Comment by capnrefsmmat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by capnrefsmmat | Hacker News Reader

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> He seems quite out of touch with the level of economic hardship involved in being a student; a huge number of students already work a couple of jobs and are navigating small businesses, especially here in the UK where he apparently now lives. They aren't going to have enough "free time" to play with a "project" even if a bit more is made available by loosening the curriculum.

Empirically, student free time grew for much of the 20th century, and students spend much less time on school work than they used to. The decline is not explained by students spending more time on work outside of school; much of it has become leisure time.

https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00093 https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811011200908

Now perhaps there has been a sharp change in the years since those two studies (there certainly has been a sharp change in UK tuition costs), but the point is that our intuitions about how hard students must have to work these days are usually wrong.

The articles are from 2006 and 2011.

Here is inflation since

https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2022/04/inflat...

Please lets have some decency towards the struggles of students

When I was an undergrad (35 years ago) I had at least 2 days a week where I was so busy that I had to choose between eating or sleeping. I usually picked eating because not sleeping meant I could pick up another shift or grind on a class project (also because I was young... if I tried that now I'd probably die)

And there's someone on the opposite end of the Bell curve that balances you out.

I was pretty normal for an engineering student at that time.

I was going to say, "You might not have noticed, but it has been the 21st century for a quarter-century." However, you clearly did notice, so I'm not sure why you bothered to make this post. It's like you came to a conclusion, realized your empirical data was empirically out-of-date, but decided to press on anyhow. Rather than elucidate the subject, you just exposed your biases.

More recent surveys have not contradicted the trend. For instance, in 2015,

> On average, students spent about 14 HPW preparing for class, 6 HPW working for pay, 12 HPW relaxing and socializing, 7 HPW participating in co-curricular activities and community service, 2 HPW caring for dependents, and 3 HPW commuting to campus. These activities accounted for a total weekly average of 45 HPW.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-018-9497-z

I've looked for other data and have not found anything to indicate the trend has reversed.

That's a mischaracterization of the study. The very next sentence:

  However, the standard deviations indicate that there is considerable variation in how students allocate their time to these activities.

Additionally, their data is an "analytical sample" extracted via "weighted random selection" from a larger data set from more than 10 years ago. We don't know how well that sample fit the broader reality a decade ago, let alone today.

That you went fishing for research to support your argument and this is the best you could find is telling.

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