Assign placement choices to student identifying their top three

I have a table of 20 students who are to select which placement they want to next. There are 30 placements in total, so 10 will be going un filled. The students have picked their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice options, so there is some overlap (multiple student have the same placement as their first choice etc..). I have attached an image to show what i mean.

Can I run a matlab script on the data to help assign which student get which placements, so that as many as possible get their 1st choices? if so, what would it look like?

or is there a way to do this in excel?

Answer 1

[Steven Lord]

See the matchpairs function.