This paper fills in thegap by exploiting a rich dataset from a Chinese high-school that provides theinformation on students’ reported preference lists and the matching outcomes during thecollege admissions. The result shows that students with high CEE scores are matched tobad schools and more specifically there is a significant gender difference in thematching quality and strategic behavior which indicates unfairness in BostonMechanism of CAS. The colleges that female students are matched with are worse thanthe colleges that male students with similar college entrance exam scores are matchedwith and the first-choice colleges of female students are on average worse than those ofmale students. This paper also confirms that the gender difference in matching qualityand strategic behavior is difference under the two mechanisms. In addition, byemploying a difference-in-differences analysis, the paper shows that under ParallelMechanism, students of science track are more prone to list colleges with smaller quotathan under Boston Mechanism. This implies that the reform is effective in changing thestrategic behavior of students in preference listing. The main contributions of this paperare in two aspects. The first is to use field data to describe the fairness of school choicemechanisms and students’ strategic behavior. Secondly, this paper also tries to evaluatethe effect of the reform of Parallel Mechanism in terms of both matching results andpreference listing.