Add to ORKGA large portion of school and college places in the world are allocated through cen-tralized admissions schemes. In this paper, we study a model of centralized admissions with the feature that schools are allowed to pre-commit to admitting qualified appli-cants who rank them as top choice over more qualified applicants who do not. We identify two motives for doing so. A less popular school may use the pre-commitment to steal applicants who otherwise would not choose it as their top choice (stealing motive); a popular school may use the pre-commitment to prevent its own applicants from being stolen (preemptive motive). We show the conditions for such motives to exist, and in doing so, illustrate the roles of school popularity, difference in ...