{"schema_version":1,"research_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp05_external_evaluation_20260803","source_assessment_id":"deadweight_loss_reduction__sociology_anthropology:P4:v0","cell_id":"deadweight_loss_reduction__sociology_anthropology","search_queries":["site:heqco.ca work integrated learning barriers employers students placements report Canada","community engaged learning practicum placements matching platform students community organizations university","student placement matching algorithm field education social work practicum study","official guidance community engaged learning placements ethical principles community partners student consent","community partners perspectives service learning student placements burden coordination study university community partnership","field education placement shortages social work survey agencies students primary research","two-sided matching internship placement student preferences algorithm empirical study","university practicum placement matching software official community partner student preferences","Campus Compact principles community engagement community partner voice reciprocity official","CSWE accreditation standards field education placement student safety official 2022 EPAS","National Association Anthropology ethics community consent student fieldwork official","university community engaged learning risk management placement official guidelines","site:bls.gov May 2025 education administrators postsecondary wage software developers wage","site:bls.gov Occupational Outlook Handbook postsecondary education administrators median pay 2025","NBER w26035 internship matching randomized assignment title","\"w26035\" internship matching"],"sources":[{"source_id":"S1","title":"Community Partner Perceptions About Community Engagement Experiences For Nursing Students","publisher":"Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education / Indiana State University","url":"https://scholars.indianastate.edu/jcehe/vol1/iss1/4/","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2009","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Focus groups with staff from 11 community organizations identified scheduling, student-agency match, orientation, project definition, and interaction quality as important placement-design concerns.","Community organizations are identifiable stakeholders with expressed needs concerning placement fit and process."]},{"source_id":"S2","title":"Community Partner Experiences in a Service-Learning Development Program","publisher":"Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, University of Georgia","url":"https://openjournals.libs.uga.edu/jheoe/article/view/3073","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2024-06-26","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Mixed-method evidence from 25 community partners identified logistical and equity challenges in service-learning implementation.","Community partners valued joint planning, relationship formation, and collective problem solving, warning against reducing placement quality to slot filling."]},{"source_id":"S3","title":"GEO Community Practicum","publisher":"Northwestern University Center for Civic Engagement","url":"https://engage.northwestern.edu/programs/geo/","source_class":"OFFICIAL_ORGANIZATION_DATA","publication_date":"undated; current 2026 program page","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["A current university community-practicum program has staff work one-to-one with students to secure placements matching their interests.","The program reports placements at more than 100 organizations, demonstrating an identifiable institutional operator and established community-placement workflow.","The program emphasizes mutually beneficial partnerships and invites host feedback."]},{"source_id":"S4","title":"National Matching Program","publisher":"National Matching Program","url":"https://www.nationalmatchingprogram.org/","source_class":"COMMERCIAL_FIRST_PARTY","publication_date":"undated; current 2026 product page","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["A functioning web-based matching service already serves government, higher-education, and nonprofit sponsors using participant preferences.","Established features include rank lists, uniform deadlines, confidential preference data, participant-data verification, matching algorithms, reports, and sponsor-specific customization."]},{"source_id":"S5","title":"Two-Sided Matching for Mentor-Mentee Allocations—Algorithms and Manipulation Strategies","publisher":"PLOS ONE","url":"https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0213323","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2019-03-12","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Two-sided matching with incomplete preferences and ties was implemented on three years of real university mentor-mentee preference data.","Several algorithms approached the maximum matching size, while multi-objective methods could improve welfare and fairness measures.","Stable matching cannot make truthful reporting a dominant strategy for every participant; simulated manipulation could harm participants and introduce instability.","The study treats being unmatched as preferable to an unacceptable pairing, supporting explicit acceptability lists."]},{"source_id":"S6","title":"Clearinghouses for Two-Sided Matching: An Experimental Study","publisher":"California Institute of Technology","url":"https://authors.library.caltech.edu/records/jereh-qfx04","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2009-12","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Laboratory evidence found only 48% of observed matching outcomes fully stable despite a setting modeled on a standard two-sided clearinghouse.","Participant behavior and market structure can cause realized outcomes to depart from theoretical matching guarantees."]},{"source_id":"S7","title":"Anthropological Ethics","publisher":"American Anthropological Association","url":"https://americananthro.org/about/anthropological-ethics/","source_class":"OFFICIAL_GUIDANCE","publication_date":"undated; current 2026 guidance page","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Anthropological practice should do no harm, obtain informed consent and necessary permissions, weigh obligations to collaborators and affected parties, protect records, and maintain respectful relationships.","A practicum matching procedure cannot itself authorize research, cultural access, data collection, or participation."]},{"source_id":"S8","title":"National Employment and Wage Data by Occupation, May 2025","publisher":"U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics","url":"https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.t01.htm","source_class":"GOVERNMENT_OR_REGULATOR","publication_date":"2026-05-15","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Mean annual wages were $126,540 for postsecondary education administrators, $88,880 for social and community service managers, and $148,100 for software developers.","These wage benchmarks support broad resource-equivalent estimates for coordination, governance, analysis, and software work but do not constitute vendor quotations."]}],"problem_evidence":{"support":"WEAK","rationale":"Direct evidence establishes that community-placement stakeholders care about scheduling, student-agency fit, logistics, equity, and relationship quality, and that universities expend staff effort arranging suitable placements. No source verifies the proposal's specific diagnostic signature: simultaneously eligible students and approved hosts left unmatched because sequential commitments, inconsistent deadlines, duplicate inquiries, or missing rematching fragmented a known feasible set. The magnitude and prevalence of that wedge in sociology or anthropology therefore remain unmeasured.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},"stakeholder_evidence":{"support":"WEAK","rationale":"Northwestern is an identifiable university operator of a community practicum and currently assigns staff to placement matching; community partners in two studies expressed needs concerning fit, scheduling, logistics, equity, and collaborative planning. However, no named sociology or anthropology department, host consortium, practicum director, funder, or authorizer was found requesting mutual-preference batch clearing or committing data, authority, staff, or funds to test it.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},"prior_art":{"proximity":"SUBSTANTIAL_COLLISION","closest_analogues":[{"name":"National Matching Program and iMatch","similarity":"Provides centralized, web-based, preference-prioritizing matching for higher-education and nonprofit sponsors, with common deadlines, confidential rankings, verification, reports, and configurable rules—the proposal's principal clearing functions.","remaining_difference":"The public description does not establish community-field-practicum deployment, direct post-match confirmation and mutual veto, an authorized relationship-based exception path, or the proposed community-authority and incidence safeguards.","source_ids":["S4"]},{"name":"University mentor-mentee two-sided matching","similarity":"Uses real university preferences, incomplete acceptable lists, ties, stability, maximum-cardinality and multi-objective criteria; this closely matches the proposed computational problem.","remaining_difference":"Mentoring is not community-authorized field practice and lacks host workload, field safety, labor, accessibility, community consent, and relational-obligation constraints.","source_ids":["S5"]},{"name":"Northwestern GEO Community Practicum placement process","similarity":"An active university program matches graduate students to community organizations and explicitly seeks mutually beneficial projects and host feedback.","remaining_difference":"Placement is staff-assisted one-to-one rather than a documented simultaneous mutual-preference clearinghouse with a fallback round and algorithmic audit.","source_ids":["S3"]},{"name":"Experimental two-sided clearinghouses","similarity":"Tests human behavior in a preference-clearing setting modeled on established hospital-intern and school matching mechanisms.","remaining_difference":"It is a laboratory study rather than a community-practicum workflow, and its imperfect realized stability reinforces the need for confirmation rather than validating the candidate's effect.","source_ids":["S6"]}],"distinctive_claim_remaining":"In a department where eligible students and approved community projects are already known, synchronized mutual-acceptability collection plus batch clearing, direct confirmation, and one fallback round will produce more mutually confirmed and subsequently retained placements than the existing sequential process or synchronized manual rematching, without worsening host burden, match quality, confidentiality, access for constrained or less-connected students, or community control. The claim fails if no contemporaneous mutually acceptable unrealized pairs exist, relationship formation rather than sequencing is binding, or observed gains disappear against the synchronized-manual comparator.","confidence":"HIGH"},"implementation_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"The core computation is implementable: preference-based higher-education matching services exist, and research covers incomplete acceptability lists, ties, multiple objectives, and manipulation. Existing university practicum operations demonstrate feasible staffing and host workflows. Implementation nevertheless requires institution-specific eligibility data, lawful and minimal preference collection, role-based access, accessibility accommodations, exception handling, auditability, and explicit separation of placement acceptance from consent to research or cultural access. Theory does not eliminate strategic reporting, off-system reservations, coercive interpretation, or relational information that cannot safely be standardized.","source_ids":["S3","S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},"scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"Recovering even several delayed or lost placements could improve educational access and reduce host screening effort, especially for students lacking faculty connections, but the number of recoverable matches is unknown.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":2,"rationale":"Stakeholders express needs around fit, scheduling, logistics, equity, and collaborative planning, but no target adopter has requested or funded the proposed batch-clearing design.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},"incremental_advantage":{"score":3,"rationale":"Simultaneous consideration and a documented fallback round plausibly improve on one-to-one placement, directories, and unsynchronized bilateral negotiation; improvement over an ordinary matching service or synchronized manual rematch is unproven.","source_ids":["S3","S4","S5"]},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"Centralized two-sided preference matching, common deadlines, confidentiality, and higher-education customization are established. Remaining distinctiveness lies mainly in the community-practicum safeguards, confirmation/veto workflow, and causal comparison against synchronized manual rematching.","source_ids":["S3","S4","S5"]},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"Algorithms, acceptable-list representations, web systems, and operational matching services already exist. The main technical risks are data quality, auditability, permissions, and correctly encoding rather than flattening constraints.","source_ids":["S4","S5"]},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"Universities visibly administer community placements, so a practicum authority could govern timing and procedure. Actual authority, host agreements, data stewardship, accommodations, labor review, and ethics boundaries must be confirmed at a named institution.","source_ids":["S3","S7"]},"evidence_readiness":{"score":2,"rationale":"A falsifiable shadow study is clear, but the decisive evidence requires proprietary event histories or prospective nonbinding preferences and participation by students, hosts, and the department; public evidence cannot establish the feasible set.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S5"]},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":3,"rationale":"A pooled process could reduce reliance on faculty connections and make constraints visible, but it could also disadvantage participants with complex needs or small hosts unless equity and burden are explicit noninferiority outcomes.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S5"]},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"The software pattern scales, but community-defined tasks, consent, relationship histories, accommodations, exceptions, and supervision capacity require local governance and limit simple replication.","source_ids":["S2","S4","S7"]}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"One department's retrospective or prospective nonbinding shadow study: data-governance review, de-identification, event-ledger construction, two compensated student/host design sessions, baseline reconstruction, two comparator algorithms, and analysis.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["Approximately 0.15-0.30 resource-equivalent FTE-year of administrator/analyst effort.","Existing secure survey, spreadsheet, or institutional analytics tools are used.","No live placements are changed and no production integration is built.","Community and student representatives receive modest compensation."],"source_ids":["S8"]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"One-department production preparation: co-design, privacy/legal/accessibility review, intake and consent materials, configurable matching implementation, audit logs, limited integration, testing, training, exception design, and rollback procedures.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["Configuration or modest custom development rather than a campus-wide platform build.","Roughly 0.4-1.2 combined FTE-years across coordination, software/data, legal/privacy, accessibility, and faculty governance.","Existing identity, secure storage, and placement-agreement infrastructure can be reused.","Vendor pricing and institutional overhead are unknown."],"source_ids":["S4","S8"]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"One live cycle for one department: participant onboarding, host support, eligibility verification, preference collection, match processing, direct confirmation, fallback round, help desk, incident response, outcome evaluation, and compensated governance review.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["Approximately 30-100 students and a comparable number of projects or host capacities.","A 0.5-1.0 resource-equivalent coordinator plus part-time evaluation, technical, accessibility, and privacy support.","Host onboarding and representative participation are compensated where appropriate.","Existing safeguard reviews remain in place and are not charged entirely to the pilot."],"source_ids":["S1","S2","S3","S8"]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Annual operation for one or several related departmental cycles: coordinator time, host relationship maintenance, data administration, accessibility and exception support, software licensing or maintenance, monitoring, evaluation, and periodic rule review.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["At least 0.4 resource-equivalent FTE-year is retained because community relationships and exception handling cannot be fully automated.","The system reuses institutional infrastructure rather than commissioning a new enterprise platform.","Range excludes host supervision labor and student practicum labor, which must be tracked as incidence rather than treated as free.","No vendor quote or site workload study was available."],"source_ids":["S2","S3","S4","S8"]}},"verified_pipeline_gates":{"externally_supported_problem":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"External evidence supports placement-fit, scheduling, logistics, equity, and relationship concerns, but not the exact coexistence of mutually acceptable unfilled projects and unplaced eligible students caused by fragmented sequencing.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},"externally_credible_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"Northwestern's Center for Civic Engagement is an identifiable current operator of a community-practicum placement process and demonstrates that university staff can administer matching; it is an analogue, not a committed adopter of this proposal.","source_ids":["S3"]},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The proposal can be compared against both the actual sequential baseline and a synchronized manual-rematching comparator on confirmed/retained matches, delay, duplicate inquiries, burden, equity, quality, and safeguard outcomes.","source_ids":["S4","S5"]},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"A one-department, one-cycle nonbinding shadow study can test whether the claimed unrealized mutually acceptable pairs exist without changing placements.","source_ids":["S1","S3","S5"]},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"A shadow study is plausibly low risk, but a named institution must authorize use of placement histories or preferences, define confidentiality and retention, compensate community participation, and ensure rankings are not mistaken for placement, research, or cultural-access consent.","source_ids":["S2","S7"]},"credible_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"YES","reason":"The four scopes are bounded and the wide resource-equivalent bands are consistent with current administrator, community-service-manager, and software-developer wage benchmarks, though vendor prices and local overhead remain unknown.","source_ids":["S8"]}},"next_evidence_step":"Recruit one named sociology or anthropology department and its authorized data steward for a single-cycle, nonbinding shadow study involving approximately 30-100 eligible students and approved host capacities. Before examining outcomes, co-design permissible compatibility fields, confidentiality, compensation, veto, exception, and deletion rules with student and host representatives. Build a time-stamped ledger of eligibility, capacity, inquiries, offers, deadlines, provisional commitments, withdrawals, final placements, unfilled projects, and explicitly stated acceptability. Compare (A) the actual sequential outcome, (B) a synchronized manual process with one rematching round but no preference algorithm, and (C) auditable deferred acceptance using incomplete acceptable lists; include a maximum-cardinality/multi-objective solution only as sensitivity analysis. Do not issue or alter placements. Primary diagnostic: the number and share of contemporaneous, mutually acceptable pairs never considered under A. Secondary outcomes: duplicate approaches, time to decision, unmatched parties, distribution by prior faculty connection and constraint burden, host intake time, and missing/unsafe data. Falsify the problem claim if no mutually acceptable unrealized pair exists or if unfilled capacity is explained by ineligibility, supervision scarcity, lack of interest, or relationship requirements. Do not advance to a live pilot unless C identifies a practically material gain over both A and B and no privacy, coercion, community-authority, accessibility, labor, or distributional threshold fails.","blocking_evidence":["No externally verified department-level prevalence of contemporaneous mutually acceptable but unrealized student-host pairs.","No event ledger establishing that sequencing, deadline mismatch, duplicate approaches, or failed rematching—rather than scarcity, eligibility, supervision, or relationship formation—is the binding cause.","No named sociology or anthropology practicum authority has committed to adopt, authorize, fund, or supply data for the study.","No evidence that candid host and student acceptability rankings can be collected without coercion, strategic distortion, confidentiality loss, or damage to relationships.","No comparison against synchronized manual rematching, so the incremental effect of the algorithm is unidentified.","No live evidence on placement retention, educational quality, host burden, equitable access, off-system reservations, or community-authority outcomes.","No institution-specific legal, privacy, accessibility, labor, insurance, records-retention, or research-ethics determination.","No vendor quotation or local staff workload measurement; cost estimates remain resource-equivalent bands."],"research_disposition":"PARTNERED_RESEARCH_PROGRAM","world_novelty_boundary":"This evaluation measured neither world novelty, patentability, freedom to operate, market size, nor realized impact. It found substantial collision with established centralized two-sided matching algorithms, commercial/first-party matching services, common-deadline and confidential-rank workflows, and existing staff-mediated community-practicum placement. The unmeasured boundary is the context-specific combination of independently screened community projects, mutually incomplete preferences, direct confirmation and veto, one fallback round, relationship-based exceptions, community-authority safeguards, and an incidence-based comparison against synchronized manual rematching.","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_version":0,"controller_recommendation":{"action":"STOP_EMPIRICAL_RESEARCH_NEEDED","repairable":false,"material_progress_observed":true,"progress_targets":["Secure a named departmental practicum authority, host-representative body, student representatives, and authorized data steward.","Measure whether contemporaneous mutually acceptable unrealized pairs exist and estimate their prevalence from a governed one-cycle ledger.","Separate the effect of synchronized intake and manual rematching from the incremental effect of preference-clearing software.","Pre-register match, retention, delay, duplicate-contact, burden, equity, quality, confidentiality, coercion, and community-authority outcomes with explicit noninferiority thresholds.","Obtain institution-specific privacy, accessibility, labor, insurance, records-retention, safety, and ethics determinations before collecting identifiable preferences.","Demonstrate in shadow mode that gains are not driven by treating unknown or relationally unacceptable pairs as feasible.","Obtain local workload measurements or vendor quotations to narrow startup and recurring cost estimates."],"reason":"Bounded web research establishes strong adjacent technical and operational precedent, but cannot verify the candidate's site-specific causal problem or comparative benefit. The decisive evidence requires proprietary placement histories or prospective preference data, named institutional authority, and participation by students and community hosts. Because this is fieldwork/proprietary-data evidence rather than a web-research gap, the controller must stop for empirical research."},"proposal_index":4}