Illinibucks

The idea of Illinibucks is really interesting. The college system involving with "buying priviledges" is similar to free market in capitalism. In the current system, university considers the needs of senior and junior for the graduation and systematically provides privilege to them. It also offers students with good academic performance some rewards, such as giving James Scholar privilege in class registration, in order to encourage students participate in more honor programs and discovery. Moreover, sometimes the priority in course registration depends on major and college. Some course opening will first fulfill the need of students from the major and college, then open to all students.

In our current system, since our rights in making important choices are constrained by university policy, there will be some inconveniences for students who are not capable to choose their highest perference. The other candidates for Illinibucks include lining up for the restaurant during lunchtime and making appointment with professors and other organizations on campus. But I'll focus on course registration.

I would consider Illinibucks will be threatened to senior who have needs for the privilege, and unfair for those who pay efforts to earn privilege, such as James Scholar. For people who already have high priority in class registration, they basically will not choose to purchase the priority in registering the class. The utility of priority might be greater for those who have less privilege and the privilege means, "have or have not," and lower for those already earn some priority and the privilege means "have a better situation." If I were in such system, I would definitely use Illinibucks to purchase priority in my graduation requirement, even though I already have priority in course registration as senior standing and James Scholar. It is related to game theory because I don't know other's action and don't want to lose my priority in the game.

Price setting of Illinibucks will be complicated and problematic if the price is too low or too high. If the price is set too low, Illinibucks will make no difference when everyone has the same priority. If the price is set too high, there might be less incentive for general public to purchase Illinibucks, and only wealthier students can be benefit. It will be unfair for the allocation of resource and contradicted to the mission of the university. And we should also consider whether the system allow auction or not, which means students can pay more to get prior in the line. If so, the unfairness will be more serious. The college system will be disorganized because price discrimination exists and there will be fair amount deadweight lost. Moreover, just like people dealing with monetary policy, university need to think about how many Illinibucks they "prints." When something becomes a currency in university, we might worry about the inflation and deflation.

In my opinion, a relatively fair condition is every student get a fixed amount of Illinibucks when they start their college life. As the resource is scarce, they can only allocate their bucks in limited ways. And we should have a complete pricing system if we decide to issue Illinibucks, For example, considering class registration, university can charge more Illinibucks on some popular and small classes, and less bucks for the others. In this case, students will carefully think about whether they split their resource in minor purposes or pour the majority of resource in something they really want to do. However, to ensure the efficiency of the system, university should ban the black market and keep an individual balance on every student.

In all, I consider Illinibucks is problematic rather than beneficial. Since all students enroll in the university all pay the fair amount of tuition, they should have a regulated order to use the resource and an honor system to reward their efforts. Even we have some ideal policies and system to ensure the function of Illinibucks, it is not applicable for the university because it require lots of spending on research. I feel lucky that we don't have Illinibucks.