The first round of this year's high-school-match notifications in New York City's massive, district-wide school choice process went out to students this month, sparking celebration, consternation, and a renewal of concerns about unequal access to the city's best schools. The Big Apple's school-matching system is certainly on a New York scale, with a formula so complex that its 2003 design helped earn its creator, Alvin E. Roth, the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics. The city's 8th graders and their families pore through a 600-page directory of profiles of more than 700 potential schools, of which they can rank up to a dozen by preference. Overall, about 53 percent of students, whether high- or low-performing, got into their first-choice schools--but the students differed widely in their choices. Fewer than a third of the low-achieving students ranked academically selective schools as their first choices. In turn, lower-achieving students were half as likely as other students to get into those schools.