In our Illinibucks thought experiment I believe having a large amount of opportunities to spend them would lead to the best overall experience. The student opportunities on campus that I think would benefit from the ability to jump in line follow:
1. Single class registration
I have had problems every semester so far getting into classes necessary for me to complete my academic plan. Most semesters this is only one or two classes. I believe that if there was a way for students to pay with Illinibucks for a single class this could reduce registration stress for many.
2. Dorm room picking
Dorms are allocated based off school year then randomly amongst those of the same year. If someone could pay to pick a certain room I believe many would take the opportunity.
3. Mental health services
The idea of this frankly disgusts me morally, but I will explain myself.
There are two main routes for obtaining mental health through the University. The counseling center has Monday through Friday appointments and you must make them same day. This means that the lines basically fill up at 7:50 AM and you are very lucky to get an appointment if you call much after. McKinley also has counseling appointments and you can book these in advance. In their words: "Appointment schedules book out weeks in advance during much of the fall and spring semester. We recommend the student see their assigned primary caregiver before making an appointment as access is faster and often the primary caregiver can meet the initial student need."
The short of it is that mental health care is constantly in a shortage at this school. If there is any way for a student to get help right when they need it then I think that option should be explored. Therefore if someone in dire need could use their Illinibucks to get a counseling appointment than I think that is better than nothing.
4. Library Study Space
Many times the group study spaces in some of the bigger libraries on campus are all reserved a few days ahead of time. Perhaps there could be a few study spaces set aside for those that wish to use Illinibucks to ensure a spot.
5. Washing and dryer space in the dorms
My freshman year I did laundry at 3 AM every Saturday. There were 4 washers and 6 dryers for about 100 people. Being able to reserve a washer or dryer ahead of time with Illinibucks could make planning laundry time much easier.
6. Seat reservation in class
Some students find it easier to concentrate in class when they are near the front row. If these students have a class across campus that ends 10 minutes before their next one then they will most likely not get their optimal classroom experience. These students could reserve a chair ahead of time with Illinibucks so that they could learn in the way they like to.
Another use case of this could be lefties reserving desks for themselves.
Inefficiencies Created:
In cases 4 and 6 students could make a reservation and then not actually use it. This would result in a wastage of space. I think the best way to solve this inefficiency would be to have seats and study spaces open to all, but if someone decides to pay for it then they have the right to boot out the students using it for free.
In case 5 if someone does not use their reservation I would penalize the student several Illinibucks to dissuade them from wasting the time of others again.
Pricing:
In both the cases of prices being too high or too low then we will return to the system currently in place. When the price for an activity is too high then students will just not use their Illinibucks on it, making everyone have equal access. When the price is too low all students will use their Illinibucks on that activity, meaning they will just have to wait in the same queue as they did before the installation of the Illinibucks program.
Optimal pricing would have the big ticket items, like 1, 2, and 3 use a majority or large portion of the student's Illinibucks. That way only students that really want one of these activities will redeem them. For items that could be repeated, like 4, 5, and 6, the prices would need to be set so that most students won't redeem, yet it is still within reach of those that need the opportunity.
My Illinibucks usage:
I personally would redeem my Illinibucks for single class registration. Getting into the online portion of CS 173 would make my life much easier, yet I don't have the opportunity as CS majors get first pick and that class fills immediately. Since I am not a CS major I cannot get overriden in.
Other Potential Illinibucks Usages:
Printing, food and drink, tickets to games, charitable donation...
These do not pertain to the 'jump to the head of the line' part of the thought experiment. However, I think that having other ways to burn Illinibucks would make it so students that don't care as much to jump in line wouldn't use them just because they have them. This would keep the line jumpers to a small enough amount that line jumping will still result in a better position than not.
1. Single class registration
I have had problems every semester so far getting into classes necessary for me to complete my academic plan. Most semesters this is only one or two classes. I believe that if there was a way for students to pay with Illinibucks for a single class this could reduce registration stress for many.
2. Dorm room picking
Dorms are allocated based off school year then randomly amongst those of the same year. If someone could pay to pick a certain room I believe many would take the opportunity.
3. Mental health services
The idea of this frankly disgusts me morally, but I will explain myself.
There are two main routes for obtaining mental health through the University. The counseling center has Monday through Friday appointments and you must make them same day. This means that the lines basically fill up at 7:50 AM and you are very lucky to get an appointment if you call much after. McKinley also has counseling appointments and you can book these in advance. In their words: "Appointment schedules book out weeks in advance during much of the fall and spring semester. We recommend the student see their assigned primary caregiver before making an appointment as access is faster and often the primary caregiver can meet the initial student need."
The short of it is that mental health care is constantly in a shortage at this school. If there is any way for a student to get help right when they need it then I think that option should be explored. Therefore if someone in dire need could use their Illinibucks to get a counseling appointment than I think that is better than nothing.
4. Library Study Space
Many times the group study spaces in some of the bigger libraries on campus are all reserved a few days ahead of time. Perhaps there could be a few study spaces set aside for those that wish to use Illinibucks to ensure a spot.
5. Washing and dryer space in the dorms
My freshman year I did laundry at 3 AM every Saturday. There were 4 washers and 6 dryers for about 100 people. Being able to reserve a washer or dryer ahead of time with Illinibucks could make planning laundry time much easier.
6. Seat reservation in class
Some students find it easier to concentrate in class when they are near the front row. If these students have a class across campus that ends 10 minutes before their next one then they will most likely not get their optimal classroom experience. These students could reserve a chair ahead of time with Illinibucks so that they could learn in the way they like to.
Another use case of this could be lefties reserving desks for themselves.
Inefficiencies Created:
In cases 4 and 6 students could make a reservation and then not actually use it. This would result in a wastage of space. I think the best way to solve this inefficiency would be to have seats and study spaces open to all, but if someone decides to pay for it then they have the right to boot out the students using it for free.
In case 5 if someone does not use their reservation I would penalize the student several Illinibucks to dissuade them from wasting the time of others again.
Pricing:
In both the cases of prices being too high or too low then we will return to the system currently in place. When the price for an activity is too high then students will just not use their Illinibucks on it, making everyone have equal access. When the price is too low all students will use their Illinibucks on that activity, meaning they will just have to wait in the same queue as they did before the installation of the Illinibucks program.
Optimal pricing would have the big ticket items, like 1, 2, and 3 use a majority or large portion of the student's Illinibucks. That way only students that really want one of these activities will redeem them. For items that could be repeated, like 4, 5, and 6, the prices would need to be set so that most students won't redeem, yet it is still within reach of those that need the opportunity.
My Illinibucks usage:
I personally would redeem my Illinibucks for single class registration. Getting into the online portion of CS 173 would make my life much easier, yet I don't have the opportunity as CS majors get first pick and that class fills immediately. Since I am not a CS major I cannot get overriden in.
Other Potential Illinibucks Usages:
Printing, food and drink, tickets to games, charitable donation...
These do not pertain to the 'jump to the head of the line' part of the thought experiment. However, I think that having other ways to burn Illinibucks would make it so students that don't care as much to jump in line wouldn't use them just because they have them. This would keep the line jumpers to a small enough amount that line jumping will still result in a better position than not.
Of your list, the mental health services are new to me. I don't recall any other student posting on this in previous offerings of the class where I used this prompt. Let's look at this a little more closely, in particular whether the issue is worse than it was in the past, say 5 years ago or 10 years ago.
ReplyDeleteI don't know the answer to that, but as we documented in class earlier in the semester, the number of students has been growing pretty steadily over the past 10 years. So we'd like to know whether the counseling has been growing at the same rate. Again, I don't know, but it would be interesting to find out.
Another possibility is that such services are in greater demand now, on a per student basis. One possible explanation for why is that there is now less stigma associated with accessing these services (as distinct from the underlying need being greater). If that's right, in spite of the congestion in accessing these services, that the demand is there should be seen as a positive. Asking for help when you need it is a good thing.
As i've written in my comments to several other students, one of the things I hoped you would consider in writing this post is whether it would be possible to have a supply response that increased capacity. If so, then the use of Illinibucks for getting priority access might serve as an indicator where capacity increases should happen first. In the case of mental health services, the question is whether the excess demand beyond capacity can be measured. It would be more urgent to increase capacity if that excess demand was large.
As a professor, I know only a little about the Student Affairs side of the University. On the Academic Affairs side I have a better sense of how revenues are allocated. So I can't say whether an increase of mental health services would come from a reallocation within Student Affairs or if, instead, it would require an injection of funds from other sources. That's the sort of questions I had hoped the prompt would help you to consider.
I don't have any concrete data on this either but I think that your idea about a decrease in stigma is very likely on point. I do not know how things worked in the past here in terms of mental health but I find it hard to believe that it could be so understaffed from the start. It would certainly be interesting to get the data on this, but I do not know how legal it is for the university to release that. I do research closely tied with university provided data so I will talk to a few people about obtaining the data.
DeleteI understand your point about using Illinibucks to help utilize funding effectively. I would hope that would work out, but I feel like most of the problems I have outlined are known by the university. In that quote I used about mental health services they show that they know they are not capable of providing the care needed for every student. I do not know where the money would come from to fix these issues either, but I would hazard a guess that numbers 1, 2, and 3 are from different sources, meaning hopefully each problem could be worked on concurrently.
I agree with you that I would use my illinibucks for single class registration. As you mentioned in the blog, I also had a similar experience with registration. When I haven't declared double major in Chemistry, I didn't have any priority to register for that class. So, I had to wait until the restriction was gone and by that time, all spots were already taken. And, I also couldn't override as well.
ReplyDeleteI didn't think of using illinibucks on dorm picking. But, I think it is a good idea since I know one friend of mine who couldn't get into what she wanted to live in. And, she used to complain about the dorm everyday when I was a Freshman. For washing and drying machine in dorm, I think it can be work well or make it worse. If there are many students reserve time to do so in much earlier time, more and more students would need to wait for a long time to get into the line to do laundry. Bur, if there are right amount of demand of reservation using illinibucks, it would perfectly work well and save waiting time for students who reserve.
Last, I think you idea of using illinibucks to reserve group study space in library is good. For me, it was hard to find the available time in group study space on the same day during exam dates. It would be great if students can use their illinibucks to reserve the space when they are need one in desperate.
Overall, I liked the ideas that we can use illinibucks. With illinibucks, I think there should be some limitaion in usage of illinibucks to be fair with all students.