Theories on Why College Kids Are Studying Less | Hacker News Reader

Theories on Why College Kids Are Studying Less

theatlanticwire.com

24 pointsjamesbritt24 comments

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.

Your reasoning is based on a movie clip. However, I have a hunch that there are statistics that can back up your claim. My hunch, of course, is based on my current personal experience with undergraduate life, which indeed seems to be a large body of students taking college for the sake of taking college.

having finished undergrad this June, I completely agree

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... (contains more years + more data)

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

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.

Well I certainly can't say the same.

I don't know about you but I find it very, very hard to actually learn something (rather than read about it once on Wikipedia) that isn't programming related, computer related or job related, unless I'm forced to sit down and study it every week (as in school).

My point exactly. It just seems backwards to force feed people information if they are not motivated to actually learn it so it shouldn't be surprising that people are studying less now that they have ways to pursue other activities. There is no way you are going to get anything meaningful out of something if the only motivator is punishment in the form of a lower GPA. On the other hand, if you are actually interested in learning something because you want to learn it then the knowledge you gain automatically spills over into other areas and your knowledge grows organically and not according to some template designed by a committee.

I don't agree. I don't think school is punishment. GPAs are just an unfortunate element of the education system.

I learned so many things in college that I didn't want to learn at first. But I'm glad they sat me down and made me learn it because I realize how ignorant I was.

IMO, the biggest problem facing the world right now is ignorance. What do I offer society by only learning about my interests (in my case, software development)? In the future, what will I offer young people and my children, if I only have knowledge of my niche?

What do artists offer to the world by only pursuing their passion? Plenty. I once met a sculptor that did nothing except sculpt stone, granite, and marble statues since the age of 16. His works can be seen throughout middle asia and armenia and he was one of the most interesting people I have ever met. The same can not be said for the thousands of college students that are being spoon fed anti-ignorance.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

I've had courses that have challenged me to study because either the topic was difficult or the professor was a researching mathematician who rambled in lecture.

However this article made me notice of a trend of having less free time: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/04/...

Personally, the culture outside of the classroom was that you had to be involved in many different things: work, clubs, career building, etc. Like studying itself would not make you a successful person. Is this forcing professors to make me study less? Am I gaining less knowledge because of it?

I wish I knew, but I'm too busy studying to know ;)

EDIT: Well to be honest, too busy surfing the internet instead of studying. Yes it's an addiction and an uphill battle to fight it, but it beats being addicted to WOW like my previous roommate. At least I have a small insight into the thinking of entrepreneur-ing hackers.

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?

You can do that if you want straight As!

You can do that if you want an aneurysm!

http://thereifixedit.com/

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

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.

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

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?

Traditionally education system has been creating employees. Time to change that to create employers.

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.

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!

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