Events
DS Distinguished Lecture | José Correa
School Choice in Chile
Centralized school admission mechanisms are an attractive way of improving social welfare and fairness in large educational systems. This paper reports the design and implementation of the newly established school choice system in Chile, where over 500,000 students apply to more than 9,000 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.
The DS Distinguished Lecture Series is presented by the Center for Data Science for Enterprise & Society (CDSES). This talk featuring José Correa is co-sponsored by the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE).
Speaker Bio
José Correa is a full professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Universidad de Chile. Jose obtained a mathematical engineering degree from Universidad de Chile in 1999 and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT in 2004. His research, focusing on algorithmic game theory and mechanism design, has received numerous awards, including an ACM SIGecom best paper award, an INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics best paper award, a Tucker prize finalist, and research awards from Amazon and Google. José has given keynote talks at several institutions and conferences and has been on the program committee of international computer science conferences. He also serves and has served on the editorial board of some of the leading journals in his field: Mathematical Programming B, Mathematics of Operations Research (as Game Theory Area Editor), and Operations Research.