Abstract

International higher-education choices are sequential commitments often funded and evaluated by more than one family member. Even when new information weakens the attractiveness of an option, students and parents may continue because withdrawal would make earlier expenditure, public announcements or imagined futures feel wasted. This conceptual article develops a family-level account of commitment lock-in, distinguishing it from rational persistence under genuine future switching costs. Integrating sunk-cost theory, escalation of commitment, reference dependence, mental accounting, status-quo bias and regret, it proposes that financial, effort, identity and reputational investments can be distributed across family members who do not share the same psychological reference point. Prestige can function both as a legitimate prospective benefit and as a retrospectively defended social endowment. Six testable propositions address post-commitment reference-point shifts, publicly visible status, distributed mental accounts, Security–Status–Freedom orientations, prospective-reset procedures and pre-specified review triggers. The argument extends existing applications of sunk-cost theory to education by specifying whose investment matters, how public commitment changes the perceived loss from withdrawal, and what would distinguish lock-in from informed continuation. It offers research designs and bounded implications for career counselling and university policies. No new causal evidence is claimed.