Say, the 3 prospective courses I have shortlisted are French, Guitar and Business Management. I am interested in each of these, but my motivation for taking each is different.
In order to arrive at a decision, I would first like to list out the benefits (profit) and drawbacks (cost) of taking each course. The benefits could be pure enjoyment, learning useful skills, a strengthened CV for college applications and the opportunity to assess my interest for taking up a subject as my college major. The drawbacks of taking a particular course could be bad grades, large quantity of coursework or very high difficulty level of the course.
Learning French would be fun and I would get to learn a foreign language. Knowledge of the language could also strengthen my college application. Learning a new language would however require a lot of hard work and could take up too much of my study time.
Studying Business Management would give me an opportunity to assess whether I would like to take it up as my college major. There would be lots of coursework but I don’t think the level of difficulty would be very high. However, people in the course may be too competitive and getting good grades may not be easy.
Taking the course on Guitar would be surely the most fun. I’d get to learn to play guitar and impress girls when I get to college. Practicing time would not count as work but as leisure. Getting good grades in the course should not be difficult either, because the professor is quite lenient.
I would choose to take the elective course – Business Management, after analyzing the trade-offs involved in this decision-making task, on the basis of 2 of Mankiw’s decision making principles, as explained below.
One of Mankiw’s decision making principles is concerned with ‘opportunity cost’. The cost of taking up a particular course is the lost opportunity of being able to take the better of the other two courses. When I compare my alternatives on this parameter, I find that the cost of not being able to try out Business Management could be the highest in the long run. I could learn French or Guitar later, in college, but I must make the decision to apply for a business school now.
In another one of his principles, Mankiw states that ‘rational people think at the margin’. Thus, I must ask myself whether the benefits of a particular course outweigh its drawbacks. If I really want to learn French, I would have to devote too much of my time in learning French and it could result in bad grades even in other subjects. Moreover, if I am so inspired to learn the language, I could learn it using online resources myself, during my vacations. Similarly, I could learn guitar in my vacations. On the other hand, studying business management would teach me a lot, and help me make an important decision. Having the knowledge for making this decision is more important than just getting good grades in the present semester. Therefore, even drawbacks such as large amount of coursework and possibly unimpressive grades are justified in this case.
Works Cited
Mankiw, N G. Principles of Economics. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning, 2009.
