ERSAMUS Student Exchange Programs: How to place students?

The purpose of this paper is to offer guidelines for student placement mechanisms used in the ERASMUS exchange markets. The problem at hand resembles a student placement problem, a class of problems that deals with matching students with seats in schools. Using the mechanism to place outgoing Bogazici University students as a case, we discuss a set of criteria that a placement mechanism is desired to satisfy. We also propose policy recommendations, and show how the current system can be improved using actual data from the 2009-2010 exchange market for outgoing Bogazici University students.