Still Life of Mind

With all of the courses that have the word “studies” attached to them, you would think that students are actually doing more studying. Au contraire mon ami.

“In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty-four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week,” Philip Babcock, Mindy Marks of the American Enterprise Institute found. “Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require.”

“This dramatic decline in study time occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, for students who worked and those who did not, within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that are most relevant to education and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at postsecondary institutions in the United States.”

Then, of course, there is the material they are studying in those reduced hours and its accuracy and relevance…

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.