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Rational Students: The Economics of WebReg

Natalie Foong

ID: 14653073

Discussion: Friday 12 PM

As students, we’re all familiar with the class registration system at the University of California – Irvine. Class registration is a bloodbath: competitive, risky, and systematically flawed. Sounds a lot like the American economy. (*Rimshot.* This is not to harp on free markets, however.)

There are several aspects of the class registration system that mirror key concepts in microeconomic theory. Having a grasp of these concepts, and understanding how they can be seen in the all-too-familiar race for classes, may help students understand what inevitable concepts of economics they’re up against.

Classes: A Private Good

Private goods, as we’ve learned in economics, is a good or service that is excludable, and rival in use, meaning that the use of said good can be selectively distributed (not available to all), and one person’s use of the good affects the next person’s, and so on.

In the case of class registration, it’s clear that classes are a private good. Some classes bear major restrictions, making it excludable to a smaller set of students than most, but all classes face rival in usage, since one student’s enrollment in a class lessens the number of seats for the remainder of students.

In this set of classes, you can see that the number of students enrolled in the class is subtracted from the maximum number of spots available, leaving a limited number of spots for the rest of the students that require the class.

The competition itself is not the greatest issue in class registration, however. The problem with the registration process lies in the university’s poor gauging of the number of classes required, resulting in what is known as a shortage, and ultimately forcing students to make decisions for classes at a greater cost to their education.

A Shortage in the Market

The university faces both a need to restrict the number of students to a class, as well as a need to restrict the number of classes offered. The former is necessary because of the scope of certain subject matters; some classes are more efficiently taught in small groups. The latter is necessary because the university faces a limited budget to compensate professors and staff, and having extra classes will undoubtedly cost more money. However, this causes a problem where students face a shortage of classes that they need. We can think of this situation as a price ceiling of sorts, or in this case, a student ceiling.

According to demand laws, a greater number of students should yield a greater number of classes. However, the university cannot supply an infinite number of classes, nor can infinitely many students take a class, and as a result, a ceiling is put in place. This ceiling prevents over a maximum number of students from enrolling, but the result is a quantity supplied that is less than a quantity demanded. 

To fix this issue, let’s assume the school removes the ceiling. As we can see, the school has this many number of classes, but the supply does not meet the demand. To ensure a market equilibrium, the school could do the economically-correct thing, which is operate as a movement along the curve, and increase the number of students slightly, as well as the number of classes. However, if the school wanted to keep the number of classes exactly the same, the school could also in theory shift the supply curve left by increasing the number of students per class.

Negative Externalities of the System

Because of the way that the system prevents a large number of students from registering for the classes they require, students now face a greater dilemma as consumers of this class market when they make their rational decisions to enroll in classes. This issue is a cost of the registration system that wasn’t a part of the plan, making it a negative externality.

Let’s say that Student A is an Economics major. As an Economics major, Student A needs to take Math 4 and Econ 15A before taking most upper-division courses, but it seems that these two classes were co-requisites for each other (this rule is no longer in place as of 2019). This means both classes need to be taken at the same time, or not at all. Both of these classes are incredibly impacted, and Math 4 has less than 100 spots in the class, with one class offered per quarter. This makes enrolling in the class very difficult, considering the number of Economics majors that also need to take the class.

Without enough classes offered, Math 4 fills up within the first week of class enrollment, and Student A is out of luck. Student A must enroll in another class, but what was the opportunity cost?

Given that these classes are prerequisites for a number of upper-division classes, Student A not has to wait another quarter to enroll in the class, but falls behind in completing their major-required classes as well. The lost class credit of Math 4, as well as the lost content that could have been learned, are explicit costs of the shortage of classes. Being unable to complete other classes while waiting to take Math 4 costs Student A time, an implicit cost of the situation.

Conclusion

As you can probably infer, students with later enrollment windows are faced with a disadvantage when enrolling for classes, but the competition isn’t always friendly. Though the free market can be an efficient and industrious way to run an economy, it isn’t always the best way to run class registration.