The competition at many of those top schools meant long-to-impossible odds. One new variable this year was the department’s publishing of graduation rates in school descriptions, which caused a surge in applications to the best schools, said Robert Sanft, the chief executive of the Office of Student Enrollment. Over the past three years, officials said, there has been a slight but steady increase in the number of unmatched students, up from 8 percent last year and 7 percent in 2009. The rest, like Radcliffe, were unmatched. An additional 7 percent were matched to schools lower on their lists.
This year, of the 78,747 students who applied, the computer matched 83 percent to one of their top five choices. (This does not include the nine specialized high schools that require separate entrance exams or auditions.)Ī computer then compares the two rankings, using the same algorithm developed to match medical residents with hospitals. In 2004, in an attempt to create more choices for parents beyond the large neighborhood high schools that were seen as dumping grounds, and while trying to make the process more equitable, the Education Department instituted an elaborate process to match students and schools.Įighth graders are asked to apply to up to 12 schools in order of preference high schools then rank applicants without seeing where the students ranked them. The answer is more complicated than the toughest word problem in any high school math class. They were told to ponder “What next?” - with just two weeks to research and apply to a new set of schools - even as the bitter question “Why?” still lingered. The Department of Education’s dizzying, byzantine system for students to select a public high school left a total of 8,239 - about 10 percent of the city’s eighth graders - shut out of all their choices, and their parents feeling inadequate, frustrated and angry. He may have felt like it, but he was not alone.
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