Assigning students to academic majors

We address here the problem of assigning undergraduate students to academic major areas at a Middle-Eastern business school, which is quite different from what one usually faces in the West. Our formulation considers the student's preference in the light of his/her performance in certain bellwether courses and various practical constraints in arriving at an initial solution. We present a linear program that maximizes the overall value of the assignments to the students as well as the academic units concerned. We show through a real example how this approach has been implemented as one step in the major-assignment process.