Recommendation in equilibrium for the NYC High School Match

Every year, over 70,000 8th graders apply to over 800 high school programs in New York City. The process is grueling, requiring applicant families to learn about programs, form preferences, and navigate admissions likelihoods. Substantial prior work, including our own, has shown that there are disparities in how students apply to and match with high performing options, partially due to this complexity. I will talk about an ongoing collaboration with the NYC Public Schools, in which we designed and deployed an informational intervention to help students from underserved middle schools discover high-performing, nearby high schools where they have a strong individual admissions likelihood. However, recommending specific programs brings a methodological challenge: if many applicants are recommended the same program, then the recommendations are self-defeating, as many will be rejected and the admissions likelihood estimates will be proven incorrect. Thus, our individualized recommendations are "congestion-aware," such that the admissions likelihoods are correct in equilibrium.