ITHACA, N.Y. - Many New York City eighth-graders – particularly those from underserved communities – aren't applying to academically competitive high schools where they could succeed, according to new Cornell University research.
In partnership with New York City Public Schools (NYCPS), the research team is putting its findings into practice to help combat the phenomenon, known as "undermatching."
"It's a crazy complex process for how students apply and then match with high schools in New York City," said Nikhil Garg , assistant professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering. "With that flexibility and equality of access comes the challenge of figuring out how to navigate 900 options and decide which ones to apply to," says Garg, a co-author of the paper, " Connecting Application Behavior to Undermatching in New York City School Choice," published Aug. 18 in Nature Cities.
The researchers analyzed data from nearly 59,000 students who participated in New York City's high school admissions process during the 2022-23 school year. They looked not only at where students were admitted, but where they could have been admitted had they applied to different schools. By combining admissions data with a model of how students choose schools under uncertainty, the team assessed whether students could have applied to higher-performing programs, and where their application behavior may have limited their options.
The researchers found that, on average, New York City students enrolled in schools that admitted about 64% of applicants, even though they could have been admitted to schools that admitted only about 37% of applicants, suggesting many students were not applying to the most competitive schools within reach.
This gap was highest for students with the most competitive applications, and for Black, Hispanic and lower-income applicants – a finding that raised questions about whether the complexity of the application process itself was driving inequities in student behavior and outcomes, the researchers said.
A second paper examines how personalized recommendation systems can help students navigate the high school admissions process. Led by doctoral student Erica Chiang, the new system developed by researchers and deployed by partners at NYCPS delivered personalized email recommendations to applicants during the 2025-26 admissions cycle.
Messages were sent to students attending middle schools that historically sent relatively few students to high-performing high schools and highlighted nearby programs where students had a strong predicted chance of admission. In a randomized controlled trial, students who received the recommendations were 59% more likely to apply to a recommended program than students who did not receive them.
Providing recommendations in a capacity-constrained admissions system presents unique challenges, the researchers found. "Since each school has a limited number of seats, one student's choices can affect outcomes for others," Chiang said. "Recommending the same school to too many students could make the school more competitive than students were led to expect, and that could harm students or decrease trust in the match process."
Ultimately, Garg said success will be measured by whether the system helps the city deliver on its promise of equitable access. "The vision is to close the gap between the goals of the system and the on-the-ground realities," he said. "We want to make sure that the difficulty of the process is not preventing students from accessing the schools they are entitled to attend."
