For a lot of students out there now the reality of the "opportunity cost" is skewed. They will invest enormous amounts of time and effort in being the best in u

For a lot of students out there now the reality of the "opportunity cost" is skewed. They will invest enormous amounts of time and effort in being the best in uni even if this alone may not bring them a guaranteed leg up over the competition when they face the adult working world. My academic career was always revolving around the top but never quite at the top. So eventually I gave up on investing more effort for diminishing returns and focused on having an advantage the others weren't pursuing. I started working very early, with some embarrassingly shitty jobs at first, each of which allowed me to get the next slightly less embarrassingly shitty job subsequently and so on. I'm glossing over what could have been a long string of lucky breaks that probably made all the difference. Anyway, by the time we finished university my colleagues who were right at the top got catapulted into the working world all the way to the level I had years before. Not quite ground level but not far. And I can still see that handicap in most of their careers even now, decades later.