Here at the University of Illinois, we as students become conditioned to the idea of waiting for services and goods that we need. With 50,000 undergraduate students alone, this phenomenon is to be expected. Whether they manifest themselves as wait lists for admission, competition for scarce class availability, or even something as simple as waiting in line to checkout at the Illini Union Bookstore. I myself experience this everyday.
Just a couple weeks ago, I attended the Business Career Fair along with thousands of my peers and waited in line for hours over the course of two days simply to get a few minutes with recruiters from various companies. Students from nearly every college, LAS, the College of Business, the College of engineering, and so forth were all swimming among the crowds of people just to get a shot at an interview. Some of the people in line were simply there to get extra credit for career preparation courses, while others were graduate students looking for an experienced hire positions. While I understand this is simply a part of the recruitment process, I couldn't help but think that there must be a more efficient way to allocate applicants to recruiters. In this sense, the idea of "Illinibucks" could be that more efficient system. So long as a scarce number of Illinibucks are issued to students, then they could buy, sell, and trade to fit their needs. This would increase efficiency because students willing to spend more Illinibucks to achieve their personally optimal utility from various university services could do so, and those willing to spend less would thus receive lower priority.
In many of my economics courses to date, we have discussed similar cases of allocative efficiency using the idea of vouchers. A popular example is for public eduction. Why should students have to expect a certain quality of education because of where they live or whether their parents can afford to send them to a private school? Given a government voucher system, it is arguable that those who have the most to gain, i.e. would get the most utility out of a certain school, could use their voucher to opt out of public school and apply that implicit subsidy to private education. Alternatively, many scholars have discussed the benefits of cap and trade emissions regulation by issuing a finite number of pollution vouchers and allowing companies to trade amongst themselves to achieve efficient allocation of pollution allowances without exceeding an aggregate cap.
In relation to our class discussion of transaction costs, I believe that an Illinibucks system based on free trade between students could truly alleviate some of the congestion that occurs when trying to run such a large bureaucracy. This in turn could increase allocative efficiency of services to students and thus solve the issues we have in terms of getting priority for certain services.
You are the first among the posts I'm reading today to mention the Business Career Fair as a candidate for use of Illinibucks. So let's ask whether the current system is "efficient" or not. But I encourage you to take the recruiter's perspective in thinking about this first. Given that there are many more possible students they might interview (because of the large numbers that you suggest) do they end up interviewing the "right" subset of students? I really don't know the answer to this question, but I can envision that if there were a way to pre-screen students for the ones they'd prefer to interview, then they'd have done that already.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, you can take the student perspective and ask whether students end up with the right sort of interviews. It may be that doing some of this is simply good training for later. But if you are doing it to find an internship, rather than a permanent job, do students know where to look for those?
By the way, you over stated how many undergraduates there are at the U of I. There are a lot, for sure. But .the number is a bit more than 32,000. (See line 3660.).
Sincerest apologies for the inaccurate attendance numbers. My initial information was simply the top result from a google search, however now that I look at the university's self published facts page I see we have around 45,000 total students with just over 32,000 being undergraduates.
ReplyDeleteLooking at the career fair from the recruiters' perspective, it seems they are already doing what they can to achieve effective matching between candidates and positions. Clearly there are more students seeking employment in this country than any single firm can hire at a given point in time, so the first level of selection process would in fact be a company's decision to allocate resources for scouting the U of I, most likely based on the rankings and reputation held by various departments and colleges here on campus. Second, of all the networking events that occur here every semester, choosing the College of Business Career Fair narrows the scope of their search from the entire U of I to students who are in relevant majors and seeking finance/accounting/analyst type roles. It also limits potential hires to those with the networking skills to effectively navigate such an event, which I believe many companies do intentionally. Then from that point, determination of interview invitations are determined by qualification and experience (e.g. student resumes) and follow up communications with specific recruiters. Although a recruiter may personally speak with hundreds of applicants during a career fair, the select few who actually continue on to interviews have been screened rather thoroughly from their perspective and will continue on to a pool of applicants from other universities. From the recruiter perspective, this process is both effective in highlighting competitive candidates as well as efficient in removing noncompetitive ones. I myself can agree with this perspective since it is simply irrational to believe that one can ever screen every single student seeking employment and then evaluate the "best" candidate in a timely manner and thus must "satisfice."
From the student perspective however, this matching process can still be very inefficient. Information regarding available positions, either internship or full-time, can be found through I-Link or on specific companies' hiring page. Assuming candidates perform their due diligence, they can screen out positions they are not interested in or qualified for before ever stepping into the fair. From there, students can target the companies/positions they are going to pursue and begin the sometimes arduous networking process.
In a setting like the career fair, Illinibucks could help make sure that students with the most interest relative to other students are given the chance to speak with a desired company. If everyone has exactly 100 Illinibucks to spend in order to improve priority status, they must choose which companies to spend them on and how much to spend on any one company. This would ensure that only those willing to spend their Illinibucks to see a given company will do so, which will ideally reduce extraneous interactions. Also, this would create a gradience in priority and allow recruiters to speak with the most interested candidates first. If someone is allocating 20 Illinibucks to gain priority from five different companies, they would be given lower priority than someone who is willing to spend 50 Illinibucks on only two companies. This would force students to be more careful with their choice in lines and prioritize the companies in which they are interested in while simultaneously allowing recruiters to distinguish students who are genuinely interested from those who simply want to practice their professional interaction skills.