So what does he say about care-free student life?
> The imperfect overlap between the school ethic and the work ethic is especially blatant in modern American colleges. Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying.98 Since the early 1960s, effort collapsed across the board. “Full-time” college students average 27 hours of academic work per week—and only 14 hours of studying. (...)
> What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. Instead of being socialized for lives of boring work in hierarchical organizations, they’re being socialized for lives of play and self-expression. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa frostily remark in their Academically Adrift:
>> If we presume that students are sleeping eight hours a night, which is a generous assumption given their tardiness and at times disheveled appearance in early morning classes, that leaves 85 hours a week for other activities. . . . What is this additional time spent on? It seems to be spent mostly on socializing and recreation.
> A week in modern college is a great way to teach students that life is a picnic:
>> A recent study of University of California undergraduates reported that while students spent thirteen hours a week studying, they also spent twelve hours socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies, and three hours on other forms of entertainment.
> Instead of making students conform and submit, college showers students with acceptance. This doesn’t merely fail to prepare students for their future roles; it actively unprepares them. College raises students’ expectations to unrealistic heights, leaving future employers the chore of dragging graduates back down to earth.
His book discusses your other points too, I strongly recommend it.
If you think this is a bad thing, you are well and truly lost.
> If you think this is a bad thing, you are well and truly lost.
Well, you were claiming that the book/study did not take this into account so GP posted evidence that the book/study does indeed address your concerns.
Whether it is a bad thing or not is irrelevant to the concern you expressed, to wit - that the socialisation and play is not addressed by the study.
No, I did not.
> Whether it is a bad thing or not is irrelevant to the concern you expressed
No, the entire point of me asking about it is because I think it has value to people making educational choices.
> that the socialisation and play is not addressed by the study.
Yes, and the way the study addresses this is batshit insane, unless you are an unfeeling utilitarian robot.
> No, I did not.
So how exactly is the reader supposed to interpret this statement of yours:
> So what about the partying, making friends for life, and learning to be an adult?
>
> What about care-free student life as a carrot to incentivise young adults to go into careers that might not be good for them personally, but good for society?
When someone looks at a study and says "What about $FOO", they generally mean "Why is $FOO not addressed?", and not "Your conclusions about $FOO are wrong".
You said
> "What about $FOO"
but you meant
> "Your $FOO conclusions are wrong"
Is this correct?
? So your sentence does not make logical sense to me? Did you mean before the 1960s people would spend 40h _plus_ studying. Because the way you write it is that fifty years ago college was 40h (in-class and studying), and now it is 27h in class + 14h studying (41h) so nothing changed.
No, I'm not going to do that. And if you've read the entire book, and think I'm an idiot at this point, you are free to say so and disengage from this discussion.
But the reason I'm so dismissive of his work is that the conclusion is ridiculous and the premise inherently flawed because education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever.
And the reason I'm dismissive of the defenders is that no-one seems to be able to come up with a succinct rebuttal to the criticisms fielded by me and others in this discussion other than "read the entire book!"
Any attempt at modeling any phenomena will fail to capture some aspect of that phenomena. So are you suggesting that all attempts at modeling are inherently flawed and must lead to ridiculous conclusions?
- O Captain! My Captain!
I suggested that the non-specific incompleteness of a model isn’t a compelling reason not to use the model.