money rolling in.
How Much Do Students Really Study?
We’ve seen that students aren’t “engaged,” but we haven’t talked about what this means in terms of actual student work. How much do students really study? The answer: not much.
A number of new reports on successful people have found that the amount of work you do, the amount of time you practice something, the better you become at doing it. Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling book Outliers , said ten thousand hours of practice separate the mediocre from the world-class and mentions many successful people, including Mozart, golfer Tiger Woods, and the Beatles, who spent years playing music together eight hours a day in Germany. If you work hard at something, you are likely to get better at it and succeed. 80
College athletes, musicians, and artists understand this concept and you can see them spending hours in the training room or the studio practicing their skills in order to improve their performances. When it comes to academics, however, college students take a much different attitude. Brought up under the self-esteem movement, they think learning is easy and not worth any effort. It’s something you can learn without any hard work. You can simply sit in class and absorb it without reading, writing, or studying.
Colleges were originally set up under the Horatio Alger idea that hours of hard work set students on the road to success. Take students out of the secular society and create an enclave for them where they can pursue their studies without the distractions of the outside world and you can produce the leaders of tomorrow. A generation ago, students were expected to attend classes for fifteen hours a week and study for another thirty hours a week. If they did this for four years, they would rack up some 4,320 hours of academic study, far less than Gladwell’s ten thousand hours but well placed on the path to success.
But things are different now. National surveys show that half of American college students spend only nine to fifteen hours a week studying, only half of what was common a generation ago. Because of changes in the curriculum, dumbed-down classes, and lowered expectations, students find they can get by doing very little work and still be rewarded with a grade of B or even A. And instead of being ascetic refuges from the world, today’s college campuses are full of distractions like climbing walls, parties, rock concerts, hot tubs, student centers, and high-definition cable television sets that compete with academics for the students’ time and attention.
“This is a learned set of behaviors,” said Richard Hersh, a former college president, of the few hours students spend studying. “Students are being rewarded for it. They don’t do a lot of work but they still get a B. They can buy a paper on the internet and not get caught. No big deal. They can join a fraternity and party five nights a week and then brag about being smashed and still making it through their classes. This is being learned and they get victimized by it.” 81
Instead of teaching them to swim, he said, colleges teach students how to tread water. Students who make a minimal effort manage to stay afloat and not drown but essentially they stay in the same place. “That’s a crime,” Hersh said.
Kuh said NSSE statistics show that about 20 percent of students are simply drifting through college, yet they don’t flunk out and are awarded diplomas. These students have figured out how to game the system to get what they want with the least possible effort. They keep their heads down and avoid attracting attention. They pick large classes and tend to hang together as a group sleepwalking through college. 82 “If this is not higher education’s dirty little secret, then it ought to be,” said Kuh.
Many of my students in New Hampshire admitted to me that they did no reading or work at all outside of class. They wanted
How Much Do Students Really Study?
We’ve seen that students aren’t “engaged,” but we haven’t talked about what this means in terms of actual student work. How much do students really study? The answer: not much.
A number of new reports on successful people have found that the amount of work you do, the amount of time you practice something, the better you become at doing it. Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling book Outliers , said ten thousand hours of practice separate the mediocre from the world-class and mentions many successful people, including Mozart, golfer Tiger Woods, and the Beatles, who spent years playing music together eight hours a day in Germany. If you work hard at something, you are likely to get better at it and succeed. 80
College athletes, musicians, and artists understand this concept and you can see them spending hours in the training room or the studio practicing their skills in order to improve their performances. When it comes to academics, however, college students take a much different attitude. Brought up under the self-esteem movement, they think learning is easy and not worth any effort. It’s something you can learn without any hard work. You can simply sit in class and absorb it without reading, writing, or studying.
Colleges were originally set up under the Horatio Alger idea that hours of hard work set students on the road to success. Take students out of the secular society and create an enclave for them where they can pursue their studies without the distractions of the outside world and you can produce the leaders of tomorrow. A generation ago, students were expected to attend classes for fifteen hours a week and study for another thirty hours a week. If they did this for four years, they would rack up some 4,320 hours of academic study, far less than Gladwell’s ten thousand hours but well placed on the path to success.
But things are different now. National surveys show that half of American college students spend only nine to fifteen hours a week studying, only half of what was common a generation ago. Because of changes in the curriculum, dumbed-down classes, and lowered expectations, students find they can get by doing very little work and still be rewarded with a grade of B or even A. And instead of being ascetic refuges from the world, today’s college campuses are full of distractions like climbing walls, parties, rock concerts, hot tubs, student centers, and high-definition cable television sets that compete with academics for the students’ time and attention.
“This is a learned set of behaviors,” said Richard Hersh, a former college president, of the few hours students spend studying. “Students are being rewarded for it. They don’t do a lot of work but they still get a B. They can buy a paper on the internet and not get caught. No big deal. They can join a fraternity and party five nights a week and then brag about being smashed and still making it through their classes. This is being learned and they get victimized by it.” 81
Instead of teaching them to swim, he said, colleges teach students how to tread water. Students who make a minimal effort manage to stay afloat and not drown but essentially they stay in the same place. “That’s a crime,” Hersh said.
Kuh said NSSE statistics show that about 20 percent of students are simply drifting through college, yet they don’t flunk out and are awarded diplomas. These students have figured out how to game the system to get what they want with the least possible effort. They keep their heads down and avoid attracting attention. They pick large classes and tend to hang together as a group sleepwalking through college. 82 “If this is not higher education’s dirty little secret, then it ought to be,” said Kuh.
Many of my students in New Hampshire admitted to me that they did no reading or work at all outside of class. They wanted
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