Practice Rooms in Old Cabell Hall

Old Cabell Hall is the current home of UVA’s music department, and it has twelve practice modules. With over 16,000 undergraduate students, UVA has only twelve spaces in which student musicians can practice. So, as you can imagine, during busy hours (anytime between 11 AM and 5 PM), there is a giant waitlist for these rooms, excluding any student who can’t wait in Old Cabell for several hours in the middle of the day from using the practice modules at all during those times. This creates substantial deadweight loss – this public good is seriously underprovided, and the quality of the good is quite poor as well (the practice rooms are very small and stuffy, making very unsuitable acoustic spaces for most instruments). However, there is no incentive to create more practice rooms or to improve the ones we do have, because the Music Department would not gain anything directly from providing better options, and no students would fund it themselves because of the Free Rider problem.

However, there is a solution. If students were able to rent these practice facilities during peak hours rather than use them for free, those who need to use them most (e.g. Performance Concentration majors, students with especially loud instruments that cannot be practiced in dorms, students practicing for an upcoming audition, etc.) would be much more likely to be able to use these facilities, and students for whom the benefits do not outweigh the costs would practice elsewhere, or at a different time. I bet you’re wondering what the Music Department could do with all of the funds from their new rental fees. Create new practice modules, perhaps. Maybe even work on the acoustics of the ones that already exist. The possibilities are vast, but not as vast as the room for improvement from our current system!