Paths and what closes off
Nothing in this module is about a door slamming. It is about doors closing slowly enough that nobody notices the day they shut, and about how badly people misjudge which ones those are.
First, three from Part 1
From memory. Nothing below is gated on getting these right.
Guess before you read on
The same degree, started at 45
Part 1 found that a four year degree costing $30,000 a year catches its own cost at around age 32, for someone who started at 18 and gave up $25,000 a year of earnings to do it.
Now the identical degree at the identical price, started at 45 by someone earning the high school median of $48,360. Note that two things have changed, not one: the age, and what they are giving up to study. They stop working at 65.
At what age does it catch its cost? Answer 99 if you think it never does.
Why later is worse, twice over
The obvious reason is that fewer years remain to recoup. That one everybody has.
The second is the one that gets missed. You give up more while you study, because by then you were earning more. An 18 year old stepping away from work gives up very little, because they had little. A 45 year old gives up a real salary, every year, on top of the tuition.
Both effects push in the same direction, so the answer moves faster than the lost years on their own would explain. Here is what path dependency actually means. Nobody has barred the route. The same route simply charges you a different price depending on when you take it.
The last age it still works
Set a path and a cost, then move the starting age and watch the break-even cross your retirement. The figure worth having is the last one: the latest age at which starting still pays before you stop working.
Changing the level you are currently at resets what you earn to that level's median. Type over it. Someone at 45 usually earns well above the median for their level, and raising this figure is how you see the second effect: not just fewer years left, but more given up to buy them.
Hard to undo, or just loud
People sort decisions by how permanent they feel. How permanent something feels tracks how public and how loud it was. Those two come apart constantly, and always in the direction that hurts: the loud reversible decisions get the agonizing, and the quiet irreversible ones get made by default.
Sort each of these into one of three boxes. Two of them are in the third box, and one of those is the most expensive thing in this entire course.
Four situations you have not seen
Each turns on telling the two kinds of cost apart.
Write it down
Answers stay on this device. Nothing is graded and nothing is sent anywhere.
1. A decision ahead of you
Name one you expect to make in the next couple of years. Which of the three boxes does it belong in, and what exactly would it cost to reverse? Put a number or a length of time on that cost. "It would be hard" tells you nothing you can use.
2. What is happening by default
The third box fills up with things nobody decided. Name something quiet and hard to reverse that is going on in your life right now because no one has acted on it. This is the hardest question on the page and the one worth the most.
3. Something treated as heavier than it is
Now the reverse. Name a decision you or someone you know is treating as enormous which would actually be cheap to undo. What is the real cost of getting it wrong?
Check yourself
Answer each one before revealing ours. If you read our answer first you will agree with it, which tells you nothing.
1. Two reasons later is worse
Name both reasons retraining at 45 is harder to justify than at 18. Most people have one of them.
2. The right sorting question
Why is "what would it cost to reverse" a better question than "how permanent does this feel"?
3. The shape of the worst ones
What do the decisions in the third box have in common, beyond being irreversible?
4. Break the model
Name something the switching panel leaves out that would change what you should actually do.
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