독일 대학 입학 시스템 분석

An analysis of the German university admissions system

Alexander Westkamp

독일 법에 따르면 Arbitur (secondary school을 성공적으로 마침)을 획득한 학생이라면 누구나, 어떤 학과든, 어떤 공립대학에서 수학할 자격이 주어진다. 

According to German legislation, every student who obtains the Abitur (i.e., successfully finishes secondary school) or some equivalent qualification is entitled to study any subject at any public university. Given capacity constraints at educational institutions and the ensuing need to reject some applicants, this principle has long been reinterpreted as meaning that everyone should have a chance of being admitted into the program of his or her choice. In order to implement this requirement, places in those fields of study that are most prone to overdemand have been allocated by a centralized nationwide assignment procedure for over 25 years. 

In the first part of this paper, I analyze the most recent version of this procedure that is currently used to allocate places for medicine and three specialities (dentistry, pharmacy, and veterinary medicine). In the winter term 2010/2011, more than 56,000 students applied for one of the less than 13,000 places available in these four subjects, meaning that ultimately three in four applicants had to be rejected. What sets this part of my study apart from previous investigations of real-life centralized clearinghouses is the sequential nature of the German admissions procedure: In the first step, the well-known Boston mechanism is used to allocate up to 40 % of the total capacity of each university among special applicant groups, consisting of applicants who have either obtained excellent school grades or have had to wait a long time since finishing school. 

About one month later, all remaining places—this includes in particular all places that could have been but were not allocated to special student groups—are assigned among remaining applicants according to criteria chosen by the universities using the college (university) proposing deferred acceptance algorithm (CDA). Applicants belonging to special student groups, who were not assigned one of the seats initially reserved for them, have another chance of obtaining a seat in this part of the procedure. 

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Westkamp, A. (2013). An analysis of the German university admissions system.Economic Theory, 53(3), 561-589.

Abstract This paper analyzes the sequential admissions procedure for medical subjects at public universities in Germany. Complete information equilibrium outcomes are shown to be characterized by a stability condition that is adapted to the institutional constraints of the German system. I introduce matching problems with complex constraints and the notion of procedural stability. Two simple assumptions guarantee existence of a student optimal procedurally stable matching mechanism that is strategyproof for students. In the context of the German admissions problem, this mechanism weakly Pareto dominates all equilibrium outcomes of the currently employed procedure. Applications to school choice with affirmative action are also discussed.

Keywords University admissions · Matching · Stability · Strategyproofness · Complex constraints