No College Remorse?

October 2, 2007

The above picture is from a NY Times poll on student satisfaction with their college experience. There are four ratings, represented here by four colors of sticky notes. The interesting fact is how overwhelmingly positive the response is: the green tags correspond to "good" and the yellow tags to "excellent". The "only fair" and "poor" responses are quite low.

So what to conclude? People mostly get their money's worth in their choice of college? I think that would be wrong. This poll catches what I think of as a vacation bias. As people about their experience after a trip that they have always dreamed about and it will be almost always positive. People want to have a good experience on vacation.. and they also want to be proud of their college or at least make some claim as to its real value. I would set down this law: the more money a person spends on something, the greater the psychic pressure to have it be a great experience.