The “Zhang Xuefeng Effect”: Information Intervention and the College Admission Problem in China

ABSTRACT Information regarding the quality of colleges and labor‐market prospects of majors plays an important role in parents' and students' school‐choice decisions, particularly when these decisions are crucially relevant to the students' long‐run career choices and life earnings. This paper studies the impact of information intervention under the current college admission system in China, exploring how access to college‐major–related information affects students' preferences, thus resulting in changes to school majors' score lines, students' welfare, and industrial productivity. We consider a setting where there are a finite set of students and a finite set of schools, each school offering two majors featuring high or low labor‐market returns. We find that the score lines for high‐return majors rise, while those for low‐return majors fall, primarily due to changes in preferences among some “pivotal” students in the admission process. Moreover, a majority of students benefit from information intervention, though some students experience welfare deterioration, and the distribution of such benefits and losses depends on students' types of preferences. Without school‐prioritized preferences, more students can benefit, and students with higher scores will benefit more. When all students' preferences are school‐prioritized, students with different scores benefit almost equally from the information intervention. Our findings offer insights for upgrading information consulting services and designing career‐oriented college majors for China's college admission problems.