Question

Abby is debating whether she should take a big loan to go to a graduate school or continue whit their daily boring job.

which type of motivational conflict does abby experience above?

How can graduate schools helps people like abby to resolve their motivational conflict to enroll in graduate programs . please list two different stratergies focusing on different aspects?

Answer 1

The background for this answer will be provided by the Motivation Equation MEVID:

Motivation = [(Expectancy x Value) / (Impulsivity x Delay)]

which is to be interpreted as saying that

Motivation is directly (positively) related to

i) Expectancy or Probability of Success: We feel more motivated to do something if there's a realistic chance of succeeding;

^ that's (one explanation for) why students from certain backgrounds do worse than others: not genetics, but rather looking around at family / community members and coming to the subconscious conclusion of inevitable defeat deals a death blow to the motivation needed to foresake leisure and/or low-skilled employment and study instead.

ii) Value, or how much the desired outcome is perceived to be worth it: economics is the study of incentives, the incentive exists because of desire to consume Value, more Value translates to stronger incentive.

and Motivation is inversely (negatively) related to

iii) Impulsivity or Opportunity Cost: the more options there are for what we could rather be doing, and the more enticing these options are, the less motivated we'll be to start one activity (because paralysis by analysis) and fall into a state of flow doing it (because constant distracting thoughts have to be controlled using willpower, a finite resource)

iv) Delay or intertemporal discounting: The further away in time the desired outcome is perceived to be, the less motivated we are to put effort towards it. This explains why we experience a spike in motivation a week before the exam: now the desired outcome (being able to write well on the test) is only 168 hours away rather than months away.
^ David Laibson has talked about this in discussions on the "pull of instant gratification"; humans have hyperbolic discounting bias and choose a smaller immediately-available reward over a larger-reward that comes with a delay, even if the total value of that larger reward (even after normal exponential discounting) is more than the value of the smaller reward; google Stanford marshmellow experiment for more reading.

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The last point iv) Delay is most relevant to the question here.
Abby is biased towards short-run hits of gratification (she's likely a fellow member of the want-it-now generation, as somebody once called millenials)
so even if going with higher education will bring significantly more value to her over time
she's taking (what is called) the Path of Least Effort

Graduate schools can employ the simplistic modelling of behavior provided by MEVID to come up with many possible strategies (or combinations of tactics): pick one component of EVID and brainstorm a tactic to address it.

Some exampes:

i) Increase Expectancy component by having a roster of successful alumni across industries and the world, but also across backgrounds; show that there's something for everyone, that this is the place where weak students are nurtured (and not ignored to their own fate).
ii) Increase Value component by achieving market differentiation i.e. offering side-benefits like unique campus culture which will not be available anywhere else in the world; (perceived) scarcity drives up (perceived) Value
iii) Reduce Impulsivity by offering free-of-cost student counsellors to potential applicant(s) even before their admission, to sit down and honestly decide together whether the benefits outweigh the costs given that particular applicant's short-term and long-term goals. People who do come on board are the ones who pass through this filter, and are thus committed candidates by definition - this has network externality benefits (committed students inspire other students to become committed themselves)
iv) Reduce Delay by tying up with corporate entities to offer immersive (and paying) internships; Northeastern University in the States provides a good example of execution.
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