Undergraduate course enrollment starts next Tuesday, and students are already beginning to worry.
“I want a mother-figure to do enrollment for me,” joked second-year English student Jackson Leung.
Some university officials seem to be channeling Leung’s anxiety. USAC Academic Affairs Commissioner Addar Weintraub has proposed modifications to the current enrollment system. The Academic Senate’s Undergraduate Council, which regulates the system, has also been mulling over ideas to make it more equitable and efficient. I’d like to propose just one more idea.
The registrar should run an auction for seats in courses.
The goal of an efficient enrollment system is to allocate limited seats to the students who need them most. As it stands, however, the intensity of one student’s need relative to another’s is hard to pin down.
That is a big problem. A fourth-year may need a biology GE so he can graduate on time, or an athlete may need a math lecture that does not conflict with her morning workout. The list goes on.
It’s impossible, however, to rank all these needs in a complete order.
The current system tries to proxy need by giving enrollment priority to students with more units, athletic obligations and other qualities that affect the amount they “need” classes. The trouble is that the system isn’t perfect, and students whose needs don’t give them priority get cheated.
An auction solves this problem by forcing students to translate their own nebulous notion of need into something quantifiable ““ a willingness to pay. That way, everyone can be sure courses are allocated equitably and efficiently to those who “need” them most.
Here’s how it would work: At the beginning of each quarter, students would receive an allotment of 5,000 points, called BruinBucks.
The enrollment process would then comprise successive rounds of auctions. In the first round, students divvy up their points and place bids for the classes they want.
Suppose a certain Renaissance student wants to take molecular genetics, early romantic poetry, abstract algebra and advanced basket weaving. She really needs basket weaving to complete her engineering degree, so she bids 2,500 BruinBucks for that course and 500 on the other three. Once the bids are placed, a computer decides the winners.
Suppose there are 25 seats in the weaving course. The computer enrolls the 25 highest bidders and they have to pay the “clearing price,” or the bid of 26th highest bidder, like an eBay auction.
Students who fail to win keep their BruinBucks and can use them again in the next auction. The auctions repeat every few days until courses are full. Next quarter, everyone starts over with 5,000 BruinBucks.
This auction is much fairer than the current system. If our student fails to get into basket weaving, she’ll have plenty of BruinBucks left over to place high bids in other courses. If those courses are full, it will be only because others who needed them more enrolled. If everyone starts with the same amount of money, there’s no way that the outcome can be unfair.
“It would be nerve-racking,” worried Emily Pichler, a first-year psychology student.
Indeed, it sounds a little complicated, and people tend, in general, to be reticent about change. But in the long run, auctions could be less stressful than the current system. Once students gain experience, they’ll have more control over a process that once seemed determined only by luck. Counselors could train incoming students to use the system, perhaps with a tutorial game on MyUCLA.
Some graduate schools, notably the Wharton School of Business, have had terrific success with similar programs.
“It really puts you in charge,” then-Wharton student Karin Magnuson, told the New York Times in 1999.
Another virtue of the auction system is its flexibility. If administrators still wanted to retain a priority system, they could simply give priority students extra BruinBucks. Disabled students could get 500 extra, and those in honors could get 250.
Ultimately, the long-run remedy to our enrollment woes has to go beyond the auction. The university needs to start admitting students based on their interests, making it more competitive for students to enter into top-heavy majors such as economics and political science.
Until the university makes this change however, enrollment will still be a bear. An auction is a novel way to give students more control over the process and increase fairness.
What do you think of the auction? Tell Reed at treed@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.