The members of Matching in Practice are involved in a large-scale mapping of matching practices in education and related markets in Europe. If you have comments on some of the descriptions included herein or want to contribute comments or expertise, please contact us.
Countries or regions with available information are coloured blue, please click on each country or region for related profile. A list of profiles on higher education can be found here.
| BELGIUM | |
|---|---|
| Who is in charge? | Individual institutions, within regulatory guidelines. |
| Restrictions on preference | |
| Matching procedure | Open access, except in select tracks. |
| Priorities & Quotas | None, except in select tracks. |
| Tie-breaking | None, except in select tracks. |
| Germany | |
|---|---|
| Who is in charge? | (a) Clearinghouse, and (b) universities themselves. |
| Restrictions on preference | (a) Applicants are allowed to submit one rank order list containing at most six universities for each part of the procedure. There is no consistency requirement for these lists. (b) No restrictions concerning number of subjects and universities |
| Matching procedure | (a) Boston mechanism for the priority based part, and the university-proposing Gale-Shapley mechanism for the rest. (b) Applications and admissions at the level of the universities |
| Priorities & Quotas | Quota for students with excellent grades from high school (20% of seats) and quota for students with the longest waiting times (20% of seats). The remaining 60% are allocated according to applicants’ and universities’ preferences. |
| Tie-breaking | (a) Several tie-breaking rules such as handicaps, parents living close by etc., lottery. (b) Left to decide by each individual university. |
| Italy | |
|---|---|
| Who is in charge? | Ministry of Education, together with the universities. Decentralized for private universities. |
| Restrictions on preference | None, except for the constraint imposed by the impossibility to take the entry exams of different universities that organize their exams on the same day. |
| Matching procedure | Students are free to choose among all the degree programs into which they got admitted. If there is no cap on the number of students, public universities have to admit all students who apply. |
| Priorities & Quotas | Based on exam results for degree programs with an entrance exam. |
| Tie-breaking | The tie-breaking rule for degree programs with a legal cap on the number of students is set by the Ministry of Education (typically: results obtained in subsections of the test, final grade in high school and date of birth). Set by universities for other degree programs. |
| Ukraine | |
|---|---|
| Who is in charge? | Ministry of Education and Science and universities |
| Restrictions on preference | Max. 5 programs without an ordering of these programs. |
| Matching procedure | Semi-centralized procedure, equivalent to first three steps of the college-proposing deferred acceptance procedure. |
| Priorities & Quotas | Priorities are based on the External Independent Test results, and school marks. In some cases, universities are allowed to organize additional exams. Some students (with health problems, from Chernobyl area, orphans, etc.) are admitted before all other applicants. |
| Tie-breaking | There are almost no ties (because the range for the EIT results is large); there are several rules for tie-breaking. |
| Hungary | |
|---|---|
| Who is in charge? | A non-profit governmental organisation. |
| Restrictions on preference | There is no restriction, but the applicants are charged for every item in their lists after the third one. |
| Matching procedure | A score-limit algorithm based on the student-proposing Gale-Shapley algorithm. |
| Priorities & Quotas | The scores of the students are coming from their grades and central entrance exams, with some additional scores for competitions, language certificates, or social and medical conditions. |
| Tie-breaking | There is no tie-breaking, students with equal scores are either rejected or accepted together (‘equal treatment policy’). |
| UK | |
|---|---|
| Who is in charge? | Universities and UCAS. |
| Restrictions on preference | Applicants can apply to a maximum of 5 degree tracks (with some exceptions). They are not asked to rank their choices. |
| Matching procedure | The actual matching is largely decentralized but manages congestion by imposing constraints on applicants’ behavior. |
| Priorities & Quotas | Medical schools have quotas for domestic and international students. For the rest, universities have complete freedom to evaluate applicants (interviews are common). |
| Tie-breaking | Left to decide by each individual university/college. |
| Ireland | |
|---|---|
| Who is in charge? | Universities/institutes and the central applications office (CAO). |
| Restrictions on preference | Applicants can apply to a maximum of 10 courses in order of preference, for different degree levels (level 8 and level 7/6). |
| Matching procedure | 4 rounds for matching (different categories of students qualify for different rounds). The algorithm used in each round is the college-proposing Deferred Acceptance algorithm. |
| Priorities & Quotas | Priorities are given to students with higher scores on the Leaving School Examination (LCE). Some universities have quotas for students with disabilities, students from socio-economically disadvantaged background, mature students, and FETAC applicants. |
| Tie-breaking | A randomly-generated number is assigned to every student. |
| France | |
|---|---|
| Who is in charge? | The clearinghouse APB (voluntary participation) and the programs |
| Restrictions on preference | Students can rank at most 12 programs per type of institution (technological faculties of state universities, other faculties of state universities, preparatory schools, technical high schools) and at most 36 in total. |
| Matching procedure | An undisclosed matching algorithm is applied three times with manual rounds in between where students can temporarily or definitively accept offers. |
| Priorities & Quotas | Selective programs use either state-determined criteria or criteria chosen by the institution itself. Non-selective programs use geographical priorities. |
| Tie-breaking | Selective programs can choose a tie-breaking rule. Non-selective programs must use the rank of the program in the student preference list and random draws. |