A flier recently distributed on campus for new and prospective students and their parents contained the following statements:
1) “95% of St. Mary’s students live on campus.”
2) “Students who live on campus have a higher average GPA than those living off campus.”
Given the nature of the publication we might guess the intended inferences are that:
3) Living on campus will place a student among the majority
And assuming somewhat dubiously that:
4) Being among the majority is generally a good thing
It would follow that
5) It is best for students to live on campus
Such an inference, if intended, may commit an ad populum fallacy. Premise 2 perhaps seeks to reinforce this message by suggesting, via a possible false cause fallacy and some statistical confusion, that:
6) If you choose to live on campus your GPA will likely be higher than if you do not.
Though of course there is no good reason to think this will be so in any individual case, or that there is any direct causal link between the two.
Aside from logical problems, the use of these statistics and their likely implications in a publication for parents or prospective students suggests a covert strategy to encourage on-campus living. Of course, there is nothing wrong with promoting on-campus living. Such a deceptive strategy, however, risks insulting those who, for a variety of reasons, live off campus (and are, as the flier concedes, a small minority, thereby compounding the offense).
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7 comments:
If I can find it, I should show you the respective surveys they handed out to parents and students at the transfer orientation.
That would be very interesting.
Well yes, I would agree that they have a correlation/causation mistake going on here. To play the Devil's Advocate, I can think a few justifiable, or at the very least understandable reasons for doing this:
1.) Off-Campus students don't pay room and board. Public School or not, they have a budget to balance. Encouraging students to live on-campus, even through some logical fudging, helps them in the long-run.
2.) More charitably, they might use these surveys to persuade students to live on-campus because the school is under the impression, for one reason or another, that it is better for the student to live on-campus. Whether for academic reasons or otherwise, the school is just looking out for our best interest.
Which is more likely, do you think? Or is there another possibility I haven't included here?
Excellent application of the principle of interpretive charity, Michael. I am sure you are right that there are both fiscal as well as principled reasons for encouraging on-campus living. My objection is only to the covert means. If the College needs to fill its dorms, or believes that the on-campus experience is in some ways healthier, which it may well be, it could state its reasons forthrightly, which would show respect for its students and their parents.
Although these means may be covert to some, the small amount of people that do live off campus are there because the were kicked off campus or chose to live off campus and have previously lived on campus.
so to a certain extent they might be able to back up their claim that students who live on campus obtain an higher GPA
I don't doubt that the statistic is accurate -- I just doubt that it is a useful statistic for someone deciding where to live.
I also assume that the reasons for living off campus are as varied as the students who choose to do so, and that we should be careful not to stereotype them (we're talking about approximately 100 individuals, after all).
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