A Decade of Centralized School Choice in Chile: Design, Behavioral Frictions, and Policy Lessons

Abstract

This solo-authored paper reviews ten years of Chile's nationwide centralized school admission system (SAE), documenting how the platform's deferred acceptance mechanism, priority rules, and digital tools reshaped access to both public and subsidized private schools. Combining administrative data, surveys, and a sequence of large-scale experiments, the project highlights gains in match rates, access to preferred and higher value-added schools, and perceived fairness, while emphasizing the behavioral frictions—short application lists, limited awareness, and biased beliefs—that continue to limit welfare. It synthesizes evidence on risk warnings, personalized recommendations, the MIME explorer, and the formalized aftermarket “Anótate en la Lista,” drawing broader governance and design lessons for the next generation of centralized school-choice reforms.

Citation & BibTeX

Christopher A. Neilson, "A Decade of Centralized School Choice in Chile: Design, Behavioral Frictions, and Policy Lessons", Work in progress, 2025.

Project summary

Chile’s Sistema de Admisión Escolar (SAE) replaced a fragmented, discretionary admissions process with a transparent, strategy-proof deferred acceptance mechanism that spans both public and subsidized private schools. Using nationwide administrative records, household surveys, and multiple randomized and quasi-experimental evaluations, the project traces how ten years of SAE affected match quality, access to higher value-added schools, and perceptions of fairness, with especially large gains for disadvantaged students. At the same time, the evidence shows that behavioral frictions—short and risky application lists, limited awareness of nearby options, and biased beliefs about quality and price—still constrain outcomes. Information tools such as real-time risk warnings, personalized recommendation reports, and the MIME explorer meaningfully improve applications and reduce non-assignment risks but also create congestion and spillovers that must be managed in general equilibrium. The paper concludes by analyzing the new Anótate en la Lista aftermarket platform and distilling governance lessons for algorithmic transparency and incremental mechanism improvements.

Extended abstract

Chile’s Sistema de Admisión Escolar (SAE) is one of the most ambitious applications of centralized market design in compulsory education worldwide. Implemented beginning in 2016 and rolled out nationally by 2020, SAE coordinates admissions to nearly all public and subsidized private schools through a single digital platform that pairs a strategy-proof Deferred Acceptance mechanism with legally defined priority rules such as siblings, socioeconomic vulnerability, and distance. Introduced under the Ley de Inclusión Escolar, the system sought to eliminate discriminatory admissions practices, expand access, and increase transparency in one of Latin America’s most market-oriented school systems.

This paper takes stock of SAE’s first decade, linking the design and evolution of the platform to a rich body of empirical evidence and ongoing policy debate. Using administrative records covering the full population of applicants, supplemented with survey and experimental data, the paper documents how centralized assignment reshaped Chile’s school-choice landscape: match rates rose, seat allocation became more rules-based, and families gained unified access to a broader menu of public and private options. Chile’s experience complements evidence from Boston, New York, and other settings, but in a context where a national platform integrates diverse providers under a common regulatory framework.

Adopting a theoretically sound mechanism, however, proved only the starting point. During the phased rollout, three behavioral frictions emerged as first-order constraints: families overestimated admission chances at popular schools and submitted short lists; awareness of local options was limited and uneven; and beliefs about quality, price, and admission probabilities were biased in ways that reinforced socioeconomic gaps. More than 60% of applicants continued to list three or fewer schools, and many recognized fewer than half of nearby schools by name.

To address these frictions, the platform progressively incorporated information and decision-support tools, each evaluated through randomized controlled trials or quasi-experimental designs. Real-time risk warnings encouraged families to add safer options, increasing the probability of adding at least one school by roughly 20 percentage points and lowering predicted non-assignment risk by around three percentage points. Personalized reports and MIME-based explorers expanded awareness of nearby, higher value-added schools, shifting applications toward safer and more effective choices, particularly for disadvantaged households. These interventions show how correcting misperceptions and lowering search costs can deliver welfare gains comparable to a substantial share of the full-information benchmark, yet they also reveal congestion and spillover effects when many families target the same desirable schools.

A second contribution of the paper is to formalize and evaluate the aftermarket, which has evolved into the digital platform Anótate en la Lista. Administrative data and policy variation show how post-match transfers and seat adjustments now play a central role in enrollment dynamics. Choices about how tightly this aftermarket is integrated with the main match, how priorities are enforced, and how information is shared can either reinforce or undermine gains from the initial assignment.

Despite rapid experimentation in information tools, the core algorithm and priority hierarchy have changed little since national rollout. The paper argues that this divergence reflects political and institutional constraints rather than a lack of technical opportunities: calibrated capacity adjustments, better treatment of twins, or more flexible fallback seats remain largely unimplemented. The analysis underscores how rigid political boundaries and limited public understanding of algorithmic trade-offs have impeded incremental improvements to the core design.

The paper concludes with broader lessons for countries considering or refining centralized school admission systems. Successful implementation requires a tight research-policy feedback loop, recognition that behavioral frictions are central design elements, and governance structures that treat algorithmic transparency and iterative improvement as public goods. A decade of SAE shows that digital, strategy-proof assignment systems can substantially advance equity and efficiency, but realizing their full promise demands combining robust mechanisms with behavioral insight, continuous experimentation, and democratic engagement around the rules that govern educational opportunity.

  • Coauthors:
  • Published: Work in progress
  • Date: 2025-11-16
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