Every year, national admission systems attempt to match millions of applicants with their preferred schools and universities. Yet their coordination efforts are undermined as they operate alongside private programs and informal routes, allowing students to hedge their bets by applying both on and off the platform. New research by an expert team including Olivier De Groote (Director, TSE Human Capital Center), former TSE PhD student Anaïs Fabre and TSE associate Arnaud Maurel investigates the impacts in French higher education. Their NBER working paper reveals how to design fair and efficient systems when centralized platforms compete with alternative options.
What’s the problem with national admissions systems?
Centralized matching platforms rarely capture the entire higher-education market. In most cases, private schools and specialized tracks make offers outside the national system. Students therefore face a strategic decision: Should I participate fully on the platform or rely on off-platform options as a back-up?
Naturally, many students delay decisions while waiting for private offers, but this blocks others from receiving opportunities. The result is longer waiting times, lower overall satisfaction, and a mismatch between student preferences and available places. These bottlenecks – caused by partial participation in the centralized mechanism – have received scant attention from researchers and policymakers, and yet they have profound implications for the efficiency and equity of the whole system.
Why focus on French higher education?
France used to have a uniquely transparent multi-round matching mechanism. In this mechanism, students submit ranked lists of preferred programs to a central platform. Offers arrive in three rounds. Students can choose to accept, refuse, or wait until the final round. Declined places are reallocated. This sequential mechanism can help students to match with higher-ranked programs, with knock-on benefits for their graduation outcomes and welfare. However, students can also face increased uncertainty if admissions are delayed, making it harder to plan key decisions about housing, finances, or a student job.
This setting makes it possible to investigate empirically whether a sequential procedure can mitigate the ‘bottleneck’ effects of off-platform behavior, comparing how much different admission designs slow down admissions, leave seats empty, or change who ends up where. Combining detailed administrative data on students’ applications and decisions, we built a model that captures the key trade-off and allows us to simulate how changing the system would affect outcomes.
How does the French system stand up against alternatives?
Compared with a standard one-round system where students must accept or reject immediately, France’s three-round system leads to more and better matches, a 5.4% decrease in the share of students who drop out without a degree, and a substantial welfare gain for all socioeconomic groups. In particular, the share of students accepting an offer through the platform rises by three percentage points.
The main benefits are experienced by students who do not receive an offer from their top-ranked program in the first round. For these students, we calculate that having the option to wait provides an average gain equivalent to studying 861km closer to home. That’s roughly the distance from Paris to Milan.
Who gains most? Are students treated fairly?
Students from vocational and technological tracks are the most likely to gain a match through the sequential mechanism, while academic-track students are more likely to enroll in a higher-ranked program than they would under a single-round system.
Our study shows that holding out for a better offer can bring substantial benefits. We find that about one in three students who delay ultimately receive an offer from a higher-ranked program. Receiving such an offer is linked to a lower probability of dropping out from higher education without a degree.
Unfortunately, the benefits are unevenly spread. Among students who do not initially receive their preferred offer, only 55% choose to delay. This is because waiting costs can be large. On average, we calculate that they are equivalent to the cost of studying 172km farther away from home, outweighing the benefits of receiving a better offer. These costs are even higher for poorer students, who place a higher value on immediate certainty, and can least afford to wait for better offers.
What lessons emerge for policymakers?
Policymakers need to think not only about how to propose a good initial match of students and schools, but also about how to deal with off-platform options and the timing of decisions. Our analysis provides evidence that multi-round admission mechanisms are an effective way to reduce the inefficiencies caused by off-platform options.
To avoid unintentionally widening inequalities, multi-round mechanisms should be paired with measures that lower waiting costs and reduce the burden of late offers. For example, by shortening the time between rounds and expanding access to affordable housing for students who decide on their program later.
Beyond educational settings, our research may offer insights into how to improve other allocation mechanisms that involve similar tradeoffs between waiting times and match quality, such as the waitlists used to assign public housing, access to healthcare, or deceased donor kidneys.
Mechanism design is not just a technical exercise. It impacts how people experience opportunity. Even small design tweaks can have large social returns. When admission systems are clear and predictable, they reduce stress, improve fairness, and help students make better decisions.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Market congestion – Even well-designed national admission systems suffer from bottlenecks when many applicants wait for off-platform offers.
• Sequential admissions work best – France’s three-round system generated more matches than a single-round alternative, raising graduation rates and overall welfare.
• Inequalities persist – Large waiting costs prevent many students, especially those from poorer backgrounds, from holding out for better offers.
FURTHER READING
TSE Human Capital Center seeks to promote evidence-based solutions to improve education and labor policies around the world. “Sequential College Admission Mechanisms and Off-Platform Options” (coauthored by Anaïs Fabre, Margaux Luflade and Arnaud Maurel) and other publications by Olivier De Groote are available to read on the TSE website.
Article published in TSE Reflect, January 2026
