Correction:
An earlier version of this article misstated the University of California campus that employs economist Mindy Marks. It is UC-Riverside, not UC-Santa Barbara. This version has been corrected.
Mark Gail/The Washington Post - George Mason University's Ashley Dixon talks with friend Canesha Swift while working at a campus information desk in Fairfax.
The University of the District of Columbia declined to release data on study time. Georgetown and George Washington universities have not given the survey recently.
Evidence of declining study was mostly ignored until 2010, when two University of California economists brought the issue to the fore in a paper titled “Leisure College, USA.”
Number of hours students study
Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks unearthed previous research, part of a longitudinal study called Project Talent, that showed students of 1961 spent about 24 hours a week studying.
They calculated that those students spent another 16 hours in class time, or 40 hours in total weekly scholarship, giving college, for them, the feel of a full-time endeavor.
By contrast, the typical student today spends 27 hours a week in study and class time, roughly the same time commitment expected of students in a modern full-day kindergarten.
“This is an absolutely enormous change in postsecondary education, possibly as big as anything we’ve seen in the last 50 years,” Babcock said.
The finding has led some critics to question whether college is delivering on its core mission: student learning. Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa identified lax study as a key failing of academia in their 2011 report “Academically Adrift,” which found that 36 percent of students made no significant gains in critical-thinking skills in college. Arum’s own research found that students study only 12 hours a week.
“What students are getting is four or five years of country club living,” said Richard Vedder, an Ohio University researcher who studies the economics of higher education.
Some academicians dispute the evidence of a downward trend in study time. They note that the findings are based on different surveys and on the fallible accounts of students. Babcock and Marks say their analysis accounts for those subtleties. The director of the student engagement survey, Alexander McCormick, concurs that the findings are sound.
By many accounts, students are far from lazy — it’s just that things besides schoolwork are consuming more of their time.
“They’re working full time and going to school full time, which I think is absurd,” said Joe Scimecca, a sociology professor at George Mason. “I asked a class recently how many were working, and there were only two who weren’t.”
Dixon, the sophomore from Haymarket, is majoring in tourism, works 23 hours a week at a campus information desk, commutes up to two hours a day and volunteers at church.
“My planner is a wreck,” she said.
Students at several other colleges report the same stressful pace. Karli Wood, a senior at Northern Kentucky University, maintains an A-minus average, even though she works nearly 40 hours a week and commutes up to an hour a day across the Ohio River from her Cincinnati home. She counts her study time in minutes, not hours.
“I don’t mean to sound cocky,” she said, “but if I had more time, I could have had a 4.0.”
Modern technology helps and hinders collegiate study. Students are more efficient in researching and writing term papers now than 50 years ago. They also spend several hours a week using computers for fun, a pastime that did not exist in 1960.
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