To everyone, with love from the school: Illinibucks and your shortcut.
Each student gets Illinibucks
: Every student is receiving this particular service! Since there are no specifications, I would assume that everyone gets the same amount on the same time if I were to consider the characteristics of the university, which should be fair to all students instead of giving privileges to a certain student or a particular group.
So, this ground-breaking concept of 'making the cut in line legal' is introduced. I would not prospect it to have good results, but never mind my thoughts for now. Then follows the question: Use of the Illinibucks would occur at a pre-specified price
set by the campus. What sort of thing would be a candidate for this?
If I were to handle the pricing problems of where the Illinibucks would be used, the first thing that comes into my mind would be 'the importance' of that certain activity. Since this particular service is to give students 'a cut in line pass' to the services that the university provides, thoughtful students will tend to use this in their preference, or in other words, what is important to them. In that reason, I think measuring the weight of the importance of the
activity that it is spent in is a valid method to price the activities.
So for example, if the Illinibucks is spent in registering
for classes, which is a major problem for students to apply their preference in
the form of class (which is a big deal) and furthermore, to meet their
graduation requirement, a lot of demand will gather around the class
registration process, thus making the price of this particular activity high
proportionate to the demand.
Okay. So there are prices now, and people would start spending. I'll be one of the consumers of Illinibucks, and of course, I will use it for my own benefits too. Like most of the other students, I would certainly use
it for the most prior things that are related to my duty, which is studying. It
would be a bad idea to not use it for registering for classes, since certain
classes have severe competition to get into. However, I wouldn’t use up
everything for the registration. I would save some for health care issues such
as going through the line in McKinley center when I am of in desperate need for
medical services. Also, I would save some for my personal pleasures, such as
cutting in line for the lunch meal in the basement of the Illini union building
since there are too many people using at that time.
Price failures: Too High or Too Low !
The prompt wants me to assume how things would be when the prices that the authority gave out for spending Illinibucks was too low or too high. This is the part where I thought it would be much more interesting if there were hypothetical details for this topic. Well, back to the topic, what issues would arise if the administered price was too
low?
In my opinion, if the price was too low, everyone would have
enough credits to satisfy themselves more, causing the depreciation and
ultimately, the inflation of the Illinibucks. Further problems would be
identified if there were specific information about the rules of using
Illinibucks, but since no rules are revealed, I guess this is the general
concept of what would happen. If the situation gets out of control, Illinibucks will lose credibility to the people and the authority would have to shut down Illinibucks.
Too high? This would cause Illinibucks to have more weight than the
authority would have anticipated. To be exact, it will give more power to the
person who has more Illinibucks. But we assumed that each student was allocated
Illinibucks, where we can say that nobody got additional amount of this
particular service compared to others. So If we start on the same basis, and if
more Illinibucks means privilege on certain aspects that can influence one’s
situation and duty of a student, one does not have to be a genius to figure out
that people will try to get additional Illinibucks by trading with other goods.
We did not assume if the trading of Illinibucks is available, and if there is a
way to trade it if it was legal. If there was absolutely no way to trade the
Illinibucks, inefficiency will be created, and the authority that handed out
this service will have to either lower the price to make it more efficient in
terms of its usage, or shut the service down due to its uselessness. If there
were some way to trade Illinibucks, whether it was legal or illegal, there will
be a bartering market for the Illinibucks. The perks that it gives out is
simply too great, and for those who think Illinibucks is valuable (freshman or
people who don’t have James Scholar in terms of class registration), they will
try to gain more Illinibucks at a reasonable trade with other goods. On the
other hand, for those who does not value this service worthy enough for them (seniors
or people with James Scholar in terms of class registration) will try to get
other types of goods, such as money, since they would not benefit from it too
much.
The information provided is simply too abstract, and it would be going
too far to assume certain situations, but these are the results that I think
would happen in each situations.
The information was abstract so you could make it more concrete yourself. But you didn't rise to the challenge. I wonder why?
ReplyDeleteI actually made some situations up by myself while thinking about this idea of Illinibucks. However, as I came up with details, problems got much more complicated and I was not able to organize it in a orderly fashion, but rather overwhelmed by the details that I was thinking.
DeleteBut I would like to share one of the ideas that came up while I was thinking. One of the thing that would be a problem is that it would have a problem while it was spent on the class registration. Although Illinibucks has its amazing feature, which is to cut through the line to be in the first place of everything, one of the major characteristics of a class being organized is that it has a maximum number of people who can participate in the class. So, for example, let's say a econ 303 class has a maximum number of 40 people per each section.
If Illinibucks were to make people cut in through the lines after the maximum number of students per each class is limited, will the Illinibucks kick out the students?
If so, who will be kicked out? The students who registered the most late without the Illinibucks?
Will there be any compensation for the student who got kicked out by Illinibucks, or will that student be just kicked out without any plans if the students were to be kicked out of class?
What happens if the class is really popular among students (i.e. easy A class, all time favorite professor, etc.) and there are nearly 3~400 students who wants to join the class with or without the Illinibucks. How will this problem be dealt with?
To be honest, it doesn't really come to me how these problems will work out. However, if I were to think of a possible scenario to make things more exciting, I would say that students will be kicked out of the class due to Illinibucks. If not, there is no point of making the conceptual service of Illinibucks, at least for class registering, since the service will remain as first come, first serve base.
The assumption leads to students getting kicked out of classes because of the students with Illinibucks. Then arises the problem of whether the university should compensate the loss due to Illinibucks or not. If the university chooses to compensate the loss, I'm not even sure how they are going to come up with such an idea to compensate. However, if the university chooses not to compensate for the students' loss via Illinibucks, then the university is silently acknowledging that Illinibucks is a new source of power that students can actually dictate over others. Whether the price is high or not for the class registering via Illinibucks, there will be a new market (more likely to be an underground one, since the university would not approve the concept of the value of Illinibucks equivalent to money or a certain kind of currency) created to trade the Illinibucks. The currency of the market would most likely be money, since Illinibucks deserves that right due to the immense power it influences over one of the most significant activities to university students, and the people with more money and more motivation and eagerness to use Illinibucks for their own benefit will be the dominant ones over the game of class registering.
DeleteWhen there are 3~400 students who wants to join a class with 40 maximum occupancy limit, it will be a chaos. The worst part is that since there are too many people who would like to join the class, someone needs to be kicked out, and the people who joined with the Illinibucks payment can be kicked out again since they have to make the room for the newcomer.
I know problems will continue, but coming up with details just gives me an eternal labyrinth inside my head. One imperfect way that I came up with for solving the students being kicked out over and over again is to raise the payment value of Illinibucks in an incremental way each time it is used. So, if the first student who got into the class payed 5 credits worth of Illinibucks, the next user would have to pay 7 credits, and the next user 9 credits, and so on. This would be a temporary solution to overload of students gathering up on one class, but I still do not think that it would solve the main problem.
The main problem of Illinibucks that I fear is that unless it is prohibited by the system itself to trade, due to the power that it gets over certain important aspects of the services that university provides, it will be treated as a currency to do the certain services at more ease in a severely competitive manner which can harm the idea of fairness and equality that university should pursue. I won't deny that the capitalism is built on the competition. Survival of the fittest is one of the main concept that capitalism embraces, and due to its merits, people compete with each other to make oneself better, thus creating a competitive society that develops and benefits all. However, the basic right of human being is invaded by the current day capitalism; things are to be calculated in terms of money, and it is sadly true that unfair things are happening in the society because of the power that money gets. Of course, the university gave out Illinibucks in a good spirit. They just wanted to give students a chance to get in front of the line for the students' benefit (maybe not, the university might have planned something evil..). However, there are simply too many possibilities that Illnibucks will turn into the second, unofficial currency that will be traded over students, implicating once more that the wealthy one will get the privilege.
DeleteLet me address the "klcking out" issue by looking at a real world counterpart. Airlines do on occasion overbook airplanes. They sell more tickets than there are seats. This is efficient because their are frequently no-shows and if they didn't over book they would fly with some empty seats when, in fact, there is demand to fill those seats.
DeleteIn the registering for class example, there are drops. The drops are similar to the no-shows. The actual practice is to not allow an add till a student has dropped. The airlines do this differently. They overbook, which means that once in a while they have too many passengers.
What they then do is offer a payment (typically in the form of a voucher to fly at some later date) along with booking the passenger on the next available flight to their destination. If they get currently ticketed passengers to accept this offer, that frees up the needed seats. They only give the offer to enough passengers so the plane can fly full. If there aren't enough passengers who will accept the offer, then they raise the terms and try again.
This method is efficient, in the sense that the "right" passengers opt to fly on the later flight. They have the lowest value for the current flight among the ticketed passengers. Those with higher value for the current flight don't find the offer attractive.
Something similar might be done in the class registration case. Currently enrolled students could be offered additional Illinibucks plus additional priority for registration next semester.