Students Studying Less -- And Not Because Of Facebook: Report

Glenn Beck might have thought twice about opening a new university had he known that students aren't studying as much as they used to.

Two economists have discovered just that. The Boston Globe reports:

According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today's average student hits the books for just 14 hours.

Babcock and Marks found that this decrease in study might be attributed not to social networking, the internet and other technologies but a desire -- both on the part of students and professors -- to do the least amount of work possible. Universities attempt to combat this tendency by relying less on course evaluations when making decisions about tenure and requiring professors to administer explicit directions to students. That universities are often unaware of the scope of this particular problem, however, undermines their efforts. Many still hold that for every hour a student is in class, he or she should be studying for two.

Critics of the survey believe that regardless of university and SAT scores, it is impossible to compare 21st century students to their predecessors. After all, students today are not only more active on campus but also have more effective tools, like laptops, at their disposal.

Given these advancements, is it possible that students are working just as hard as ever? Weigh in below.

Comments

[Reticent]

09:21 AM on 07/08/2010

Maximizing time to achieve priorities is not exclusive to students and is a basic HUMAN action. Ordering priorities is the difficult issue, and few college students are self aware about the degree to which they make choices that are based in simply maximizing their time. The perception of time and understanding how much time is needed to master a task are also problematic for many people.

[wariswrong]

06:30 PM on 07/07/2010

Hahaha, I am in high school, and I study about 12-14 hours per day in the summer.

[Bseltzer08]

01:40 PM on 07/08/2010

lies

[Kiabell04]

04:53 PM on 07/07/2010

I study more often than I should actually....and I donot rely on the internet for information on my papers. Also, some of you posters should really stop generalizing everyone. Sheesh.

[MarcEdward]

03:53 PM on 07/07/2010

In 1961 it took considerably longer to get one's hands on information than today. For example, if you wanted to get a single article on a subject, you had to go through the Readers Guide to Periodical literature, copy down a bunch of magazine issue numbers and dates, give that to the librarian, wait for her to come back with what little they had, than take hand written notes. Now you do a Google search.
When you wrote a paper in 1961 you used a typewriter and if you made a mistake you had to use "white out" to correct it. You probably had to write a proof first, hand correct it, than type it - now you can write, correct, etc. on the fly.
Perhaps what appears to be "less study" is just greater efficiency?

[gingersaff]

11:41 AM on 07/07/2010

A relative of mine is a department head at a very large midwestern university. He also has a heavy teaching and writing load, and he usually has one or two lower division courses that meet several times a week each semester. It never fails that at least a few of his students cry foul when they receive their grades. Despite not handing in the homework and doing below-average on their exams, they feel that they have bought and paid for good grades, especially if they are trying to slide through on a "mick" major (no hard sciences, no labs, etc.) and want at least a "B" average. Some of them actually say that because they showed up, they should receive an "A". It's a combination of plain, old-fashioned laziness and complex, new-fangled entitlement.

[Cinnamonape]

11:21 AM on 07/07/2010

When I was at Berkeley in the early 1970's I was told that I should be studying 3-4 hours for every classroom hour. That meant you were supposed to study 45 hours a week. I felt like a slacker at doing about 30...but that's because I also had to work part-time and tried to do College sports (downgraded to intramurals eventually).

Today students don't even buy the textbook, and it's clear they write their papers about an hour before submission.

[NoahVail]

10:06 AM on 07/07/2010

How many hours per week do the Indian and Chinese students spend studying?

[newyorkcawfee]

03:29 PM on 07/07/2010

The liberal arts and economics and business students?

Or the ones doing a real degree?

[NoahVail]

04:23 PM on 07/07/2010

Ouch! That's my wife smacking me up side the head for saying "soft science" and "hard science."

[Reticent]

09:24 AM on 07/08/2010

Excellent question. Add Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese into the question as well. The entire idea of global competition for jobs at an individual level is something US college students seem to show ignorance about, and their mentors a willful ignorance about discussing.

[mjeffn]

04:05 AM on 07/07/2010

premed is the same for my son today as it was for me decades ago. Maybe he has better tools but he still has to master the same material for the MCAT. You can;t fake your way through. Either a student learns the material or doesn't. Also, it is just as competitive if not more so today. He studies, and studies, and studies some more. He recognizes that there are way more pre-med students then there are slots in med school.

[mjeffn]

03:57 AM on 07/07/2010

Any time studies done on the difference between writing a term paper in a word processor vs. on a typewriter? I didn't think so.

[Cinnamonape]

11:09 AM on 07/07/2010

And yet students still turn in term papers that aren't spell-checked or proof-read. Maybe the cut-and-paste original had the same errors?

[CVales]

03:45 AM on 07/07/2010

SleepNewYork, and all other thoughtful posters, college is its own mini-world with its own rules and expectations. Students study less because professors work less. Hardly anyone lectures anymore, they do a lot of focus group type stuff. The professor sort of lays off, gives a 'group' assignment, and walks around supervising. I have been in college since 2001, off and on, depending on when I could afford it. I finally got old enough to not get screwed on financial aid and just when the republicans lost power all the federal aid flowed in. I have seen a noticeable change in the culture of the classroom, the rise of plagiarism/laziness, and the reticence of teachers to really express their points of view. Since tenure is hardly available anymore -so many classes have become lip service to the student. There should be some enthusiasm for learning and a sense that not everything is political. All the lawsuits in the 90s and early 2000s changed it all-now teachers guard their words. It's hostile. People also disrespect academia. The purpose of college is, to get the student to think critically, give them some guideposts for the profession they want to enter and the time to network in the interim. That is useful. Colleges are HUGE bureaucracies, and are generally terrible to navigate. IF you want to know why students study less, look at all the forms they have to do, and how many mucky advisors they must meet with. Crazy.

[newyorkcawfee]

03:31 PM on 07/07/2010

Yeah, you are right. Gimme that special sauce of the college world Vales. Its awesome. Professors are unaccountable, the presidents take a lot of money in a scheme that as has been said, would make Madoff jealous.

Gimme some of this Disney for grown ups world - just don't make me a student there with a huge debt and nothing to show for it but a useless economics or la degree.

[SleepNewYork]

01:37 AM on 07/07/2010

This is quite possibly the first time in history where the students are probably able to be "smarter" than the professors, in the sense that the information required to understand something and the methods of learning it quickly and effectively are almost universally available with little cost. Huge online libraries, ebooks and web resources make it easy for the student. Is it really necessary for someone to spend as much time studying material from slides, resources that are well organized and other aids as they did in the past where they got black ink on white paper and a self important professor who wanted to impress students in his class?

What I don't get is why there is no debate about how long this charade of doing a liberal arts degree (or many other degrees such as management, business etc) for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time and place of the colleges' choosing is going to last. People, especially parents, are beginning to wake up to the scam that is college (just google collegeisscam to see what I mean).

Look at it this way. You could spend your own time learning management, organization theory, NLP, whatever by spending about 100 dollars at Amazon and using Google Scholar. Instead of spending 150K on college and 4 years, instead you spend that money doing a 16 week technical course on something useful and start up your own business. Why go to college? The model is dead.

[Cinnamonape]

11:15 AM on 07/07/2010

Yes, students have access to massive amounts of information...more than they can ever mentally process (but that was true at the University of California Berkeley...and the Bancroft Library, too...back in the 1970's). The difference is that much of what is available on the internet is erroneous, not produced by a specialist in the field of interest, and requires a whole different skill set to interpret validity and value.

And many skill sets simply are not capable of being learned "on-line". Try to understand vertebrate or human anatomy without actually doing dissection or lab work.

[newyorkcawfee]

03:26 PM on 07/07/2010

I agree with you. But studying human anatomy means that the student is at college for a vocational degree. That's a useful degree.

But management? Liberal arts? Gimme a break.

[red wolfe]

11:44 AM on 07/07/2010

My wife and I both work at universities, one private and one public. There is absolutely a need for reform of higher education, but real reform will take some imagination and consideration. Liberal arts still have real value, but they need to be more integrated into providing the contemporary skills we all use.

For one thing, I can tell you the online model is far from being workable because students are really not that technologically literate. Sure, they can manipulate buttons with their thumbs and stare at screens both large and small, but most of them have no idea how things work or what the real goals of most software are. Nobody taught them because nobody taught their teachers. I'm amazed at how inept most students are at using Google, and many have absolutely no understanding about where their files go. They've become to things just magically being there.

And the technology is only a tool. There needs to be a purpose for the tool. This why I say integration of liberal arts is still needed. Education built around technology platforms requires constant updating, so the role of the instructor is still there. Texts on Amazon are often not well evaluated and can mislead students (I know - part of my job is evaluating and creating materials).

And tenure has to be re-evaluated. If parents knew how much of their children's education is in the hands of part-time adjuncts, I think they'd flip.

[newyorkcawfee]

03:27 PM on 07/07/2010

You have a vested interest. Let me ask you this. If you had 200K to spend on 2 children, would you encourage them to get a liberal arts degree each? Or would you suggest that they learn how to do something that's more vocational, and spend the change on starting the business and running it for the first 2 years, and spend the change on books that would be prescribed in a la degree?

I think thats what SleepNY is saying.

[BlueCashew]

03:51 PM on 07/07/2010

I'm a part-time adjunct.

Students at my university evaluate the course and the prof on a six point scale (six points being excellent) on a number of various aspects. The school also allows the student to rate the course and prof as a "seven", meaning the course and/or the prof is the best they've taken.

My course and I consistently rank near 6.00. My last semester was rated a 6.50. My students are always asking me if I teach anything else. They say they like learning about the "real world". Their evaluations also say that my course is "a ton of work".

And no, I don't hand out easy grades. Students in my class get what they earn.

[uwhusky253]

01:22 AM on 07/07/2010

I just graduated from a university. I can say this, it was much easier than I ever expected. I don't recall studying for more than a couple of hours on any one topic. I graduated with 3.78. Not as high as I wanted but a certain history teacher was just all over the place and I couldn't figure out what he was asking us to learn. In turn, I kept learning the wrong things and I really did study hard for his class. I learned a lot just not exactly what he was looking for. LOL. Overall, classes are really dumbed down. I did learn a lot; however, I am not sure we all learned enough.

[palindrom]

10:54 PM on 07/07/2010

That's interesting -- now, do you feel you got your money's worth? Do you wish it had been harder? I'm not judging, just asking!

[uwhusky253]

11:24 PM on 07/07/2010

I don't exactly feel I got my money's worth. I don't think harder is the point of good education. It is more about the context of the education that is important. If I were quizzed on all the topics in my million text books, I would likely fail simply because professors these days don't seem to know how to incorporate readings and assignments into actual class time. As a matter of fact, they don't even test on the reading material they assign. Some are just so full of themselves they actually test on their lectures only. So then I ask myself "why did I buy this book?" Then we wind up wasting valuable class time challenging everyone's beliefs, ideas, and values instead of discussing the actual assignment. Anyhow, on to Grad school...

[Nigel Hessing]

01:14 AM on 07/07/2010

14 hours? try less than 30 mins

[downerbeautiful]

01:43 AM on 07/07/2010

Unless it's finals or mid-terms, and then it's more like 45 minutes.

[Steve1289]

12:42 AM on 07/07/2010

"Babcock and Marks found that this decrease in study might be attributed not to social networking, the internet and other technologies..."

Those have everything to do with it. For instance, I'm surfing the HP on the internet instead of studying for my graduate classes.

We have much more to do and we have research on how we can study more efficiently.

[Cinnamonape]

11:26 AM on 07/07/2010

"we have research on how we can study more efficiently"...

and one conclusion of those studies is that multi-tasking is a failure, and that multiple modalities of learning (visual, auditory and physically doing problems) are the best way to learn and retain information. Furthermore, actually concentrating on the information and immersing oneself in it allows successful retention and COMPREHENSION. The less time spent on a subject, the less likely the student will understand and retain that information.

[JessWonderin]

11:46 PM on 07/06/2010

I think I found the MUSIC TEACHER!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7oGx2dImE8&feature=youtube_gdata