I think the idea of Illinibucks is interesting, students on campus will be
able to value their needs, and pay a certain amount of Illinibucks forn early access of each goods. The candidates can be making an appointment with an academic advisor,
getting early access to pick university housig, or using career center for mock
interviews.
Early registration for class can
be one of the candidates for Illinibucks, too, and it will be probably be what I
will spend a large amount of Illinibucks on. But I believe that pay for priority
to register for class would be highly demanded by students, as a result, the
cost of it will be incredibly high. I may also pay to get an early adviser's appointment because sometimes advisers may have a very full schedule.
However, the idea of applying Illinibucks on campus may rise many
issues, the first one I think of is we will not be able to afford emergencies.
For example, if I have an urgent need to use the career center for preparing an
interview, I can use Illinibucks to get ahead of line only at a cost of sacrificing
other needs, such as registering for class later than I expected, and classes I planned
to take may be already full. Another issue is people may find a way to trade Illinibucks,
such as use money or other goods for trade. This would cause many unfairness on campus,
students from rich family can easily take advantage in this case, and students
from average or poor family may face many difficulties in collge.
An additional concern that could be brought by applying Illinibucks is pricing
for getting early access for each service. it would be complicated to set a reasonable price for every service, and the price will affect quantity
demanded. Both too high and too low price could lead to the failure of the
entire system. For example, low price can lead to exceed demand of prior access
of certain service, when everyone pays to get ahead, the system could lose
meaning; and high pricing will make the college system inefficient because
students may be blocked from what they really need, such as accomplish a class
for graduation. I talked about unfair trade of Illinibucks in the paragraph above,
and I think high price could also be a cause of unfair trade.
To sum up, I don’t think the idea of Illinibucks is viable based on the
current situation, the current first come first serve and priority system generally
is generally fairer, and is more efficient than Illinibucks.
Some of the complaints you raised are valid, but others are solvable. Preventing Illinibucks to be transferable, for example, is quite do-able. You simply make them like a credit card balance. The transaction goes through if you have enough of them in your account. Otherwise, it won't. You don't need a paper version. On the other hand, you might actually want the Illinibucks to transfer in some instances. We'll discuss that in class tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteYou are right about the pricing, but if the demand for Illinibucks use is stable, there could be pricing experiments to see what price makes sense. It might take a while to get there, but that shouldn't preclude trying it.
You are the first student who mentioned using the career center for mock interviews. I've seen something like this sitting in BIF and drinking my coffee after our class is over. I actually heard one of the coaches say - practice not being nervous. That's easy to say but very hard to do. The only real way I know how to do that is have the same experience again and again. Eventually you get used to it, though there might be some stage fright still even with all that practice.
Hello Prof Arvan, thank you for your comments. I think your idea about preventing illinibucks to be transferable makes sense, and I'm looking forward to hear the discussion about wanting the Illinibucks to be transferable in class. And about the price, you talks about doing price experiments, and I'm wondering how exactly can people do the experiment, do they do that on actually students, and will the experiments impact students' college life, besides, I don't think demand of Illinibucks will be perfectly stable throughout the semester.
DeleteI talked about the career center because I've used it before, and it is really hard to just try not to be nervous, and I agree with you that, the only way to do it is to have the same experience over and over.