School Choice with Transportation

Many countries once adopted comprehensive school systems where students attended their local school, aiming to foster social mixing and community. In practice, this goal has been undermined by residential sorting: popular schools drive up nearby house prices, making their catchment areas less diverse and effectively restricting access for disadvantaged students.

In response, proponents of market-based reform — drawing on ideas like Friedman’s 1955 essay — argued that giving parents school choice through vouchers and competition would raise educational quality at lower cost. Modern implementations moved away from simple voucher programs toward matching theory frameworks, using ranked preferences and published priorities to assign students to schools. However, the results have been mixed: while school quality improvements have been modest, school choice has significantly increased stratification between schools along socioeconomic lines. Often this mirrors the very problem it sought to solve, as proximity-based admissions priorities recreate the residential sorting dynamics of the old neighbourhood comprehensive system.

This research aims to design an allocation mechanism that expands school choice for disadvantaged students while preserving the benefits of proximity-based assignment and avoiding increased urban emissions and congestion. This is pursued through three directions: designing a segregation-aware mechanism that bundles schools with transport options for disadvantaged areas; modelling how consecutive allocations across school stages affect student and school populations over time; and analysing how urban transport infrastructure could be modified to complement the mechanism and minimise segregation and associated externalities.