Opportunity Cost vs. Sunk Cost

These costs come in units of money, right? Like, monetary units. So they’re measured as amounts. Makes sense. But this stuff has been hammered into us since high school,

and I’m too lazy to chew through it all again here with my mouth half-numb. Let me just hit opportunity cost and sunk cost through a fun analogy and move on.

Picture a high schooler picking a university.

There are countless opportunity costs out there.

But for most students, a big chunk of those are unavailable opportunities. (Not sure that’s the proper term — sorry lol.)

Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Oxford, Peking — those guys are what I’m calling unavailable opportunities.

You just mentally cross them off. haha

OK so let’s say our actual lineup is Cheonha U, Hacheon U, Syungka U, Bingkogbbang U, and Inha U.

(I can’t write the real names, lol — only the easy-to-roast one gets its real name.)

Everyone in the lineup is reachable with my CSAT score.

So they’ve all dropped into the available opportunities bucket. And I rank them: Inha U is what I think is the best pick, Cheonha is second-best, and so on down.

I mean, wouldn’t anyone go best over second-best?

So the moment I commit to Inha U,

opportunity cost = Cheonha U, and everything from third onward is just… out of mind. Gone.

So I show up at Inha, but the second I’m in, things start going sideways.

The school’s rankings? Plummeting.

Student council, president, all kinda off — zero unity, vibes getting worse and worse,

and on top of that Hanjin, the conglomerate backing Inha, just got named one of the top 5 companies most likely to go under within 5 years. So the funding for the school is drying up.

My life is RUINED~~~

That’s when “opportunity cost” comes screaming back to mind,

but time doesn’t run backwards. Kinda like the second law of thermodynamics. Irreversible.

At this point, the choice I’d locked in as the best — Inha U — has officially become my “sunk cost.”

This sunk cost one really hits home for me. hahahahahahahahaha

P.S.

This was just an analogy to explain the concept, obviously.

I don’t actually think the name on your diploma decides your life. hahaha

Coming to uni, all I found was surface-level studying,

and at the institution literally responsible for higher education, rote memorization and cram-style schooling still hasn’t gone anywhere….

And the ranking-and-sorting of students? Yeah, that never stopped either.

So screw opportunity cost,

I’ll just

keep grinding…

(I will)……

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Originally written in Korean on my Naver blog (2016-07). Translated to English for gdpark.blog.