Abstraction involves identifying the critical behaviors of an object and hiding irrelevant details. It focuses on the essential qualities rather than complex implementation. For example, a laptop user needs only to know how to operate it without understanding how each component like the screen or battery works internally. Abstract classes allow defining common behaviors for derived classes to implement. The example shows two university classes GBTU and MTU inheriting from an abstract university class and overriding its abstract fee methods to output school-specific tuition costs.