The New York City High School Match

TLDR: In the first year, only about 3,000 students had to be assigned to a school for which they had not indicated a preference, which is only 10 percent of the number of such assignments the previous year as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: We assisted the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) in designing a mechanism to match over 90,000 entering students to public high schools each year. This paper makes a very preliminary report on the design process and the first year of operation, in academic year 2003–2004, for students entering high school in fall 2004. In the first year, only about 3,000 students had to be assigned to a school for which they had not indicated a preference, which is only 10 percent of the number of such assignments the previous year. New York City has the largest public school system in the country, with over a million students. In 1969 the system was decentralized into over 30 community school districts. In the 1990s, the city began to take more centralized control (Mark Schneider et al., 2000), and in 2002, a newly reorganized NYCDOE began to reform many aspects of the school system. In May 2003, Jeremy Lack, then the NYCDOE Director of Strategic Planning, contacted one of us for advice on designing a new high-school matching process. The NYCDOE was aware of the matching process for American physicians, the National Resident Matching Program (Roth, 1984; Roth and E. Peranson, 1999). They wanted to know if it could be appropriately adapted to the city’s schools. The three authors of the present paper (and, at several crucial junctures, also Tayfun Sonmez) advised (and often convinced) Lack, his colleagues (particularly Elizabeth Sciabarra and Neil Dorosin), and the DOE’s software vendor, about the design of the match. I. The Prior (2002–2003) New York City Matching Procedure