Trade off is a practice of lessening or forgoing one or more important things in order to get or increase other desirable items so as the total reward or effectiveness is optimal. In other words, a trade off can be said to be a sacrifice of one item in place of another. The trade off usually occurs if some conditions exist that make it impossible for a person to acquire all the things he/she wants at the same time. In economics, the trade off is referred as opportunity cost, which means that the one of the alternative costs must be done away to obtain a certain item. Many conditions lead to a trade off, but the main condition is the amount of money a person has for use. In a business, there are many trades off that occur, but a choice need to be made on the best option. For example, a business may have several projects to undertake like purchasing of a new machine, building of a business premise, buying of business van and increasing the employees’ salaries. For a consumer, the decision may be to choose on the items he wants to buy for example, buying a car instead of using public car on the way to work. The society in general may choose from many available community needs that are important or urgent like building of water tanks instead of constructing a community hall. All the available choices need to be analyzed to determine which need to be taken first. Many times in life, one is faced with many trade offs that sometimes it becomes hard to make the decision on the item or situation to choose since all seem to be important. For instance, when I was finished high school, I had two choices to make concerning the college education. I wanted to go to college for a diploma in accounting which could take less time to study and therefore get a job within the next three years. The same time, I needed to have a degree course in Economics in one of the universities. The course usually takes four years. I had to make a choice either to study accounting for three years and get a job or to go for the degree course for four years. The advantage of the degree courses is that I could land a well paying job afterwards than the accounting job, but I had to wait longer. I later made a choice of pursuing the economics course since it is the future that mattered lot than the present. Since the derived benefits from the degree course was more than the accounting course, then it was important to choose on over the other. After deciding on taking the economics course, the other problem was to make a choice from where I wanted to pursue the course from either from the public university or private. Private universities are said to have good learning environment since they are not crowded. They are also less affected by student and lecturers strikes. Despite all their advantages, they are very expensive for a middle aged student to afford. On the other hand, public universities have a lot of educational facilities, enough lecturers and above all they are affordable by any person. It was very difficult for me to know to which university I will go, but after laying down all the advantages and the disadvantages of both universities I decided to take on the public. The r