The college admission problem plays a fundamental role in several real-world allocation mechanisms such as school choice and supply chain stability. The classical framework assumes that the capacity of each college is known and fixed in advance. However, increasing the quota of even a single college would improve the overall cost of the students. In this work, we study the problem of finding the college capacity expansion that achieves the best cost of the students, subject to a cardinality constraint. First, we show that this problem is NP-hard to solve, even under complete and strict preference lists. We provide an integer quadratically constrained programming formulation and study its linear reformulation. We also propose two natural heuristics: A greedy algorithm and an LP-based method. We empirically evaluate the performance of our approaches in a detailed computational study. We observe the practical superiority of the linearized model in comparison with its quadratic counterpart and we outline their computational limits. In terms of solution quality, we note that the allocation of a few extra spots can significantly impact the overall student satisfaction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.