Chinese College Admissions Reforms: Experimental and Empirical Evaluations

The last fifteen years have witnessed radical reforms in the Chinese college admissions system, with many provinces moving from the “sequential” (Immediate Acceptance) to various versions of the “parallel” college admissions mechanisms. We evaluate the old and new mechanisms both in the laboratory and with naturally-occurring data. In the laboratory, we find that the more emphasis a mechanism puts on the first choice, the more likely students rely on their rankings in the test to manipulate their reported preferences. We also find that the Deferred Acceptance mechanism is more stable than the parallel mechanism, which is in turn more stable than the Immediate Acceptance mechanism. Using naturally-occurring data from a county in Sichuan Province, we find that, in the year after the province adopted the parallel mechanism, students list more colleges in their rank-ordered list, and more prestigious colleges as their first choices; furthermore, they are less likely to list local colleges as their first choices. At the outcome level, fewer students were admitted to their reported first choices, whereas we do not find significant difference in matching stability. In sum, both laboratory and field data indicate that the parallel mechanism is less manipulable than its Immediate Acceptance predecessor.