Imagine that there are two universities in the world, Colleges 1 and 2, each with a capacity for one student, and two existing applicants, Students 1 and 2.
Let Student 1’s first choice school be College 1. However, he is currently accepted at College 2 and wait listed at College 1. Now suppose Student 2’s first choice school is College 2; on the other hand, he is in at College 1, but wait listed at College 2.
What if each university gave each accepted student until the same date (May 1st, I believe, for undergraduate admissions) to either accept or decline their offer? Then, wouldn’t the natural outcome be that each applicant waits until the last possible date to accept their offer, not knowing that if they decline, the other student will accept, thereby opening up their first choice slot? Now expand this idea to Students 1…..n and Colleges 1….k. I imagine this frequently happens in undergraduate, graduate, and professional school admissions- students (everywhere) waiting until the last minute to receive a better opportunity, while simultaneously blocking their own spots from opening up to others. In these cases, each student ends up with a less-satisfactory outcome, even though a Pareto improvement (from the perspective of the students, not the colleges) can be achieved through trade.
Potential Solutions:
1. Schools, using a centralized application service (Common App for undergraduates, AMCAS for medical schools, etc.) share data on wait lists and accepted students they’re waiting on replies from, and offer trades for students.
2. Schools open up the data for students and allow them to make trades themselves. This would likely necessitate large groups of students making trades amongst multiple schools.
3. Schools stagger their required reply dates for acceptance offers. It would be intuitive that the most competitive, desirable schools have earlier dates, so that rejected students can “trickle down” (much like UES elections). Of course, the ranking of schools would be subjective. Another possibility is to allow competitive bidding for earlier dates to accept offers.
4. Institute a match process, whereby students rank schools and the schools rank students, and allow a computer to pair them, much like medical residencies.

Yesterday, browsing the Alachua County Library District’s Headquarters library, I saw a new book about Ronald Reagan that I had never heard of: The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan. At first, I thought I would just skim it and get the conclusion, but it had just enough new information that I decided to go through it page by page.
During my several months in Hong Kong, I daily entered the CUHK book store to read
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