College admission in three Chinese provinces: Province-specific versus pooling quotas

In terms of college admissions in China, each college has a quota for each province. Under this province-specific quota system, students from different provinces do not compete with each other and are not differentiated after admission. As opposed to the pooling quota system, where each college has a quota for multiple provinces, the province-specific quota system may introduce unfairness and inefficiency. In this paper, I thus develop a model to empirically compare the two systems in Guangxi, Hebei, and Sichuan in 2006 and 2007. I find that pooling quotas improve students' welfare and so does combining quotas for more provinces. However, students from some provinces have lower utilities after pooling quotas. Since students are treated equally after pooling, the results indicate the unfairness of the province-specific quota system. All results indicate the government should abandon the province-specific quota system.