Abstract
Higher education marketplace relies on economic approach theoretic model in how decision makers’ actions differ in different scenarios. Economic models play a major role in predicting and explaining how individuals behave when deciding on choices particularly students in colleges in response to factors influencing decision making. Individual decision makers’ preferable students have been used in this paper in explaining how decision makers behave differently in varying circumstances. Therefore, this paper seeks to discuss the economic definition, objectives and constraints impacting decisions of a student in higher learning marketplace.
Economics is all about making choices and the majority of microeconomics level courses are actually devoted to the economic theory on ways people make decisions. In this case, an individual who is a student is the decision maker. Everybody literally makes several decisions at the course of the day (Toutkoushian & Paulsen, 2006). For instance, what to drink, where to go amongst others. This relates to higher education too in various ways. For the student he or she has to make a decision whether to go to university and also which faculty he joins, whether to shift to another university or to remain, which course to major in, and how much of his or her time to dedicate for attending classes. In essence, the decision depends on the student’s preferences. The student has a stand to pick sides.
It is argued by economists that individual goals and objectives are to get the most out of the utility or satisfaction resulting from their actions (Toutkoushian & Paulsen, 2006). For instance, if a certain amount of money would be given to the student, he would definitely allocate all the money he has to cover for both his higher education fees and as well for meet other personal needs. The student would choose to take the opportunity to utilize all that money to satisfy all his diverse needs at once. According to economists, fixed utility values are not allocated to both services and good, but instead, let people acquire different rate of satisfaction out of similar goods and services (Toutkoushian & Paulsen, 2016). Therefore, since the student has no source of income, he would aim to satisfy all his needs by spending all the money given to him in order to satisfy all his needs.
There are two main constraints that are the student face which impact the level of satisfaction he can attain from the utility (money). First, the student requires a source of income or money so as to buy goods and services. Preferences and decisions will differ if the student receives or has a small amount of money for use, as he would have to behave rationally by limiting his preferences to the suit the limited budget and ends up only satisfying a few of his needs which are basic (Toutkoushian & Paulsen, 2006). The second constraint is the time constraint, sufficient time is required to make a decision which thus symbolizes the student’s resources to achieve top satisfaction. If the student has insufficient time, he will be likely to make bad decisions and ends up using the utility (money) inappropriately by over satisfying some needs while leaving out other important needs. Therefore, the student requires enough time to make good decisions on how to use his utilities to satisfy his needs appropriately.
I choose North Carolina State University – Raleigh for the case study. It is a public institution founded in 1887 with a total of 23, 847 undergraduate enrollment. It covers 2,090 acres, uses a semester-based academic calendar and ranked position 81 in Best Colleges in National Universities, 2018 edition. North Carolina State University’s local students’ school fees amount to $9,058 while for foreign students pay $27,406 in academic year 2017 – 2018 (“How Does North Carolina State Raleigh Rank Among America’s Best Colleges?,” n.d.)