And they can cry about it all the way to the bank

Yahoo! News - Poll: Harvard Students Mostly Unhappy
This is actually a good example for my stats class of a headline that makes more out of the stats than is really there. The headline might make you think that Harvard students are mostly unhappy, since that's exactly what it says, but when you get to the detail, the Harvard average was 3.95 on a scale of 1 to 5. It doesn't say exactly what the words associated with the scale were, but it was probably something like 1=very dissatisfied, 2=disattisfied 3=neutral, 4=satisfied, 5=very satisfied. If that were the case 3.95 looks a lot like satisfied to me. The article also talks about how Harvard compares with the other schools in the survey (lower than all but 4). Of course we're talking about a difference of .2 points between Harvard's average and the average of all schools. And of course this survey was only conducted at exclusive private colleges, so there's no telling how much better they do than more typical colleges. Now there is validity to comparing yourself to only like insititutions, but it still sound like much ado about nothing. Of course, now I wonder why I wasted your time on this.