Why do people still assume things that are easily checked?

College Confidential Community
1

<p>Why do people still assume things that are easily checked?</p>

<p>For example:</p>

<p>“School X has good/bad financial aid” instead of running school X’s net price calculator.</p>

<p>“School X has large/small class sizes” instead of looking at school X’s class schedule to see if class sizes are listed there.</p>

<p>“School X is generally considered good, so it must have a good department/major D” instead of looking at school X’s catalog and schedule for department/major D.</p>

2

<p>Or “I’m going to major in Business at Yale” (which doesn’t have that undergraduate major)</p>

3

<p>We did not assume anything, however, used “word of mouth” much more and with much more trust than oficial website , where lots and lots, and in many cases majority of information and the most important peices of it is simply missing. Boy, we were so right. I very rarely use internet info. I agree, that sometime I see posts here with questions that are very easy to find on internet. I also use it very often to find suggestions on a very technical issues that I encounter at my job. That side of internet is simply unbelievably good, better than many technical books that I have around me or even software built in Help. But you will not find how much particular UG will cost a particular applicant, no way, no how…unless you talk to family who has similar student. The fact is (not any kind of theory, but actual fact), D. has applied ONLY to UG that we kenw for sure would give her a Merit award and we also knew which ones would give a lot and which ones probably not so much. So, we were psychologically prepared to check certain schools somewhat closer than others. We were correct 100%. And no internet would provide us with this information. So, if people are planning to apply to schools that are kind of far and they do not have anybody around them to check how the experience with these schools went for other family, then they ask here, I perfectly understand this part. Running calculator will not answer a question on how many privately sponsored Merit scholarships are available at certain public state college or how many scholarships are available for top students at some private school. But that was how my D. got full tuition Merit award at her public state UG - her tuition was covered by about 10 privately sponsored Merit scholarships. How we knew that she has a good chance at this school? I talked to my friend who happened to have a year older son with similar stats. If I did not have this source of info., we would be either playing the guessing game or start looking / asking somewhere else, like here, on CC. CC has helped a lot with the different type of information - about bs/md programs. CC actually trigerred a deeper search on internet, which is actually was very successful. While privately sponsored Merit awards are not readily posted on internet, information about bs/md programs was relatively accessible.
Again, in regard to class sizes. I am not sure if this info is availble for Honors colleges. I am not sure that even criterial for Honors college at specific UG is available. This quesions pop up here all the time. For comparison, while regular class might be 200 - 300 student, the Honor could be 15.</p>

4

<p>Why check something when you believe the source is correct? </p>

<p>I mean…you can say “People should always check this and that” bit people are not if they believe the source is correct. </p>

5

<p>This reminds me of the man who applied to the Princeton Law School.</p>

6

<p>^ Very nice @QuantMech‌. I had to google that. <a href=“Princeton Law School - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Law_School&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

7

<p>Why people ask question in this forum instead of looking up the school’s website? ;)</p>

8

<p>ucbalumnus, I find your post somewhat ironic, in the sense that none of the three illustrations you present supports your thesis.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>A net price calculator is great, but it doesn’t always account for things like closely held businesses, and it doesn’t account for merit aid on which many families rely. So in many cases word of mouth remains an important source of information.</p></li>
<li><p>Average class sizes don’t tell you much. If you are a Biology major, your quality of life will not be improved by the fact that your college offers courses in Akkadian and Sumerian that 1-2 people per semester take. Some colleges let you look at actual enrollment for specific classes . . . but if you know enough to figure out how to do that, you are probably in college or beyond already. And it’s still only some colleges.</p></li>
<li><p>Looking at the course catalog may tell you the size of the department (and there are other, easier ways to figure that out), but it doesn’t tell you how “good” the department is. OK, you can get a rough sense by looking at the catalog, and maybe that rough sense is all anyone applying to college needs or deserves. But it doesn’t really come close to answering the question </p></li>
</ol>

9

<p>Nothing beats word of mouth.</p>

10

<p>People just like to argue. </p>

11

<p>Lack of confidence in the accuracy of any specific source of information leads to a desire to consider multiple sources. Whether any greater accuracy is achieved by this method is unclear.</p>

12

<p>What? You mean there are first gen, low resource students out there who don’t even know where to start? </p>

<p>I guess it’s a good thing that there’s a forum to help them.</p>

<p>People assume lots of things that aren’t true because no one has ever questioned them. Outside of college, think about how many people still think we only use 10% of our brains. </p>

13

<p>"Why people ask question in this forum instead of looking up the school’s website? "
-This is exactly what I meant when I said that many important facts are not going to be there on the schools’s websites. Is information on how you feel when you visited school and how student body fits with your specific personality, is it going to be available? Only people with personal experiences can answer that. And again, many privately sponseored scholarships will not be there. Website will not mark any class as “weed out killer”…etc.
However, some other information will be available. </p>

14

<p>I’m in the “look it up” camp. The people in the “I heard” camp (or the ones who simply state things as facts when they are wrong) are far too far in the majority. </p>

<p>

</p>

<p>As long as there are people around who believe in looking things up, greater accuracy is assured.
Otherwise your information will come from people like the soccer mom who told me that her doctor had told her that her son was in the 110th percentile on some metric. </p>

15

<p>“Why don’t people look at the website instead of the forum?”</p>

<p>Simple, the website serves the interest of the school. The forums serve the interest of the student. </p>

16

<p>Some people are not good at looking up something, or are too lazy or too busy to do so, or they are not sure whether the info they found is up-to-date, or sometimes, intentionally or not, misleading or even self-contradictory.</p>

<p>Another issue is that sometimes some people lack the skill to interpret the piece of the info at hand (e.g., tax code - that is the reason why there is a need for tax accountants., etc.)</p>

<p>I am always amazed by the fact that the parents here collectively possess a huge amount of knowledge; for some of it, it would take me a lot of time and efforts to learn it by myself.</p>

<p>For example, our family have a question about this at this moment: How long would it take for an auto-shipping company (e.g., Dependable Auto Shipper) to ship a car from the west coast to the east coast? Most auto shippers will tell you that it would take about 2-3 weeks on their web site. But we have very little confidence in their estimate and are therefore tempting to ask this question here. (And we actually have had experience in shipping our car before and are still not sure about this!)</p>

17

<p>To expand on post #7 (JHS)

  1. merit scholarships - sometimes word of mouth is true in general, but not true of you. So it’s probably true that NYU is usually stingy with money, but there are some students whose best offers came from NYU. So you may not want to eliminate colleges just because you can’t be sure what sort of offer they’ll give you.
  2. Every college in the world claims that most of their classes are under 20. Once a class gets over a certain size (somewhere around 50) it turns into a lecture class. Personally, I really liked having some lecture classes in my mix. I don’t think you necessarily have to drop a college where you know the intro Econ class is huge. The question is, are the breakout sessions well taught?
  3. The size of CMU’s department vs. Harvard’s was a big part of mathson’s decision - but of course the reputation had to go hand in hand with the size. Big and lousy isn’t going to be better. </p>
18

<p>Because people are way to lazy to do any research</p>

19

<p>My favorite, and common posts on CC are “Does X University have research opportunities for freshmen?”</p>

<p>Then the poster asks a series of questions that could easily be looked up (researched) on the school’s website.</p>