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College students should study more

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26 pointsvwoolf48 comments

How on earth could a college student enrolled full-time only have 1.2 hours of in-class instruction per day? Back in my day, when we had a foot of snow on the ground and had to walk barefoot uphill in every direction, a 15-credit-hour semester amounted to 3 hour-long courses on MWF and 2 hour and a half courses Tu and Th. Even subtracting 10 minutes for time between classes, it comes to 2.83 hours per day, using a real-world example- my own freshman year. Am I splitting hairs, or does this seem wrong to anyone else?

A 15 credit semester for me, having been through undergrad within the decade, typically meant 1-2 courses with 1.5 hour lectures 3 days a week, a 3 hour lab or lecture once a week, and another 1-2 courses with a 1.5 or so hours of lecture twice a week. So yeah, 1.2 seems like a wild underestimate.

Unless maybe non-STEM programs are less rigorous? Since I was in the engineering department, a large chunk of my general education requirements were waived as there were simply too many requirements to cover (so, eg, no second language class and most others needing only one class in each category, setup so single classes could fulfill multiple categories).

Eg if you're an art student, maybe large amounts of classroom instruction isn't as important as large amounts of time to work on projects and then get feedback during class time?

The one art class I took (and instantly dropped) seemed to be like that. The hour long lectures were just about analyzing and discussing a piece each week, and instead there was a lot of work to be done on writing about the work and going to museums to perform studies (which is why I dropped it, as much as I enjoy museums, I prefer to enjoy them without worrying about grades).

Its off by a massive margin.

I was in architecture. My roommate was a bio-chem major. Besides a full day of classes, I spent several hours a day in studio doing projects and my roommate spent several hours toiling away in the school lab.

All told, I lived in a house with several soccer teammates and we were all logging tons of time outside our normal classes in labs, studios, and elsewhere that were considered part of our normal class time which effectively extended the time professors expected you to be working on their stuff. Our weeks were just crammed hour to hour with homework, practices and games and trying to fit in 25-30 hours of part-time work a week to boot.

College was a blast, but it's not for the feint of heart or slacker.

Yeah, had a similar experience with my undergrad in CS.

The expectaton at the college I went to was that each credit hour roughly maps to 1 hour of lecture + 3 hrs of work outside of class. That estimate wasn’t even for getting an A, that was just to pass a class with a C. Which sounds like a lot, and it was, but you gotta account that this would include weekends as well (thus leaving some amount of free time, because otherwise it would require pulling 16 hour weekdays).

It definitely builds character, and I absolutely would do it the exact same way if I had to go back in time. However, I wouldn’t recommend my school to anyone who wants to do premed, because your GPA will needlessly suffer, and GPA is one of the primary importance metrics for med school acceptance.

When I did a CS degree in the 1980s at a UK university I think we had at least 4 hours of lectures per day - with lab hours and tutorials on top of that (maybe a couple of hours a day).

We thought we had it easy - the Electrical Engineering students we shared a lot of classes with had 8 hours a day in their timetables.

Edit: By fourth year I was practically living in the department building - easily averaging ~10 hours there then going to the pub or for a run...

My first year was 36 "hours" (an hour was 50 minutes, followed by a break of at least 10 minutes) per week, which included lab/terminal time. Homework was, as the word says, not included, but some classes mixed classical teaching, explanation, and exercises. The number of hours in class steadily dropped over the next years, as the homework load increased to 40+ hours for writing what's nowadays called the MSc. thesis.

I'm currently studying Electrical Engineering at a Russell Group UK uni. My timetable is nothing like what you are describing, so I think things have changed.

I have about 3-4 hours of lecture time per week and 3-4 hours of tutorial time with professors. That amounts to 8 hours per week.

A lot of it seems to have shifted to "self-directed learning" time, i.e. studying, doing labs, etc independently.

You're not going to like this: that degree cost me nothing financially - I didn't pay any fees and I got a full grant which was more than enough to live on and have a nice flat in central Edinburgh.

Edit: Turns out this was a pretty good investment by the taxpayers of the UK...

University of Edinburgh? That happens to be where I'm studying right now.

It's £28,950/year for EU students.

No - I went to the far less prestigious Heriot-Watt (although I was accepted by Edinburgh!) which at the time I was there had the distinct advantage of having the relevant departments located in the Grassmarket.

Fees for Scottish universities still free for students from Scotland though? I'm just bitter because my own son decided to go to an English Russel Group University...

I don’t understand this, we had 5h of classes a day in CS for 4 years in Spain, it’s still like that, and it was not particularly strenuous. There was plenty of time left to start my first company and a reasonable amount of leisure time, while maintaining top grades.

I have been in a number of other prestigious universities across EU after that, the actual instruction quality and difficulty was not any lesser in Spain.

How do they even learn anything with 1.2h?

EDIT: sure including the weekend that’s 3.6h per day, still is 3x.

I don't remember the exact numbers but undergrad would, I think, be at least 3 hours of classroom a day.

It's obviously wrong, and by a lot. At every university I know of, a full-time courseload is defined as at least 12 hours in class per week, or 2.4 hours per weekday. The average student doesn't cut half their classes.

Perhaps by counting non-class days such as weekends, vacation and exam days? A semester at my school was 62 instruction days, so 3 * (62 / (365/3)) is about 1.5.

It's very wrong, when I was in college full time was 4-8 hours of class every day M-Th.

Beyond that assignments outside of classroom instruction were usually around 2 hours of work per hour of instruction, and MUCH more for non-entry level CS and SE classes.

Spending less than 3 hours a day for a full time student is legitimately insane.

Maybe remote/online classes are getting to be a lot more popular post-COVID?

In the US there seem to be a lot of requirements forced upon universities that limit how much instruction is allowed to be exclusively remote or online for a student to still be considered full time (by visa requirements for international students, and I think by student loan requirements for local students). IIRC only 3-4 credits of ~15 are allowed to be an online/hybrid course. Although courses which have in-person spaces, but allow remote viewing (no interaction) are fairly common.

I wonder how much time is left over in a 24 hour period after you get your daily recommended sleep, study and exercise. On to of the required work and class time.

I worked full-time while finishing up my degree. 40 hours of work, 12 hours of class, an hour a day for transportation, 7 hours a day for sleep. That's 92/120 hours a work week accounted for before homework and personal life stuff, so 76% of the hours in a work week. Weekends were loaded with a lot of studying time, lots of reading ahead in classes. I didn't hit the gym often during the week but a lot of my commute was bikeable so that kept me active. Parking on campus was expensive.

It was a busy time in my life but was just a few years while I was young. In the end I feel like I had more personal time back then compared to now with multiple children.

I’ve never done the math, but in college I had a coop and an additional job (or two) for most of it. I have been told it was “impossible” before though.

I worked enough I rented a whole apartment with my now wife, and we both graduated with about 3K in loans each. Prices are different at a Canadian college than an American university though.

I rode my bike to work and school.

It was busy but I never felt overwhelmed. Maybe I was too focused on getting it done, I’m not sure.

I agree that having a family is way worse in the personal time sense. Kids are a huge emotional/energy suck too. Way different than being busy at work.

The time I worked the hardest was actually when I was the most energetic, second half of college.

Not a lot. I do exactly this and I'm only left with a few hours per day to do whatever I want. I could obviously sleep less/eat out but that's not worth it imo.

The graph in the article is woefully different from my own experience

Social science students study way less than STEM, and the remaining subjects even less than social science. Also students at easier to get into colleges study less than at more prestigious ones. So likely your experience wasn't very representative, unless you studied something normal at an average university instead of STEM at a higher end one.

I think you're correct that experience will differ substantially by context. I think your particular generalizations might hold enough to show up in a regression but there's enough other stuff going on (and noise) that they won't be tremendously predictive in individual cases.

I was a STEM major, did well at a reasonable school, and the only time I felt like I had way the hell more homework than I could get through was at a community college when I signed up for a Literature course and a Political Science course the same summer.

Yeah, I was trying to make sense of the graph in the article, because even if I were carrying only 3 STEM classes per semester (sometimes it was more), then class plus at least 1 lab would come out to 10 hours per week, but these classes typically had problem sets we spent 4-5 hours on each week, so that's almost 25 hours per week before we count the other 2 classes I didn't mention, or study for exams. And if it was programming, most would have similar workloads, but some were notorious, so a single graphics or operating systems class might demand 15-20 hours of programming outside of class time the entire semester!

168 hours in a week

-56 hours sleep

-15 hours classroom time

-45 hours study time

-7 hours exercise

= 45 hours remaining, or 6.5 hours per day

Take off an hour a day for travel, another for hygiene, another for meals.

We are rapidly approaching time deficit even assuming perfect discipline.

I've been cooking myself more since COVID. Finding recipes, shopping, prepping, cooking, eating and cleaning is far more than 1 hour per day. And I live within walking distance of a major supermarket. But maybe I'm just really inefficient.

This doesn't make any sense. A full-time student spends at least 2.4 hours in class per day by definition. Most universities consider a student full-time if they take more than 12 credit-hours per semester, and a credit-hour is one hour of in-class instruction per week. That works out to 2.4 hours per weekday. In practice most students take 15 credit-hours, which means they spend three hours in class per day.

The chart is from The Heritage Foundation, so it's a lie but I assume not fabricated from whole cloth. Did they count weekends and holidays in the denominator, perhaps?

Weekends probably count.

It doesn't add up. 12/7 ≈ 1.7 > 1.2

Also, counting weekends would be dishonest without pointing it out. A full-time job is eight hours per day, not 5.7.

For difficult coursework where you really need to learn the material inside and out in order to have any chance of success in the next course in the series, the lecture:study ratio needed is about 1:3.

If one is taking three such courses, perhaps ten hours in lecture per week, then around four hours a day, seven days a week will be needed for study. (It's true that some people grasp material quicker than others, but often that's because they've had some prior introduction to it.)

This is pretty demanding and it's why a lot of people switch their majors to something less time-consuming. However, this lecture:study/practice ratio is entirely normal for vocational programs, e.g. learning to weld, etc.

"If I hold up one corner of a square and the student cannot workout the other three for himself, I won't go any further." - Confucius

The problem here is the sheer cost of college. Since college is so damn expensive, it creates a lot of risk aversion. You can't flunk a student or take away their scholarship because they'll end up with a lifetime's worth of debt without any degree. That's potentially life ruining. College as a whole is way more risky. The baby boomer idea of using college to explore one's passions becomes untenable when a single year costs 80k.

The paradox here is that while college is extremely expensive, it's also still very much a gateway to white collar, middle class life. So you end up with a lot of students who are forced into college by their parents, who don't really want to be there, and who need decent grades. So yeah, they're not going to study that hard. To avoid this, we need cheaper college, and more routes into the middle class that don't involve college.

>To avoid this, we need cheaper college,

You don't get to have that though. College could be cheaper in a past era, because in some ways it was the byproduct and not the actual product. Byproducts can be sold cheaply, because the main product is where the profit center lies. But byproducts are also really limited... there was just enough for 5-10% of the population to attend. When that was asked to be scaled up to something approaching 100%, the original supply could not handle it. And if you do scale up for a byproduct, it's no longer the byproduct. Turns out it was costly. Someone has to pay.

That's not even the only mechanism at work causing costs to spiral out of control. If universities have to compete to persuade students to attend their own campus rather than some rivals, it seemed really expedient to build nicer dormitories. One lady I worked with described that when she attended back in the 1940s, it was four students sharing square footage that sounded like a closet to me. The modern dorms at the local university are now about x6 the square footage, but only house 2 students. They're much more nicely furnished, larger, and have more amenities. But not just the dorms... the grounds are nicer. Lots of nice new halls and buildings. All networked like a spaceport. I wonder how many big flatscreens I could count if I wandered through campus for an hour.

All of these things cost, and the cost was passed on to students for tuition. All so universities could try to take market share from other universities. But even if you change that, the universities didn't pay for those things in cash. It was all financed, and they'll be paying the mortgage on them for decades more. Someone has to pay for that.

None of this comes without maintenance either. The number of staff exploded. They all need salaries. And to manage so many staff, administrative overhead grew. They all need big salaries.

College can't ever get cheaper. And any attempt to tinker with it will result in catastrophe I think. If someone tries, a few of those with the largest endowments might limp along, but most of the states will consolidate and downsize state schools, and the smaller privates will just wither away into insolvency and closures. There are hints that this might already be starting.

> College can't ever get cheaper.

Residential college. For most, college will look more like community college, commuter college, night school and other extension sites, or online college.

As you say, this is already underway in the US (due to the “demographic cliff” in projected high school graduates in most states).

Is the college not failing students for the benefit of the student or for the benefit of themselves (continuing to collect the student's tuition money). I'd argue it's the latter. Current colleges are not these selfless organizations centered around doing good for their students. Sure maybe a lot of professors and TA's care about the education but administrators who dominate the system now only care about sucking in as much money as possible and dont really care how they do it.

>>> becomes untenable when a single year costs 80k.

Where are people going to college where its 80K a year? I went to a neighboring four year state college where I got reciprocity and graduated with only 15K in debt which I was able to pay off in about 4 years.

College is not "extremely expensive" if you actually do your research. A lot of my friends saved money by taking all their generals at a community college, then transferred to a four year college where they finished in two years because all they had left to get done was their program specific classes.

You also have tons of two year technical colleges where you can get a degree in tons of different areas, and there's also trade schools where day 1, you're working in your field and you apprentice under a master to become a journeyman. The trades are in crazy high demand and most of those entry level at around 60K/year and go up from there.

College is only expensive if you make it expensive. It doesn't take much to get a decent degree and find an in-demand industry where you can make good money. Tons of my friends opted for two year tech degrees. Many of them went into graphic design and networking and had a fraction of the debt I had and were all earning-40-50K/year right out of school.

There are also thousands of different scholarships and grants available to low income families and if you're a decent student, you can also get a fractional scholarship that would take care of some of it. You also have to consider the military or National Guard. I had several close friends that said the only reason they were in the guard was to get college paid for free and the bonus was getting paid extra in the meantime.

Also, schools yank scholarships all the time. When I was in college, I saw several frat guys lose their academic scholarships and saw three athletes have theirs yanked as well.

This. People just pull random sticker prices from Ivies/Stanford/MIT type of schools, without realizing that almost no one attending those schools pays that much. They have amazing need-based financial aid programs. “I got accepted into Stanford/MIT/Ivies, but cannot afford to attend” isn’t really a thing.

Unless your family is extremely wealthy, you can only realistically spend that much by either going to a small expensive private school (aka one that doesn’t have Ivies-tier financial aid) or to a hyped public school out of state (e.g., UCs as a non-CA resident). Which is a mostly silly idea, but even then, you wont really be hitting $80k/year.

I remember that back in 2013, UCLA was roughly $32k/yr for an out-of-state student. Of course I ended up not going to UCLA and went to GT instead as an in-state student. In-state sticker price of tuition was roughly $10k/yr, but every single in-state student also had access to HOPE/Zell Miller scholarship based on GPA (3.0+ covers 90% of the tuition, 3.3+ covers 100% of the tuition). And that’s on top of federal financial aid. Even without the scholarships, $10k/year is not terrible, and is a far cry from $80k/yr. Out of state costs were roughly $22k/yr, and international costs were around $30k/yr.

I am really curious to see those $80k/yr schools that don’t offer Ivies-tier need-based financial aid. I would bet that the number of those schools in the US can be counted using just two hands at most. I, personally, am yet to find a single school like that. So if someone could list at least a few that are of any noteworthiness, it would be greatly appreciated.

Demand for college has sharply increased, and I don't think we've seen supply meet it yet. That can solve itself, and there are also trade schools.

Why do people drag out trade schools? Sure they can make sense financially, but there's a heavy toll of working with your body instead of sitting in an office chair for work. And the numbers don't lie, college graduates make significantly more than non college grads. You might have loans, but your career trajectory can be much higher with a degree.

You don't need a college degree to have an office job.

The problem isn't the cost of college, it's the chronic underpayment of a proper wage post graduation. College costs accurately reflect the impact of inflation. It's wages that are depressed. We can thank our corporate masters for that.

Inflation is a different rate for each person really, but you can group it. The rate for the middle class, spending on things with semi-fixed supply like a desirable house or college, is higher than for lower class. The rate for upper class is the highest. Probably has to do with each one's asset mix (or lack thereof). The only thing shared between them all is our US Dollar which tends to double in supply each decade.

Definitely a both and. We have seen an infantilization of the academy that I believe is in no small part due to the increased economic necessity of a college degree. I think quality education should be available to all who want it. Forcing people to jump through arbitrary and largely irrelevant hoops just to get a middle class job though is definitely hurting a significant segment of our society who are capable but not academically inclined. Catering to these students also deprives resources from the stronger and more motivated students.

By the time I went to college, the institution was already clearly in decline, but it does seem that things have gotten markedly worse in the last 10-15 years, which is quite dispiriting.

The problem with this argument is you have slackers like me who specifically chose my major because it was something I was good at so had to put in minimal effort to get passing grades.

The last college essay I had to write I started at the beginning of class, walked it to campus before the class was over and got an A.

And, as they say, D's get degrees.

As the chart shows, the real spike in grade inflation is when the US government effectively used GPA as a measure for whether or not young men were sent off to patrol villages next to rice paddies in Vietnam.

Also, if you attended college, you got a draft deferment. There were quite a few Ph.Ds awarded in that period.

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23300/report/u-s-doctorate-awa...

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