Agent-Based Simulation of Russian College Admission Mechanism with Quotas

National admissions policies profoundly influence the distribution of students across universities and their subsequent educational success. Various student matching algorithms have been developed in microeconomics to ensure fair and effective university admissions (e.g., Gale and Shapley, 1962; Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez, 2003). In Russia, universities have traditionally been constrained by national criteria rather than their own, making school choice algorithms particularly relevant for modeling admissions policies. We have implemented several school choice mechanisms, including the Boston mechanism and deferred acceptance, to compare their effects on student distribution using agent-based modeling. Our study contributes to the literature by introducing quotas for high-quality applicants, reflecting the ability of Russian school competition winners to enter universities without exams. We explore how these quota sizes affect student distribution among universities. While quotas have recently been examined in the context of college admissions (Agoston et al., 2022) and the theoretical properties of these algorithms have been discussed (Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez, 2003), our work is the first to numerically study these mechanisms using Monte Carlo simulations. To our knowledge, agent-based modeling has only been applied by Hou et al. (2020) to the Chinese college admission system, which did not incorporate quotas and accounted only for a limited set of parameters. Our implemented models offer a robust framework for analyzing the impact of policy changes, particularly quota sizes, on student distribution within the general applicant pool.

1. Gale, D., & Shapley, L. S. (1962). College admissions and the stability of marriage.
2. Abdulkadiroğlu, A., & Sönmez, T. (2003). School choice: A mechanism design approach.
3. Ágoston, K. C., Biró, P., Kováts, E., & Jankó, Z. (2022). College admissions with ties and common quotas: Integer programming approach.
4. Hou, L., Jia, T., Wang, X., & Yu, T. (2020). Coordinating Manipulation in Real‐time Interactive Mechanism of College Admission: Agent‐Based Simulations.