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Where should you send your kid to college? - Marginal REVOLUTION

marginalrevolution.com · 476 words · saved by 1 readers

Attendance decisions are due May 1, so what should you do? If parents (and their children) are loaded with biases, is behavioral economics useful? I suspect the core bias is parents wanting to feel they have done everything possible to help the kid, rather than maximizing the kid’s (or the world’s) expected return. This will lead parents to ignore the upsides of risky courses of action. Who wants to send the kid to the wrong school and feel guilty for the rest of your life? But if the school works out especially well — your kid wins a Nobel Prize rather than your kid "merely" receiving tenure at an Ivy League school — the parents are not so much happier. "More pride" is only a little better than "pride," and most of your kid’s accomplishments you will overvalue and exaggerate anyway. So parents put too much stress on the possible downside and not enough weight on the potential upside of a choice. If your kid is very smart and takes plenty of initiative, maybe you should send him

Attendance decisions are due May 1, so what should you do? If parents (and their children) are loaded with biases, is behavioral economics useful? I suspect the core bias is parents wanting to feel they have done everything possible to help the kid, rather than maximizing the kid’s (or the world’s) expected return. This will lead parents to ignore the upsides of risky courses of action. Who wants to send the kid to the wrong school and feel guilty for the rest of your life? But if the school works out especially well — your kid wins a Nobel Prize rather than your kid "merely"

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