How Family Preferences Structure Educational (Sub)Markets: A Network Approach

• In Event: Parental Preferences and Policy Dynamics in School Choice

Abstract

In a school choice system, the structure of the marketplace is governed by families’ preferences for schools, their enrollment decisions, and schools’ responses to these decisions. While researchers have long studied families’ preferences, there has been significantly less work on how preferences shape competition between specific schools. Using high school application data from NYC, I develop novel measures of competition, construct a network of competition between all high schools, and use network analysis techniques to predict what characteristics explain competitive relationships between schools for the same subsets of students. Findings indicate the high school market is segmented into many discrete submarkets defined by school and student characteristics, and competition is explained by shared curricular theme, admissions methods, and school performance.

Author

• Dillon G. McGill, Vanderbilt University