How to De-Reserve Reserves: Admissions to Technical Colleges in India
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Date
2022-11-11
Authors
Aygün, Orhan
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The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
Abstract
We study the joint implementation of reservation and de-reservation policies in India, that has been enforcing comprehensive affirmative action since 1950. The landmark judgment of the Supreme Court of India in 2008 mandated that whenever the OBC category (with 27% reservation) has unfilled positions, they must be reverted to general category applicants in admissions to public schools without specifying how to implement it. We disclose the drawbacks of the recently reformed allocation procedure in admissions to technical colleges and offer a solution through “de-reservation via choice rules.” We propose a novel priority design—Backward Transfers (BT) choice rule—for institutions and the deferred acceptance mechanism under these choice rules (DA-BT) for centralized clearinghouses. We show that DA-BT corrects the shortcomings of existing mechanisms. By formulating India’s legal requirements and policy goals as formal axioms, we show that the DA-BT mechanism is unique for the concurrent implementation of reservation and
de-reservation policies.
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This is the working paper of the article published as Orhan Aygün , Bertan Turhan (2022) How to De-Reserve Reserves: Admissions to Technical Colleges in India. Management Science. doi:https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4566. Posted with permission.
Copyright © 2022, INFORMS.
Copyright © 2022, INFORMS.