Economics in Choosing Class
by
Jackie, Yixuan, Van, Shijia
Jessica is an incoming Mount Holyoke freshman. She is asking
advice for choosing classes. She is very interested in music and sports and,
she is planning to major in Music. After researching through the music and PE
class catalogues, she wants to choose between Scuba diving and swimming class,
violin and piano class. To add more fun into her study life in Mount Holyoke,
she decides to take the riding class and join the equestrianism team. As a
freshman, she only has a very limited budget--2000$ to spend for the whole
semester, and the budget is for mainly four parts—riding class, swimming class,
music class and recreations, so she has to spend the money wisely.
Jessica loves swimming and she
definitely wants to take her swimming skill onto next level. She starts to look
at the PE classes, and she has two choices, regular swimming class or scuba
diving class. If she takes Scuba diving class, she will eventually take the
Scuba diving test and earn the certification. In this way, taking scuba diving
class and taking certification test are complements.
However, this would cost over 500$ not even including the travel expense. This
takes almost ¼ of her budget, which is not very ideal. Then, look at the other
option—regular swimming class. If she decides to take swimming class, she would
only need to pay $25. Paying less money but enjoying swimming at the same time
makes taking a swimming class a good deal. Its cost strictly limits within the budget constraint and still leaves room
for other expenses, so she finally decides to take the swimming class, instead
of the expensive scuba diving.
Jessica also has another
hobby--horse riding. She knows Mount Holyoke has a brilliant equestrianism team
and dreams of joining the varsity team. Taking horse-riding class costs approximately
$800. Of course, for her, this is a huge amount of money. However, she is
informed that as long as she makes to the varsity team, she does not need to
pay for horse riding anymore. We are confident that she is talented and will
eventually be accepted to the varsity team after taking several lessons of
horse riding. The diagram of her budget
constraint will look like this:
As Jessica’s hard work pays off, she
will be able to enjoy horse riding for free. This satisfies her budget
constraints and also leaves enough money for other activities.
Among all the instruments, Jessica
chose violin and piano but she cannot decide between these two. She asked some
professors from the music department, and she was told that she could take
private lessons for both violin and piano. Furthermore, the two lessons cost
nearly the same. Because of the limited
budget, Jessica can only take one of these two lessons in order to learn
the basic of music, which means violin lesson and piano lesson are substitutes. However in order to
practice at home, she needs to own either a piano or a violin. Since Jessica’s
mom had been a violinist, Jessica is able to get one free violin from her mom
so that she can practice in her dorm. In this way, violin and violin class are complements. On the other hand, so are
piano and piano class. If she chooses to play piano, she has to buy one for
practice, which cost far more than the free violin and outweighs her original
budget, so she can’t even afford it. Reasoning through, she found taking violin
class is very economic for her. Thus, she decides to sign up violin class in
the fall semester.
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