Implementation and perception in school choice
This project will push the boundaries of scientific knowledge on the design and inner workings of school admission systems that are based on school choice.
We ask three interlinked questions:
i) Are there fundamental differences in how students’ admission to various high schools in Denmark affect their academic outcomes?
ii) How do student applicants perceive schools’ social composition and ability to raise admitted students’ outcomes and how do their preferences responds to the perceptions?
iii) How will socioeconomic admission quotas and information to applicants affect students’ academic progress after admission and social segregation between schools?
To answer these questions, we will leverage recent methodological advances on estimating students’ preferences and how admission affect students in combination with the unique access to enrollment data in the context of centralized high-school admission in Denmark.
Part A: Opening the black box of school value-added
A core element of the project is measuring school value-added for raising the admitted students’ academic prospects. We will leverage recent methodological advances in using admission data to measure the school value-added from quasi-random assignment to over-subscribed schools.
Part B: The origins of students’ preferences
In this part, we measure the accuracy of students’ perceptions of school characteristics and estimate preferences accounting for mis-perceptions.
Part C: The impact of correcting applicant mis-perceptions
The next part of the project will analyze how the provision of information to high school applicants on school composition alters their perceptions and application behavior.
Part D: The impact of socioeconomic admission quotas on diversity and welfare
In this final part, we combine the earlier project parts, school value-added measures, and student preference estimates, to perform a counterfactual analysis.
PI, Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen and Mikkel Høst Gandil have collaborated on earlier projects. They collaborate with top scholars in the field from Yale and Amsterdam. Please see list of group members below.
Researchers
| Name | Title | Job responsibilities | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen | Associate Professor | Educational public policy; AI for public policy; Social Networks |
|
Funded by
Implementation and perception in school choice has received a four year funding from Independent Research Fund Denmark
Period: August 2023 - August 2027
Contact
PI, Associate professor Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen