Abstract

During the annual college application season, popular college majors often attract a large number of applicants, while less popular majors rarely receive many applications. To fulfill the government’s enrollment targets, Chinese colleges may accept additional applicants through the major adjustment process and place them in majors with vacancies. This poses a dilemma for applicants: should they allow colleges to place them in an adjusted major? In this paper, we examine the impact of the adjustment process on Chinese college admissions from the perspective of mechanism design. Based on the Application-Rejection mechanisms, we introduce the Major-Adjusted Parallel Mechanisms. The latter considers both the regular admissions process and the adjustment process. We find that, under the same conditions, the Major-Adjusted Parallel Mechanisms allocate at least as many college seats as the Application-Rejection Mechanisms, implying that the major adjustment process can boost enrollment. Furthermore, we show that truth-telling is a weakly dominant strategy for every student with a preference ordering that can be recognized by the system. However, there is no weakly dominant strategy for other students.