

Theories on Why College Kids Are Studying Less - jamesbritt
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/8-Theories-on-Why-College-Kids-Are-Studying-Less-4235

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Towle_
NONE of those theories are the reason. And frankly, I find it worrisome none
of these guys can even come close. Studying methods becoming more efficient?
C'mon, dude.

There's a great scene in the movie Orange County (Colin Hanks, Jack Black,
others) where the main character, a high school senior, is arguing with his
mother, who's worried about the prospect of him leaving home. Shaun: "But I
have to go to college." His mother: "Why?!" Shaun: "BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT YOU DO
AFTER HIGH SCHOOL."

These days, most of us are not going to college to learn anything. We're going
because that's what you do after high school.

~~~
Groxx
Backed up by this data:[1]

    
    
                     1960        1981
      HS Grads       41.0%       69.7%
      <4 College     16.5%       32.1%
      >=4 College     7.7%       17.1%
    

(all numbers are cumulative (college-bound are also HS grads), and for people
25+ years old from the entire population)

A higher percentage _graduated_ college in 1981 than _entered_ college in
1960. A person was _twice_ as likely to enter college.

Meanwhile, in 2009, we had:[2]

    
    
      HS Grads          86.7%
      Some College      55.6%
      Associates+       38.5%
      Higher degrees    29.5%
    

(I separated Associates, as I believe those are often <4 years, but just to
include it. Same data set & methods.)

Not directly comparable, I'll grant you. But the trend continues. Assuming
Bachelors+ == 4 years or more, nearly as many people had 4 years or more as
entered college in 1981. And look: the college-entry rate has nearly doubled
again. Even with grade inflation, I'd say things are improving overall,
despite (because of?) the lowered hours.

[1]:
[http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/education/p20-390/t...](http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/education/p20-390/tab-11.pdf)
(contains more years + more data)

[2]:
[http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/education/cps20...](http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/education/cps2009.html)
("both sexes" excel link)

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greenlblue
I don't know if it's true for others but I could have skipped high school and
college and I would have missed absolutely nothing in terms of knowledge
acquired during those years. I don't think my sentiments deviate too much from
the norm. Knowledge these days is much more decentralized and more readily
available and if you want to learn something then you don't really need a
classroom or a professor to do it. My suspicion is that more and more students
are actually pursuing their real passions simply because it is more accessible
and consequently they are spending less time on boring class material but are
just going through the motions to get a piece of paper.

~~~
dagw
What I really gained from high school was not so much learning what I wanted
to learn, but learning a bunch of things that I, a priori, _didn't_ want to
learn.

I was a math and science geek as a kid, and given the choice I would have
studied only that in high school. Fortunately for me I wasn't given that
choice and was also made to study stuff like literature, which has greatly
enriched my life and widened my horizons. High school wasn't (and shouldn't
be) so much about learning you favorite subject as opening your eyes to other
areas of knowledge outside your passion, so that when you do choose your
specialization you do so with a better knowledge as to what is out there.

~~~
greenlblue
I am a math person as well but my love of literature and social sciences in
general is not because I was forced to learn about them in high school or
college. In fact I started to enjoy literature, psychology, philosophy and
social science when I was left to my own devices and wasn't forced to write a
paper right after I had finished reading something. The pace in science
courses was almost always to slow and the pace in social science classes was
almost always too fast. Universities were designed as cookie cutters and they
are now starting to see the effects of that model.

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philwelch
Many of these theories fall back to one root cause--universities can't scale
to meet the demand for university education. Consider: adjust faculty are the
result of a supply/demand mismatch between Ph.D's and professorships;
competition for tenure (or even adjunct positions) makes course evaluations
more important to game, and thus grade inflation and smaller assignments
became the expectation; this same competition makes it even more important to
publish; undergraduate enrollment has outpaced scholarship availability
requiring more students to work. This covers four out of eight causes (even
five, if you consider "grades becoming less important than activities" to be a
consequence of grade inflation).

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zbanks
Did these studies ever show a decline in grades?

If grades stayed (relatively) the same, or even _increased_ , then the lack of
studying shouldn't be a problem. Either kids are smarter, or the _courses_
aren't forcing them to study as much. In this latter case, it is the
professors to blame, not the kids.

Granted, all these only come out if the grades did not decline significantly.

~~~
philk
This is confounded somewhat by the problem of grade inflation.

I suppose another way to measure would be figuring out if we're getting more
useful graduates but I can't think of how to measure that (apart from perhaps
average increase in wages).

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kd0amg
Slightly off-topic, but...

 _The University of California study finds that 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._

As I was nearing the end of high school, everyone was telling me that in
college, I would probably have to do two hours of studying for every one hour
of class. 12 hours of class (one for each two of the 24 hours spent studying)
seems like an unusually light course load to me (and it was the minimum for
maintaining full-time status), so I'm inclined to doubt that that ratio was
the norm then. Where did this two-per-one norm come from?

~~~
elai
You can do that if you want straight As!

~~~
Groxx
You can do that if you want an aneurysm!

<http://thereifixedit.com/>

edit: disclaimer: I had a 21 credit semester. Not recommended.

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theprodigy
I honestly think students study less because we can get away with it. We can
study less get a little above average on tests and with grading on a curve you
can get a decent grade.

Add to that a lot of students have a lot of fun alternatives to do with that
extra time, ie party, hang out with friends, try to get girls, pursue other
hobbies and passions.

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monological
Because they're lazy and they've been given everything on a silver platter.
I'm 24.

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alanh
Since when has it been acceptable to use anonymous and pseudonymous comments
on another site as the primary basis of an article published by a major
magazine?

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known
Traditionally education system has been creating employees. Time to change
that to create _employers._

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InclinedPlane
College is becoming worth more as a credential than as education. This is
unfortunate because it means that students will be less discriminating about
the quality of their education, causing the quality of education to diminish.
Additionally, students will increasingly care more about merely earning the
piece of paper and will be encouraged to take any shortcut possible, including
cheating, to obtain a degree.

Additionally, young adults (18-25 year olds) are not expected to be as mature
as they would have been say 20 or 40 years ago. Many students view college as
a burdensome extension of high-school, they see the student-teacher
relationship as an inferior/dominant relationship rather than closer to the
peer relationship it should be. They see education as something they need to
do rather than as an opportunity to enlighten themselves. They are
increasingly enthused by the prospect of receiving a shoddy rubber-stamp
education rather than appalled that they are receiving so little educational
value from their dollars (also partly because perhaps increasingly it isn't
_their_ dollars any more). The combination of this and the above is absolutely
poisonous to the quality of higher education.

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binspace
There may also be less perceived benefit to studying compared with other
activities, such as interacting and collaborating with the broader world. Oh,
the horror!

