Materialism, empathy and willingness to help as correlates of university and faculty selection

The article presents results of two studies on the issue of individual characteristics as factors related to the choice of the type of university or faculty. The study 1 is focused on the level of materialism as well as the definition of a life success formulated by private and state university students. The study 2 analyses the propensity to help other people and the level of empathy among pedagogics and business students. Studies were conducted with DSM (Górnik-Durose, 2002) scale measuring materialism and designed life- success questionnaire (study 1) or IRI scale developed by Davis (1980) measuring the level of empathy (study 2). The sample amounted to 92 respondents in both studies. Results show that private university students are characterized by a higher level of materialism than public university students. Students from private university, in comparison with state university students, also score higher success in life of a person with higher income. According to the results of study 2, students of pedagogics declare higher willingness to help than business students and are characterized as experiencing more positive feelings for other people who are in a difficult situation