How can colleges find successful applicants? Criteria such as GPA, interviews, essays, and tests provide information about candidates, but which work and why? We shed light on these questions using unique data on the universe of objective and subjective rankings of all college applicants in...

Strategic incentives may lead to inefficient and unequal provision of public services. A prominent example is school admissions. Existing research shows that applicants "play the system" by submitting school rankings strategically. We investigate whether applicants also play the system by...