Earlier this evening I participated in the annual Bates College housing lottery. The supposedly efficient process was—and, assuming they don't have some brilliant, massive overhaul planned, is—far from efficient. I would also argue the process is also incredibly inequitable. But that's a more subjective question.

Ideally the housing office would simply charge students higher prices to live in the dorms with higher demand and lower prices to live in the dorms with lower demand. I like the idea of some kind of auction. Of course, this would price some students out of certain buildings, creating the possibility of a chasm between students with more money and those with less money. It seems understandable, from the perspective of harmony and equality, that surpluses and shortages are not cleared out with an auction-style mechanism.

Still, the method the school has chosen to mitigate the potential haves-versus-have nots issue is far from satisfactory. Students who value certain rooms more than others can't express their preferences in a meaningful way.

It seems to me that the College should give every student some number of virtual "Bates Points," a sort of virtual currency. The College could easily restrict the exchange and resale of the Points, eliminating or at worst mitigating the possibility of wealthier students exploiting other students without the same financial resources. These points could be redeemable for a variety of scarce resources, housing included.

The College uses completely random lotteries to allocate a number of scarce goods. Students don't receive a parking space automatically: they put themselves into a parking lottery. Seats in popular classes don't go to students who value the seat the most: they're distributed at random to those who put themselves into the pool for the seats. (Granted, the class selection process isn't quite as unjust as some of the other lotteries: student can appeal the outcomes.)

Presumably, some students value having an on-campus parking space more than having first pick in the housing selection process. And I suspect other students value priority in class choices more than having an on-campus parking spot.

We should simply give every student a fixed, equal number of Points at the beginning of each school year. I have my doubts about giving more senior students more perks purely on the basis of seniority—more senior employees in the "real world" generally make more than their more junior colleagues because they have more experience and are thus more valuable—but it wouldn't be too unreasonable to give more senior students more points.

Then, students could use their points in an auction to pick their rooms, parking spaces, classes and other scarce resources. This could all be done online, eliminating the need for an multi-day, multi-hour process that requires compensating an untold number of employees and volunteers. Students could simply log on to the Internet, put in bids on rooms they wanted and repeat. As soon as no one outbids a given student after some sort of waiting period, say 24 or 48 hours, the student receives the room and the number of points they bid is deduced from their accounts. No mad rush, no huge staff to coordinate and pay, and students have a more meaningful way of expressing their preferences. More students receive rooms they want, or rooms closer in quality to the rooms they want.

This system also helps mitigate the problem created by students who choose a room and don't return following semester, depriving others students from a room one of them might have wanted. In this system, if a student decides to take the semester off or goes abroad unexpectedly, the room would just go back on the market. Other students interested in the room could put in bids on the newly available room, and, presumably, it would go to the person who valued it the most.

My system would probably work best if students have a wide variety of ways to dispense their points. If there aren't enough places to spend them, it's easy to conceive of a situation where the market fails to clear because too many students decide to allocate the same number of points to a given room or parking spot. A simple proof of concept software implementation of the idea could be a very good spring break project.

Of course, at least on the housing side, this is really just a symptom of a deeper problem. As one College executive—who shall remain unnamed—put it, many of the residence halls on campus don't meet "modern standards." The brand new residence hall I'm living in this year boasts, among other amenities, network infrastructure that copes with modern Internet use patterns. The heated competition for certain rooms would not be quite as heated if there weren't such a huge chasm between some rooms and others.

Even if every room had casement windows and hand carved walnut furniture, though, this system would still reduce the stress students experience and the number of people required to assign students to one room or another. I hope someone with power reads this.