Posted on 07/04/2010 12:00:53 PM PDT by billorites
They come with polished resumes and perfect SAT scores. Their grades are often impeccable. Some elite universities will deny thousands of high school seniors with 4.0 grade point averages in search of an elusive quality that one provost called “intellectual vitality.” The perception is that today’s over-achieving, college-driven kids have it — whatever it is. They’re not just groomed; they’re ready. There’s just one problem.
Once on campus, the students aren’t studying.
It is a fundamental part of college education: the idea that young people don’t just learn from lectures, but on their own, holed up in the library with books and, perhaps, a trusty yellow highlighter. But new research, conducted by two California economics professors, shows that over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping. 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.
The decline, Babcock and Marks found, infects students of all demographics. No matter the student’s major, gender, or race, no matter the size of the school or the quality of the SAT scores of the people enrolled there, the results are the same: Students of all levels are studying less.
“It’s not just limited to bad schools,” Babcock said. “We’re seeing it at liberal arts colleges, doctoral research colleges, masters colleges. Every different type, every different size. It’s just across the spectrum. It’s very robust. This is just a huge change in every category.”
The research, accepted to be published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, has already sparked discussions...
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
It’s true. Students are not studying nearly as much as they once used to.
A Part Time Employee co-worker, who has his BA and is going for his Masters told me he literally has never read a book that he wasn’t required to read for a course in College.
That is because of several factors.
One is that so many more people “go to college” instead of just the ones that really need to go.
Two is the selfish culture we have spawned in this country through movies and television where college is supposed to be a party.
The dumbing down of society has included the schools and colleges big time.
That's because school is boring.
Our education system does little aside from torturing kids and picking their pockets.
If they had to worry about actually flunking out of college, they’d study harder!
In the old days going to college was an all-around “well rounded” kind of education. I think there are way too many people going to college these days.
Why waste time reading a whole book, when you can Google the answer or get a summary on Wikipedia?
I can tell you one thing that probably makes a difference.
Back when we were in school, we had to type our papers on typewriters, today they have computers. That can make a huge difference, alone.
Don’t know.
I do know that when I did my degrees I spent huge amounts of time on study, explaining to myself, in my own way, what was actually going on. There wasn’t any shortcut that I knew of, and cheating on exams wouldn’t help: you have to be able to do the job.
But then, I’m a grunt engineer, by choice, not a teacher, poly sci type, or liberal arts groupie.
Yeap. You really have to work at it to flunk out.
The real question is: Are the professors providing the impetus to study with the course curriculum? Why study for 24 hours when you only need to study 15 to fulfill the requirements?
Exactly, there was a love of learning, of studying, and contemplating among successful students, now College appears to me to be a drab, barest level of results driven enterprise.
If you find school boring, then you shouldn’t be there.
Many people find tremendous mental stimulation and challenge in learning in college and truly enjoy lifelong learning after classes. My daughter is taking Organic Chemistry this summer and was telling me yesterday how much she enjoys the class and especially using the equipment in the lab. All the pieces of her undergrad career are coming together and she is very enthused about it. I was very happy for her and proud of her.
Indoctrination replaces any need for study.
Make the course challenging enough and they’ll study - or they’ll bail out of it.
They need to look at the material they are teaching ...it is so dummied down you no longer need to study
Look at a 3rd grade reader from the early 20th century and you see challenging material
Farmers with a 3rd grade education read and understood the federalist papers..today college students can not read or grasp the material
The English101 material taught in colleges is grammar and punctuation that I learned in 4th grade...no more syntax’s of sentences just speak however you choose..
I shake my head at some of the grammar on TV news shows..
Students from Japan have already learned in high school what we are teaching in colleges here.. so they come here to play before getting their masters or PHD’s
We are a nation of uneducated people . Thank you DEWEY !
A side effect of grade inflation is that work which would have gotten a C now gets a B, so people who are content with a B can slide by with little work.
“Indoctrination replaces any need for study.”
Succinct, and right on target.
You don’t even have to learn a language just use word translate or google fish
In my classes, we use the old saw, "You don't have to be faster than the fastest lion. You just have to be faster than the slowest antelope." In classes where I allow slower antelopes to hang around, the top students still perform, but the average students pace themselves just ahead of the bad students. When I cut the bad students, the mid-range student performance improves.
Expect this to pick up. Many states are changing their funding formulas for state colleges to "completers" rather than funding based on people attempting classes. This will create significantly more pressure on teachers to pass students.
There's already a lot of pressure in this direction. If a low performer is a "protected class" flunking them can put an instructor in a Dean or Vice President's office explaining themselves. Additionally, sites like Rate My Professor grade instructors, and give advice on which instructor to take. If an instructor has fifteen openings in each of his course sections while other instructors have all their sections filled, they will end up with problems from the administration.
I DID flunk out of college - went into the military, then returned to school and 4.0'd - it's more a maturity thing than anything else - I wasn't "ready" for college on the intellectual side. I did however (regrettably) EXCEL at the social side of college.
College is like a game. Also some professors and teachers are just horrible at teaching as well. Learning should also be a joy as well as a discipline but some of these universities chew up the students and take their money.
Of course if the student like to party too much and is slack with studying they are mostly to blame. For those going to school fulltime and working a job with too many hours then studying time will suffer.
I remember back when I was in college, I would attend the first lecture to get the syllabus, and to see if the exams were going to be taken entirely from the book. If so, the only other times you’d see me in the class was for the exams.
Big difference between love of learning and finding school boring. I love to learn and many things I teach myself I will never have a degree for. The problem is that many times textbooks and many teachers squeeze all the life out of learning. My best friend was reading a history book to me for her class and it was one of the most boring texts of all time. (my favorite subject) History is supposed to be something that was lived. Stories of the past. The way this book is written it would be a wonder anyone was awake to be part of history if it was as boring as written.
That's pretty sad. 1965-67 my wife's first (and only) husband tried not studying while at Georgia Tech. It worked OK until about 5th quarter calculus... He could not work the math fast enough to finish his physics exams in the allotted time.
He quickly learned that National Merit Finalist, Honor Society in high school and 1416 SAT really don't cut it by themselves unless you STUDY!
13 years, a wife and 3 kids later, he did study while working & going to school for his Airframe & Powerplant mechanics license. Hindsight - 20/20!
Agree with you 100% re History. Good authors make it come alive and make it relevant. Being an adult and having adult frames of reference and experiences help enormously too.
Well why study? After all, if you know how to put a condom on a cucumber, realize that republicans are bad, democrats good, understand that the United States is an evil country, believe that Islam is the “religion of peace” and know the way to your local welfare office, you’ve mastered the sum total of everything taught in today’s union run school system. In short, you’re ready to become the ideal government dependent and democrat voter.
Well why study? After all, if you know how to put a condom on a cucumber, realize that republicans are bad, democrats good, understand that the United States is an evil country, believe that Islam is the “religion of peace” and know the way to your local welfare office, you’ve mastered the sum total of everything taught in today’s union run school system. In short, you’re ready to become the ideal government dependent and democrat voter.
...but get turned away to make room for the poor, oppressed, disadvantaged minorities who need remedial everything just to find their subsidized dorm rooms.
Yep. There is a huge difference between finding an answer and truly understanding why its the answer. Schools may be passing on information but are failing to teach one how to think.
I am finding it difficult to find competent young folk in my industry who exhibit good judgement, but will definitely argue that they are following instructions.
Read Victor Davis Hanson:
On the matter of racial profiling: No one wishes to harass citizens by race or gender, but, again unfortunately, we already profile constantly. When I had top classics students, I quite bluntly explained to graduating seniors that those who were Mexican-American and African-American had very good chances of entering Ivy League or other top graduate schools from Fresno, those who were women and Asians so-so chances, and those who were white males with CSUF B.A.s very little chance, despite straight A's and top GRE scores. The students themselves knew all that better than I — and, except the latter category, had packaged and self-profiled themselves for years in applying for grants, admissions, fellowships, and awards. I can remember being told by a dean in 1989 exactly the gender and racial profile of the person I was to hire before the search had even started, and not even to "waste my time" by interviewing a white male candidate. Again, the modern university works on the principle that faculty, staff, and students are constantly identified by racial and gender status. These were not minor matters, but questions that affected hundreds of lives for many decades to come. (As a postscript I can also remember calling frantically to an Ivy League chair to explain that our top student that he had accepted had just confessed to me that in fact he was an illegal alien, and remember him "being delighted" at the news, as if it were an added bonus.)
NO cheers, unfortunately.
When I was teaching HS (and I stopped 6 years ago) the kids thought it was MY job to prepare them for tests, not their job to take the material I had given them and study. In other words, they expected to be spoon fed everything. I suspect that has only gotten worse.
Oh, exactly. Everything is supposed to entertain us, night and day. Sheesh.
What will happen to the collegiate sports heroes who are dumber than a bag of rocks and cannot learn at the college level?
The second great elephant in the faculty lounge which was ignored by this half-assed piece, is massive waves of cheating. Surveys reveal that large proportions of students readily admit to cheating.
Why labor away at writing a paper when you can go to termpapers.com/ and buy one. Or sit in class during exams and have your buddy text you the answers from the next row over.
Faculty members are well aware of this epidemic but attempts to police it are time-intensive, risky, and entail major hassles. Furthermore, they cannot count on being backed up by their Dean or Department Chair, especially if the perp is a privileged minority.
Funny that the Globe would miss these two major factors, especially given their proximity to so many well-known diploma mills.
i don’tmind those fools going to college, i would just like to not have to pay for it.
eliminate student loans and that would be a huge step in the right direction.
I do agree that lots of kids are not ready straight out of HS. I wasn’t. I went one year, did pass, but didn’t do that well (had a lot of fun). Got married, had 3 kids, went back and graduated with honors. Amazing what a few years difference made.
They’ve dumbed down the classes.
Make the classes challenging, some will study, the rest will fail. Once properly sorted, the college education will once again be a useful tool for employers looking for sharp, motivated applicants.
Stop funding these brainwashing institutions and our children might retain some decent values.
Make these freeloading professors get in touch with making a living the hard way. Let them wash dishes in a restaurant or deliver pizzas where they belong.
Who can argue our universities have made America a better country? We have a pervasive belief and fear that America's best days are behind her.
We have a nation of educated idiots who don't believe in the proven history of capitalism which has made us the greatest nation on Earth.
Our young people elect a con man with no experience as president who dismantles every mechanism that can give those young people a better future. These young dummies are too stupid to know they have killed the goose that laid the golden eggs of opportunity to provide for their own future.
We could not have designed a more suicidal system of education if we set out to do it.
We have a nation of people who believe in a free lunch and that trillions in deficits never have to be paid back. We have created and bankrupted Social Security and Medicare and have 40 million Americans now receiving food stamps.
We have the best medical care in the world and we're going to pull it apart and let the government it run.
Our country's leadership can't figure out you can't spend more than you take in.
Who would call this educated leadership?
Our Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century ancestors were thankfully not this stupid.
It took a nation of communist-run universities to bring us to this mass ignorance.
Keep your kids out of college and the United States might have a fighting chance to survive.
I would agree
I recall reading the curriculum of a new college in California a few years ago (Cal State University Monterey Bay) which included the multi-cultural experience in Algebra or courses like Latina English. I believe indoctrination accounts for a part of the decline in studying.
I know grade inflation is rampant - even at places like Stanford.
I know that large numbers of students are arriving at colleges under-prepared for college level English and Algebra. When some colleges began accepting the top 10% of students from any high school in CA, high schools began inflating grades in order to see to it that they gave many students a chance who ordinarily would not be considered qualified.
I tutored freshmen students in a small, rural college who had been given diagnostic tests and received scores indicting that they needed to remedial instruction in order to succeed. They were indignant because they had received all A’s in high school - they protested that the diagnostic tests were wrong and that they ‘didn’t got a problem with English’. This was at a state college made of of mostly white middle to lower socioeconomic level students. That college was not considered selective or challenging and it still had an influx of under prepared students.
If you add a cohort of under prepared students to a class, then the middle students do not feel they have to study so hard - the bell curve has a comfortable anchor. Even the highest students do not have to work so hard. The entire class may travel more slowly or cover less material to avoid losing the lower half of the bell completely. It happened first in grammar school (”it’s unfair to offer enrichment materials to better students” when others can’t perform at class level) before it happened in college.
This link leads to comparison charts related to an article titled “What is your college degree worth”
http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/bs_collegeROI_0621.html
I couldn’t quite find the body of the article but I recall that it asserts that college degrees have an exaggerated reputation for contributing to income. I was wondering if the article’s assertion is true that a college degree is not as advantageous as people believe it is or if the words ‘anymore’ should be added to it. Meaning, a college degree helped income more when standards were maintained, students studied hard etc. but now that standards are relaxed and students don’t have to study as much, a degree does not assist income as much. This happened with high school diplomas - they were sufficient until they were dumbed down and then ‘some college’ or college became the new high school diploma.
The single biggest factor, IMHO, is grade inflation and behind that lies the shift to a business model with students as consumers, which came in the 1970s and 1980s. When students become customers who pay money for a product and write anonymous evaluations of their teachers, the teachers can hardly be expected to tell the students they aren’t performing well and risk offending the “customer.” Should they be so fractious as to go ahead and grade tough anyway, administrations steps in and tells the teacher to ease up, lest the students go to some other student where grades come easier.
The upshot is that the customer is always right and the inmates are running the asylum. Colleges compete with each other for students and need to keep the customers happy.
Expecting 24 hours of studying a week outside of class? You’ve got to be kidding, prof. My other profs don’t demand that. Who do you think you are? Ease up already, doofus. Give me my A without studying. I’m paying good money for it. You owe it to me.
And if you don’t, I’ll go tell Mommy Administrator on you.
all they have to do is look it up on the Internet.
When I went back to college the library was full of books and computers hooked up to the net.
How much easier it was to simply google your query and find the latest and greatest information on it in a few minutes.
Books? The information is outdated before it gets published!
I have two high-school age cubs coming up -- what are the two well-known diploma mills of which you speak?
? Cheers!
C.S. Lewis observed this across the pond in the late 50's to early 60's.
We're just a little bit behind them in decay.
NO cheers, unfortunately.
Adversity does wonders in sharpening the minds and focusing the energies of a person.
Computing, science, math, and English require more than just looking an answer up.
The content of technical or complex disciplines requires one to build something like a series of knowledge scaffolds or ladders. This may require large amounts of reading, practicing, and frankly, memorization (like memorizing an alphabet so you can spell words without pausing to look up letters). I do wonder what role technology plays in those processes but ultimately, the ability to compose an articulate analysis of a complex issue while taking an exam in class cannot be bolstered by Google - yet.
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