Why better school information doesn't always boost enrolment

Across the world, governments are expanding centralised school choice systems. From New York City to Chile to Ghana, policymakers rely on algorithm-based admissions to allocate students to scarce school seats (Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez 2003, Neilson 2024). But these systems rely on a strong assumption: that families have enough information to make good choices. 

In decentralised settings – where students can apply to multiple schools and receive multiple admission offers – information interventions have often improved educational decisions. Providing information about school quality (Hastings and Weinstein 2008, Andrabi et al. 2017), returns to schooling (Jensen 2010), and financial aid (Hoxby and Turner 2013) has meaningfully changed application and enrolment behaviour.  

So, what happens when we provide better information about school quality and admissions selectivity inside a large, centralised school choice system? In Ghana, we find that information changed applications and admissions, but it did not improve enrolment. 

The promise and pitfalls of centralised school choice 

More than 60 countries use centralised mechanisms to assign students to schools (Neilson 2024), often based on variants of deferred acceptance algorithms designed to reduce manipulation and increase fairness (Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez 2003). 

Ghana operates a large, centralised allocation system for secondary schools. At the time of our research, roughly 450,000 students ranked four secondary school-programme pairs each year. After submitting their rankings, students sat the junior high school leaving exam, and an algorithm assigned each student to at most one school-programme pair, prioritising students with the highest exam scores. On paper, the system is meritocratic and allows students to attend any school in the country if they have a sufficiently high score. In practice, students choose from over 2,000 possible school-programme options in a low-information environment. An official school register provides basic facts – location, boarding status, gender, programmes offered – but no clear information about historical admission thresholds or the academic performance of past students. 

The consequences are striking. Over 40% of students did not ultimately attend the school to which they were assigned. Instead, families engaged in costly after-the-fact sorting, visiting schools in person and negotiating alternative placements months into the academic year. This churn delays learning for all students and wastes resources for families and for the government. If incomplete information was driving these inefficiencies, improving information should improve outcomes. 

Testing whether information improves matching 

We conducted a large-scale randomised controlled trial across 900 junior high schools in Ghana, covering roughly 42,000 students (Ajayi, Friedman, and Lucas 2026), introducing a low-cost, scalable information package – Guidance and Information for Improved Decisions in Education (GuIIDE) – that included: 

• A booklet showing historical admission thresholds for each school and programme, school-level secondary school exam pass rates, guidance on estimating own likely exam performance, admissions rules, and simple strategies. 
• A video explaining how to use the information. 
• School-based workshops to provide the information and answer questions. 

In half of treatment schools, we also held workshops explicitly for parents. The goal was simple: reduce information frictions so families could make better initial choices and avoid costly post-assignment switching. 

Information changed behaviour 

The intervention worked in several important ways. 

1. Students used the information. They reported shifting towards the booklet as their primary source of school information and away from informal channels. 
2. Students changed what they said mattered. Admissions chances and proximity became more salient in students’ stated preferences. 
3. Students changed their ranked choices. Administrative data shows that students changed the characteristics of the schools to which they applied. 
4. Students gained admission to schools with higher value-added. Administrative data also shows that students gained admission to schools with higher performance relative to the incoming achievement of students. 

In short, information changed applications and admissions. 

But enrolment did not improve 

Despite these changes, we find no evidence that students were more likely to enrol in the school to which they were assigned, enrol in any school, and/or enrol on time. Many students who switched schools after assignment ultimately attended schools they could have listed and been admitted to through the centralised system in the first place. Information improved intermediate outcomes, but it did not improve final ones. 

Why wasn’t information enough? 

Centralised systems implicitly assume that families have accurate information, can predict their own future preferences and constraints, and can translate both into an optimal ranked list. Our intervention addressed the first. The other two continue to limit students’ ability to matriculate on time. Several factors likely explain the results: 

1. Preference forecasting is inherently difficult. Students choose months before knowing their exam scores or fully understanding family finances. Forecasting ability and family preferences under uncertainty are hard to predict even for sophisticated decision-makers (Giustinelli and Manski 2018). 
2. Household shocks matter. Between application and enrolment, families may experience disruptions like income declines or health crises that alter schooling decisions in ways no information package can anticipate. 
3. Mechanism design features limit flexibility. Students in this context could list only four choices. Limited choice slots increase the likelihood of unstable matches, especially when families face uncertainty.  

When off-platform switching is possible – as in Ghana – families continue searching even after making their initial selections with better information because information alone cannot resolve the gap between what families choose in advance and what they need when the time comes. 

Does targeting parents help? 

Parents play a central role in schooling decisions, and prior work has shown that parental engagement can shape educational investments (Avvisati et al. 2014). In Ghana, students submit the rankings, although parents often influence them. We therefore directly targeted parents in half of treated schools. While parental workshops changed some aspects of decision-making, they did not increase the likelihood of enrolment or on-time matriculation. Direct parental engagement was insufficient to resolve the deeper frictions at work. 

Implications for education policy 

Information interventions have a strong track record in decentralised contexts, but our findings suggest that centralised systems introduce additional frictions that information alone cannot fix. Policymakers expanding these centralised systems should consider three lessons seriously. 

First, information is necessary but not sufficient. High-quality admissions and performance data improves applications and admissions. Governments building or expanding centralised systems should invest in making this information accessible and useable, but they should not expect it to single-handedly solve enrolment challenges. 

Second, flexibility in mechanism design matters more than is often recognised. Allowing more ranked choices or introducing structured revision periods after exam scores are released could reduce the mismatch between early preferences and later circumstances.  

Third, centralised systems are not insulated from behavioural and household realities. 
Families operate under genuine uncertainty and face unpredictable shocks. Mechanisms that assume stable, well-formed preferences at the time of application will produce instability at the point of enrolment. Addressing this may require complementary policies – such as financial support – that offset the costs of enrolling in preferred schools. 

Centralised school choice systems are powerful tools for improving fairness and efficiency in education. But to fulfil their promise, reforms may need to go beyond information provision and address the deeper behavioural and structural constraints that shape whether families can ultimately act on the choices they make. 

References 

Abdulkadiroğlu, A, and T Sönmez (2003), "School choice: A mechanism design approach," American Economic Review, 93(3): 729–747.

Ajayi, K F, W H Friedman, and A M Lucas (2026), "When information is not enough: Evidence from a centralised school choice system," Economic Journal, 136(673): 26–60.

Andrabi, T, J Das, and A I Khwaja (2017), "Report cards: The impact of providing school and child test scores on educational markets," American Economic Review, 107(6): 1535–1563.

Avvisati, F, M Gurgand, N Guyon, and E Maurin (2014), "Getting parents involved: A field experiment in deprived schools," Review of Economic Studies, 81(1): 57–83.

Giustinelli, P, and C F Manski (2018), "Survey measures of family decision processes for econometric analysis of schooling decisions," Economic Inquiry, 56(1): 81–99.

Hastings, J, and J Weinstein (2008), "Information, school choice, and academic achievement: Evidence from two experiments," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(4): 1373–1414.

Hoxby, C, and S Turner (2013), "Expanding college opportunities for high-achieving, low-income students," Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Discussion Paper.

Jensen, R (2010), "The (perceived) returns to education and the demand for schooling," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 125(2): 515–548.

Neilson, C (2024), "The rise of coordinated choice and assignment systems in education markets around the world," Background paper to the World Development Report 2024: The Middle-Income Trap, World Bank.