information:highlighting, linguistic:paraphrasing, stylistic:style_transfer
College and university

Maslow attended the City College of New York after high school. In 1926 he began taking legal studies classes at night in addition to his undergraduate course load. He hated it and almost immediately dropped out. In 1927 he transferred to Cornell, but he left after just one semester due to poor grades and high costs. He later graduated from City College and went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin to study psychology. In 1928, he married his first cousin Bertha, who was still in high school at the time. The pair had met in Brooklyn years earlier.

Maslow's psychology training at UW was decidedly experimental-behaviorist. At Wisconsin he pursued a line of research which included investigating primate dominance behavior and sexuality. Maslow's early experience with behaviorism would leave him with a strong positivist mindset. Upon the recommendation of Professor Hulsey Cason, Maslow wrote his master's thesis on "learning, retention, and reproduction of verbal material". Maslow regarded the research as embarrassingly trivial, but he completed his thesis the summer of 1931 and was awarded his master's degree in psychology. He was so ashamed of the thesis that he removed it from the psychology library and tore out its catalog listing. However, Professor Cason admired the research enough to urge Maslow to submit it for publication. Maslow's thesis was published as two articles in 1934.