School Choice in Chile
José Correa, Natalie Epstein, Rafael Epstein, Juan Escobar, Ignacio Rios, Nicolás Aramayo, Bastián Bahamondes, Carlos Bonet, Martin Castillo, Andres Cristi, Boris Epstein, Felipe Subiabre
Operations Research · 2022 · Volume 70 · Issue 2
Abstract
Centralized school admission mechanisms are an attractive way of improving social welfare and fairness in large educational systems. In this paper, we report the design and implementation of the newly established school choice system in Chile, where over 274,000 students applied to more than 6,400 schools. The Chilean system presents unprecedented design challenges that make it unique. First, it is a simultaneous nationwide system, making it one of the largest school choice problems worldwide. Second, the system is used for all school grade levels, from prekindergarten to 12th grade. One of our primary goals is to favor the assignment of siblings to the same school. By adapting the standard notions of stability, we show that a stable assignment may not exist. Hence, we propose a heuristic approach that elicits preferences and breaks ties between students in the same priority group at the family level. In terms of implementation, we adapt the deferred acceptance algorithm as in other systems around the world.
Keywords
Revenue Management and Market Analytics, school choice, matching, two-sided market
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