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 ...
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.
I made it through, but not without some hiccups. For me, after 12 years of school, I wanted something else beyond going and sitting in another classroom. When they get out of high school, most kids haven’t sampled enough of life to know what they want to do. When people return, it’s usually for a purpose.
Most colleges today are nothing but slush fund boiler-rooms for the Democrat Party.
Amen to that!
I'm not surprised this isn't the case anymore. I don't know if the situation is the same in the States, but here in Ottawa, the two university libraries have basically turned into gigantic coffee shops. (Literally: one serves Starbucks, and the other The Second Cup.)
I try to do personal research there occasionally, and it's often impossible to concentrate because of all the chatter in the (ahem) study areas.
Why study when regurgitating what the prof wants you to gets you As.
Students aren’t stupid. If they were required to demonstrate some form of research contribution to the university in order to earn their 4 year degree, then you would see research.
Research isn’t valued anymore. At least not among the student body of undergrads.
I paid for my school by writing papers for other people.
I personally saw it as a personal triumph because I earned As from profs who saw nothing better than to award me Ds when the paper had my name on it.
Reward hard work, the good students won’t help others. Stiff the good students, and watch as they collaborate because they realise that your marking system is worthless.
Russell Kirk, the great conservative thinker, actually feels it happened immediately after the post-WW II GI Bill group finished their schooling. There was a great wave of entrants, some qualified, some not and then colleges and universities faced a precipitous drop in enrollment and revenue.
The customer model goes back to the 1950s, though there are also elements of “democratic education” in there as well, as schools wanted to truly open themselves (esp. state institutions) to citizens of that state. Oh, also a focus during WW II of industrializing education, to produce workers who could develop weapons, be part of a ‘collective’ whole that would bring economic development and military superiority to the US.
Kirk points out, as you do, that grade inflation became a major problem almost immediately, as did the generation of subjects and majors far outside the normal liberal arts education.
It’s easy to be curmudgeonly about it, but there may have been a benefit to SOMEWHAT increased access to college or an addendum to the purpose of the university but it has surely gotten way out of hand.
Yes, I recall thinking, when I went back that I wanted to actually LEARN things, not just go to school and get a piece of paper at the end. That was probably the biggest difference. Of course, one beef I have with college, as it’s structured now, is that it doesn’t really prepare students for much. It’s not that that they don’t learn anything, there is value in some of the classes if they choose to learn things, but one can get out with a 4 year degree and still not be prepared to earn a living. That is a travesty.
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