Illinibucks

The concept of Illinibucks is extremely interesting because there are definitely students that would like to choose what they have priority in and what they don’t mind waiting for. This concept would allow students to spend their money in areas that they care about being prioritized. As long as the school allocates the same amount of illinibucks to all the students, I think this concept is fair. It would not allow wealthier students to purchase priority over others and the class standing of a student cannot impact their priority either. The concept of illinibucks would stop this and promote equality throughout campus.

I have thought of various concepts throughout campus that Illinibucks could be used for. One of the first things that came to mind is picking out a dorm freshman year. Many students already know which dorm they want to live in during the admission process, while others do not care to decide until Summer. Currently there is a lottery system that randomizes who gets priority, but the Illinibucks would allow students to “pay” for their preferred dorm. 

Another concept that I thought they could be used for is scheduling appointments at the DRES office or for therapy sessions. When I have tried scheduling appointments with the DRES department, I was put on a waitlist for a couple of months. In addition, the DRES department and the university offer counselors and therapists to students; however, it takes a long time for their availability to open up. This also relates to the concept of advising appointments within different departments. Often times the advisors have very busy walk-in hours and are booked throughout the first few weeks of school. Illinibucks can be used to schedule urgent appointments about situations that need attention. I would definitely put my Illinibucks towards DRES, advising, and counseling appointments because they would help me stay on track each semester. 

A concept that was mentioned in the prompt is using Illinibucks for class registration priority, and I think this is interesting because it can be very useful or detrimental to some students. Currently our system allows students with higher credit hours and DRES students have priority for registration. If this is taken away with illinibucks, then upperclassmen might not get into the 400-level classes that they need to graduate. Contrarily, Illinibucks can help all students have a fair chance of getting into classes that they need. This could allow one upperclassman to still have priority over another upperclassman with the same amount of credit hours. Illinibucks can also stop inequality due to the socioeconomic class of students. Currently students can purchase memberships for a monthly fee, which allows members to receive alerts when a class opens up. This allows members to be notified when a class has an opening before other students that do not pay for a membership.

I think the issue with this concept is that there would still be a need for a different prioritization system. If the university were to administer the price of using Ilinibucks too low, then there could be a higher demand than the available supply, which in return creates a shortage. For example, if the university were to set the cost of class registration really low, then a lot of students would want to spend their Illinibucks on this. This would cause large sums of students to register at the same time, so classes would fill up really quickly. If everyone is willing to pay the same amount, then the university would have to raise the price or prioritize classes registration differently. Contrarily, if the price is too high, then students that would not have the ability to pay for prioritization.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanJanuary 19, 2020 at 4:15 AM

    In all my years of using this prompt, you are the first student to mention making appointments in DRES. So let me make one general observation and then see if this jives with your experience. The campus has been growing, in terms of the number of students. The big picture question, then, is how to accommodate that growth so there aren't bottlenecks that are much more than they were in the past. Some courses/services might experience growth in demand beyond the average across campus. Does supply eventually catch up with this or not?

    The Illinibucks idea is a fiction, but you might imagine more of a fiction in certain things. For example, students might get priority to register for one or two courses only, not their full slate of classes. The technology makes that challenging, but conceptually it shouldn't be hard to envision this. Alternatively, for students in a major, the department might pre-populate their schedules, without students registering, and then changes would be managed by the add/drop process.

    I don't know how DRES works this way. But you might ask whether it has popular services at capacity, but less popular services with spare capacity. If so, could some students be routed to those latter services? Absent they they would need more staff and possibly more physical space.

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