I would like to pay attention to an article by David Austin "The Stable Marriage Problem and School Choice"

Here is its inroduction:

" Every year, 75,000 New York City eighth graders apply for admission to one of the city's 426 public high schools. Until recently, this process asked students to list five schools in order of preference. These lists were sent to the schools, who decided which applicants to accept, wait-list, or reject. The students were then notified of their status and allowed to accept only one offer and one position on a waiting list. After the students had responded to any offers received, schools with unfilled positions made a second round of offers, and this process continued through a concluding third round.

This process had several serious problems. At the end of the third round of offers, nearly half of the students, usually lower-performing students from poor families, had not been accepted into a school. Many of these students waited through the summer only to learn they had been matched with a school that was not on their list of five schools.

This process also encouraged students and their parents to think strategically about the list of schools they submitted. Students that were rejected by the school at the top of their list might find that their second-choice school had no vacancies in the second round of offers. This made it risky for many students to faithfully state their true preferences, a view encouraged by the Education Department's advice that students "determine what your competition is" before creating their lists of preferred schools.

Lastly, schools would often underrepresent their capacity hoping to save positions for students who were unhappy with their initial offerings.

In the end, the process couldn't place many students while it encouraged all parties, both students and schools, to strategically misrepresent themselves in an effort to obtain more desirable outcomes not possible otherwise. Widespread mistrust in the placement process was a natural consequence.

Using ideas described in this column, economists Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, and Alvin Roth designed a clearinghouse for matching students with high schools, which was first implemented in 2004. This new computerized algorithm places all but about 3000 students each year and results in more students receiving offers from their first-choice schools. As a result, students now submit lists that reflect their true preferences, which provides school officials with public input into the determination of which schools to close or reform. For their part, schools have found that there is no longer an advantage to underrepresenting their capacity.

The key to this new algorithm is the notion of stability, first introduced in a 1962 paper by Gale and Shapley. We say that a matching of students to schools is stable if there is not a student and a school who would prefer to be matched with each other more than their current matches. Gale and Shapley introduced an algorithm, sometimes called deferred acceptance, which is guaranteed to produced a stable matching. Later, Roth showed that when the deferred acceptance algorithm is applied, a student can not gain admittance into a more preferred school by strategically misrepresenting his or her preferences.

This column will present the game-theoretic results contained in the original Gale-Shapley paper along with Roth's subsequent analysis. Pathak calls the deferred acceptance algorithm "one of the great ideas in economics," and Roth and Shapley were awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for this work"

It would be nice to realize that in Maple.