A recent Gallup poll about college happiness has some interesting findings, but for some reason, every magazine and journal that is covering the story is fucking up the punchlines. Sigh. Let’s do it for them.

Vox covered the poll, but their lede is that college grads are happier than regular Americans. But then around paragraph 14, they admitted that the results don’t really show that. And then they missed the really interesting story, which is that the type of college (ie, private, public, selective, community) a person attends makes no difference in future happiness levels.

Apparently, only 10 to 12 percent of college graduates are “thriving in life” — whatever that means. None of the articles bothered to explain what that means. So, if you’re bound to hate life, you might as well attend a cheap school and end up with no debt.

And why are so many people miserable? Can we talk about that?

This article at PsyBlog starts off with the lede — “Only 14% of graduates strongly agreed that the professors cared about them.”

Well, if you go over to the Gallup website. It turns out that 64 percent of graduates strongly agreed with the statement, “I had at least one professor at [College} who made me excited about learning.” Only 14 percent agree with that statement AND  agreed that their professor cared about me as a person AND had a mentor. That’s still a pretty depressing finding, but it’s different from PsyBlog’s statement.