To Skip or Not To Skip: The Timeless College Dilemma

Welcome to college. You now must independently maximize utility through rational decision making...aka Whoohoo no parents!
As an economics enthusiast, I love trying to comprehend the marginal costs and marginal benefits of everyday life. One major quandary of MCs and MBs students analyze on a daily basis (whether or not they realize it or not) is a timeless center piece of every college experience.

Should I skip class or not?

If attendance is taken daily, you don't really understand the subject matter and there's and exam next week, odds are you should probably go to class.

Sometimes the decision to skip is a no brainer. For instance, last semester I took a class at Geneseo with a professor who will remain nameless, although anyone who goes to Geneseo probably already knows who I'm talking about. The midterm and final exams were each 20 True or False questions based on about 30 pages of reading (anyone with half a brain could easily narrow it down to the ten pages questions would be based on). The only other graded material was written work based on text examples. Not only was attendance not taken, but students were actively encouraged by the professor not to go to class. The first day of class he opened with

"Everyone in this class gets a B. A handful of you will get A's, another handful will get C's, but almost everyone gets a B. In the history of this class nobody has ever failed. I see that all of you have come today, although its a beautiful day so I have no idea why. If I were you I certainly wouldn't be here".

He went on to explain that students didn't need to go to class and that there was no reason to brown nose because he didn't plan on learning anyones names anyway. "If you see me on campus and say hi, I will be happy to wave and say hi back, just be aware I have no idea, nor do I care, who you are."

The reason he didn't care about student attendance or involvement was because in order to complete the writing assignments you had to write them in the text book and hand in the whole book at the end of the year. The catch? He wrote the textbooks which cost about $175 each! The class was essentially a scam where students could buy an easy B for $175. I however still attended a fair amount of classes because this guy has clearly figured out something the rest of us haven't. Not to mention 2/3 of the classes consisted of him telling hilarious stories about his fraternity days at Geneseo.

There are times however where the "to skip or not to skip" dilemma is more of a gray area. So many factors contribute to this momentous, yet sometimes trivial decision. Luckily, fellow college student Jim Filbert has made a true contribution to the academic community, the "Should I Skip Class Calculator". The way the calculator works is you answer about ten questions about the class and it then generates an answer telling you whether or not you should go.
The calculator essentially determines the marginal costs of skipping class that day. It takes into account the potential factors that contribute to the overall costs such as:

-How often the class meets
-How many weeks of class are in a semester
-How many times you have already skipped
-Your current standing in the class
-When your next major quiz or test is
-If you would miss some kind of small daily quiz
-Whether or not there is an attendance policy and if so what kind.
-How much exam material you would miss by not going
-Whether or not important announcements are frequently made in class.
-Whether or not you can get important lecture notes/information before next class

Although the calculator does a great job of quantifying marginal costs it doesn't offer any insight regarding marginal benefits. For instance when I used to attend the University of Vermont there would be a lot less kids in class on days when the mountains got a foot of snow or more. On an average day the marginal costs outweighed the marginal benefits, however when it dumped the marginal benefit of an epic powder day outweighed the marginal costs of skipping.


(talk about an awesome marketing campaign)

While surfing the internet I also came across this really cool thing called scanR. ScanR allows students to take pictures of class notes,overheads or whiteboards with a camera phone. It then uploads clean PDF versions of the notes to Facebook so you can share notes with friends. All you need to use it is a camera phone and an account. Here's a video of how it works.



While behavioral and nonmonetary economics (decision making not involving money) can be insightful it doesn't always account for emotional or personal factors. In the book "Freakonomics" the author examines a company that provided bagels to corporate offices. The bagels would be dropped off each morning and a box would be placed next to the bagels with a sign asking employees to pay for however many they took. From a purely monetary/logical standpoint the company shouldn't have made any money. Yet, the amount left in the box at the end of the day was always right on target for what the bagels should have cost. Would stealing a bagel really result in a free bagel? Obviously not since people still paid for them. Apparently stolen bagels are more expensive than free bagels because they have a greater cost, guilt.

Guilt is a major factor of skipping class that neither of the tools mentioned in this post address. Growing up in America, we are instilled with what many refer to as "The Protestant Work Ethic". If you are not being productive, then you are somehow doing something wrong. Often times this leads to unnecessary productivity (if you can really call unnecessary productivity productivity) that is triggered by guilt instead of logic. When most students skip class on some level they feel like they have let somebody down, even if they haven't. I remember once me and a friend were walking to a class we both knew was unnecessary but felt obliged to go to (the same one previously mentioned). When we got there there was a sign on the door saying class was cancelled that day. Walking back, we realized this was the best scenario possible. Even though we weren't going to get anything out of going to class that day we were still relieved of the guilt we would have felt had we skipped without knowing it had been cancelled. Maybe an additional question the "Should I Skip Class Calculator" should ask is "How guilty would you feel about skipping this class?"