 Ziliak received a B.A.in Economics from Indiana University, a PhD in Economics, and a PhD Certificate in the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, both from the University of Iowa.While at Iowa, he served as resident scholar in the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry, where he met among others Steve Fuller, Bruno Latour, and Wayne C. Booth, and co-authored the now-famous paper "The Standard Error of Regressions".