ABSTRACT

In US colleges, the scarcity of students from low-income families is a major concern. We present a novel way of boosting the percentage of qualified low-income students using constrained optimization (CO), an operations research technique. CO allows incorporation of both academic requirements and diversity goals in college admissions. The incoming class’s academic credentials are maximized while constraints on class composition are imposed. In particular, the percentage of students in a certain demographic group can be required to exceed a minimum. In an illustrative analysis, we show how CO can be used to increase the proportion of admitted students from low-income neighborhoods.

摘要

在美国的大学中，来自低收入家庭的学生短缺是一个主要问题。我们提出了一种使用运筹学技术约束优化（CO）来提高合格低收入学生百分比的新颖方法。CO允许在大学录取中同时纳入学术要求和多样性目标。在限制班级组成的同时，最大限度地提高了新进班级的学历。特别是，某些人口群体中的学生百分比可能需要超过最小值。在说明性分析中，我们展示了如何使用CO来增加来自低收入社区的被录取学生的比例。