Leisure College, USA
New from Professors Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks is an analysis of trends in how college students are spending their time. The answer is "less studying, more leisure." The summary provided by the American Enterprise Institute is well worth the read. Their conclusions:
- Study time for full-time students at four-year colleges in the United States fell from twenty-four hours per week in 1961 to fourteen hours per week in 2003, and the decline is not explained by changes over time in student work status, parental education, major choice, or the type of institution students attended.
- Evidence that declines in study time result from improvements in education technology is slim. A more plausible explanation is that achievement standards have fallen.
- Longitudinal data indicate that students who study more in college earn more in the long run.
Why might achievement standards have fallen? Quoting Babcock and Marks:
Educators have put forth a few theories. David L. Kirp, in Richard Hersch and John Merrow's Declining by Degrees, emphasizes student empowerment vis-à-vis the university and argues that increased market pressures have caused colleges to cater to students' desires for leisure. In the same volume, Murray Sperber emphasizes a change in faculty incentives: "A nonaggression pact exists between many faculty members and students: Because the former believe that they must spend most of their time doing research and the latter often prefer to pass their time having fun, a mutual nonaggression pact occurs with each side agreeing not to impinge on the other."[7] Consistent with this explanation, recent evidence suggests that student evaluations of instructors (which exploded in popularity in the 1960s and 1970s) create perverse incentives: "easier" instructors receive higher student evaluations, and a given instructor in a given course receives higher ratings during terms when he or she requires less or grades more leniently. Because students appear to put in less effort when grading is more lenient, grade inflation may have contributed to the decline.[8] Perhaps it is not surprising that effort standards have fallen. We are hard-pressed to name any reliable, noninternal reward that instructors receive for maintaining high standards--and the penalties for doing so are clear.
I wish I could argue against this theory, but it matches my observations pretty well. We should be demanding more of our students and ourselves. Unfortunately, this is a problem that requires action at the campus level -- as long as students can "vote with their feet," there is not much an individual faculty member can do.
LAN Games
A big driver is online multi-player games, helping students flunk out of college since the late 1990s!
falling standards
Let the aging Latin Classics prof chime in here. I think you underestimate the amount of time technology saves students - I have memories of reading "L'Annee Philogique" for hours to find 20 cites to find 3 relevant articles and waiting 2 weeks for them to show up. The same search today takes me and my students 5 minutes on line and ends up with pdfs of the files on my laptop. I also think that many faculty who were trained before new time saving technology became available also are less aware that students have more time available to think rather than do the scut work of research. The intellectual demands we impose on students haven't changed, but the time they have to fulfill them has.
I've noticed too that students are far better supported with writing and math tutors, counselors and medications for a range of personal conditions and situations that are barriers to academic performance, etc. The number of students, who before the age of learning differences and disabilities could not have gotten better than a C without super-human efforts, has dropped dramatically. The performance floor has been raised, at least for students in schools that can afford to offer this support. This is a good thing and I've noticed that it has led to more interesting students and discussion in my classes.
Finally, the trend away from required courses has had the results of more students taking more courses in topics they are interested in. I suspect this correlates to a higher grade. I actually think more rigorous academic distribution requirements would be better for students developmentally, but I've lost that battle. I think we should raise the bar or lower the curve, but perhaps with the recognition that we're expecting a more intense educational experience from our students than many of us (and certainly most of our peers) committed to ourselves.
I'm not convinced that
I'm not convinced that anything undesirable is happening. Students are learning different stuff after 40+ years. Many fields are more coherent; the body of knowledge, while more extensive, is better organized. It's not that the profs have become better at explaining but that they have a richer story to tell.
Odd as it may seem, a larger body of knowledge means that more connections can be made and the pieces are self-reinforcing. It is uncoordinated islands of data that are hard to absorb, not rich interconnect story lines.
Had another thought. The
Had another thought. The authors say:
[I]t could be argued that information technologies have simply reduced the time required for some study tasks. Term papers have certainly become less time-consuming to write with the advent of word processors, and the search for texts in libraries has become faster with help from the internet. We acknowledge these factors, but seriously doubt that they tell the whole story. A major reason for our skepticism is that most of the study time decline took place prior to 1981 (well before the relevant technological advances could possibly have been a factor).
They error in assuming that a single secular trend is at work. There could be (probably are) multiple factors. The evidence of a bifurcated data set should have alerted them to that possibility. Yet they seem to strive for a single explanation across the entire period.
Any change in mix?
There was no discussion of any change in the mix of majors and it's impact on hours studied. It isn't clear where the data that is displayed came from, so it isn't possible to drill down into any of the numbers presented.
This doesn't look like a rigorous study and many people use it to just confirm pre-existing opinions:
it matches my observations pretty well
Look at the graphs in the AEI summary
Figure 3 shows that the trend occurs within majors.
Yes I looked
The change % was not uniform across majors. And we know it was not uniform across time. And we know that the enrollment in majors has changed from 1961 to 2003.
Ignoring the interplay of these mix changes doesn't clarify the conclusions.
The graphics presented don't provide the source of their data; we are prevented from exploring the verasity of the conslusions.
Simple answers are probably right
As the father of a '10 and a '12, I have observed their grades and the "study" habits of their peers. More than half of my son's courses had a median grade of "A". When my daughter took a statistics course where the class median was a "B", there was a firestorm of criticism...all the kids thought the grades would be curved up to at least an "A-minus". (She's very proud of that B+, though). How hard do you need to study when the median grade is an A or A-?
Speaking of which, the use of Plus & Minus grades takes pressure off the top achievers, especially in classes where they may not have much natural ability. They are very satisfied with an A-, and can live with a B+...where in our day, we would have busted for the A.
I also believe that they carry forward the high school pressure to join too many clubs and extra-curriculars. The vastly expanded presence of so many women in varsity sports could be influencing the the study rates. Sports take up a huge amount of time compared to 30 years ago, all year round...and even the regular clubs meet at night, which certainly cuts into study time.
And, finally, I can't resist an old guy's lament: they drink too much. If you followed kids around and registered their behavior, you'd find that at least half are alcohol abusers...5 night a week sloppy drunks. It's tough to read Ricardo when you're hung over.
That is a problem with Ricardo, they say
Another simple answer, from today's D:
http://thedartmouth.com/2010/08/06/opinion/clearinghouse/
The daughter is in that Astro Class
And I, having taking 4 Astro courses between RPI and MIT, am the "tutor of last resort". The class is appropriately tough for a selective school audience of non-science majors (especially those with only high school physics background). The professor has done a great job of getting kids to class most days; my son took it 2 years ago and class attendance was much lower. Also, the class is not in overflow because it's easy...it's the only lab science given in the summer term, and all the kids have to have a lab to graduate.
I agree with the recommendation in the article that the pass-fail with a minimum C+ would help encourage kids to take more interesting distibs. But that doesn't stop the Dean of Students from declaring today that all distribs have to have a median grade of B. That would take the professors off the hook, and even things out between departments...and perhaps encourage some kids at the margin to get up for class in the morning. And a 3.9 would again be a thing of wonder, at least at Dartmouth.
PS - My statement about Ricardo is from personal experience. :)
study time vs extracurriculars
Replying to Tom C and his "simple answers" post, I think there is something to be said for how study time is diminished by extracurricular activities.
I remember one semester in college where between studying for the MCAT, doing research in a laboratory, working a job as a peer educator, volunteering in a hospital, volunteering as a peer health educator, and time spent in classes, I had 47 hours per week of time commitments - and that was before I even spent any time on studying.
Such a breakneck schedule was only possible with grade inflation at my Ivy league school - I could pretty much count on an A- and at worst a B+. I learned not to study hard, but to hit the 20/80 point of diminishing returns, where 20% of the effort would get me 80% of the grade.
possibly related to the
possibly related to the boutiquification of liberal arts colleges... the school I went to (class of 1990) at that time prided itself in an excellent and affordable education. Since then the price has more than quadrupled (more than doubled in real terms). Apparently this is partly marketing - a more expensive school is perceived as better quality. No wonder the kids/parents want to get the career boost they paid for, regardless. I assume this will reverse over the next decade.
Doing Research
'Murray Sperber emphasizes a change in faculty incentives: "A nonaggression pact exists between many faculty members and students: Because the former believe that they must spend most of their time doing research and the latter often prefer to pass their time having fun, a mutual nonaggression pact occurs with each side agreeing not to impinge on the other."'
I don't think Mr. Sperber has much of an idea of how faculty spend their time these days. Faculty members are much too busy blogging, general political shilling, serving on corporate boards, etc, to do any meaningful research, much less teach. How much time do you think someone like Paul Krugman actually spends teaching versus blogging and writing for the New York Times, not to mention his other extra-curricular activities? It's time our universities started to enforce their conflict-of-interest and outside employment rules.
The professors "blogging,
The professors "blogging, general political shilling, serving on corporate boards, etc." are a very small fraction of the total. Furthermore, these kinds of activities are typically done by senior academics whose research is well on the decline (I'm not sure they are much different than the analogues of the 60's, except the latter perhaps tended more toward popular books and newspaper editorials than blogs and cable news slots). Anyway promotion in academia is based almost entirely on research -- indeed I suspect the balance between research and teaching has shifted more toward research since the 60's, and the things you mention don't even enter the equation, except perhaps negatively.
Let me propose a conglomerate
Let me propose a conglomerate of top universities agree to all grade on a curve, hopefully putting pressure on all other schools to do likewise. Of course, this means a large number of students at Harvard will receive "poor" grades, but if the grade-by-curve is well-advertised, employers etc know this, and make the appropriate adjustments in assessing students.
I've always liked curve grading because it tells you what you really want to know: the student's performance in relation to his/her peers.
But this essay reveals another advantage: it puts pressure off professors to inflate grades or make the class easy. Because as it is, the dynamic setting the level of effort is a tension between students and the professor. But when grading is, by edict, performed on a curve, the tension is among the students. It doesn't matter if the professor makes the course easy or difficult, what matters is performance in relation to peers. (The brightest students should actually *prefer* more difficult courses, because it makes it easier for them to differentiate themselves. This also changes the dynamics of "voting by feet" mentioned in the essay.)
MPS, I went from a small
MPS,
I went from a small public college to a top-10 law school, where the schools are moving away from a lot of your recommendations. Just a few thoughts:
(1) The "brightest students" often don't prefer difficult courses they'll stand out in, because they don't know if they're the brightest at the school when they select it. If you're going to a really high end school - why take the risk? It takes a lot of cojones to walk into Harvard or Yale certain you're in the top 20%. This is why so many of the top 10 schools have very generous curves.
(2) The peer-on-peer pressure of a strict curve can be extremely destructive.
The horror stories of students sabotaging and undermining each other, rather than helping each other, are prevalent - especially at the very top, where Harvard students are duking it out for prime clerkships, and at the middle to bottom, where there are strict curves and students are trying to stand out to get a big-firm job.
(3) Even where employers do have grade-correction charts (and this is only feasible in some companies in some professions) there is a big psychological impact of hiring an A- student versus a B student.
BTW I agree with above
BTW I agree with above commenters that the value of education technology is underestimated. I can't imagine having to have typed a report on typewriter, as opposed to PC word processor -- let alone electronic library / internet searches vs whatever people did in the 60's.
That being said, I think the rising efficiency of learning tools should mean students spend roughly the same time studying but perform much more, not perform the same in less time.
Is increased non-academic
Is increased non-academic work really insignificant? Looking at the table, the decline in studying hours is much less dramatic for students who work over 20 hrs a week. Presumably, the fraction of students who fall into this category grew significantly from then to now. While this alone would not explain the effect on study hours, I think one should consider a secondary effect: most students study only insofar as they need to, to make the grade they want (actually I'm sure there's actually a cost / benefit analysis to more study / higher grades, but my point will be unchanged). However, when larger and larger fractions of students study less hours because of time demands of outside jobs, this allows the other students to "get away" with less studying even though they have more time to do it. In other words, working students set a lower bar for everyone else.
I suspect this is a huge effect, accounting for perhaps on order of half the difference. I will point out the effect exists even keeping work-hours constant, in that different majors have different standards for study-hours (you can see that in the AEI tables), and so there is a tendency of high-demand majors to seek out electives populated by many low-demand majors, so they don't have to work as hard to receive the desired grade.