It's not a lottery. It is a match.

Everyone calls the middle school and high school process a “lottery”. While there is a random number involved, it is really not a lottery. Calling it a lottery conjures up a linear process, probably involving a hat. Happily or not, this is way more complicated…and fascinating.

It is a matching algorithm that won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. It is commonly called “the Stable Marriage algorithm” aka “the Medical School Match”. Everyone is assigned a random number, but that is not the sole determiner of placements by a long shot.

When there are more candidates with the same priority than there are seats for a specific program, then the random numbers are used as kind of a tie breaker. There can also be other factors used to rank students that don’t use the random number tie breaker. For example, a school that uses art portfolios or auditions, ranks kids by their scores based on their talent. A school that uses a test, whether it is Mark Twain, or Medgar Evers or the Specialized HS, rank the kids by the test score, not a lottery. A school that has an essay as part of their admissions rubric makes the lottery WAY less important in their ranking.

Then there is the fact that there are generally 70,000. students on a grade participating in the match process. Each of those students will like different schools in different orders. Each of those schools with their different admission criteria will rank students, sometimes with the random number as a tie breaker, sometimes without regard to the random number. It is a huge sample with many different variables.

Calling it a lottery, makes it easy to feel like there are “winners” and “losers” based on that cruel number. Don’t fall for that simplistic binary thinking. Last year, in high school admissions; 74% of students got one of their top 3 choices. 74% of students in the city can’t possibly all have “good” numbers. 85% received one of their top 5 choices. 94% received one of their top 12 choices. They were able to pick their top 12 out of almost 700 programs citywide. Yes, there is a random aspect to a portion of this process, but it is not a lottery.