An empirical evaluation of Chinese college admissions reforms through a natural experiment

College admissions policies affect the educational experiences and labor market outcomes for millions of students each year. In China alone, 10 million high school seniors participate in the National College Entrance Examination to compete for 7 million seats at various universities each year, making this system the largest centralized matching market in the world. The last 20 y have witnessed radical reforms in the Chinese college admissions system, with many provinces moving from a sequential (immediate acceptance) mechanism to some version of the parallel college admissions mechanism, a hybrid between the immediate and deferred acceptance mechanisms. In this study, we use a natural experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of the sequential and parallel mechanisms in motivating student college ranking strategies and providing stable matching outcomes. Using a unique dataset from a province that implemented a partial reform between 2008 and 2009, we find that students list more colleges in their rank-ordered lists, and more prestigious colleges as their top choices, after the province adopts the parallel mechanism in its tier 1 college admissions process. These listing strategies in turn lead to greater stability in matching outcomes, consistent with our theoretical prediction that the parallel mechanism is less manipulable and more stable than the sequential mechanism.