Smart Students Attract Parents More Than Smart Schools

In 2003, when Parag Pathak was a graduate student at Harvard University, he helped design the computer algorithm that matches some 80,000 eighth-graders to more than 400 high schools across New York City each year. Students have the freedom to apply to almost any public high school throughout the five boroughs, and it was a complicated task to factor in students' preferences with each school's admissions standards.

More than a dozen years later, working as a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pathak teamed back up with Duke University economist Atila Abdulkadiroglu, with whom he had worked in 2003, to see what their algorithm had wrought. They wondered if the school choice system in New York City was working in practice the way free-market proponents said it should. Since parents are asked to list their top schools and rank them, it was an opportunity to see if families were making choices that would promote competition among schools to improve. Together with two colleagues from the University of California—Berkeley, they asked a question: Were parents choosing schools that were the most effective?