It’s true that students after World War II worked much harder than anyone who came after. In the early 1960s, the average college student worked about 25 hours a week. By 2000, that number had dropped to about 14 hours, a 44 percent drop, and it’s stayed around that level ever since. In other words, baby boomers experienced the most rapid decline in academic standards, but today’s students are working about as hard at their degrees as millennials and Gen Xers.
It’s true that students after World War II worked much harder than anyone who came after. In the early 1960s, the average college student worked about 25 hours a week. By 2000, that number had dropped to about 14 hours, a 44 percent drop, and it’s stayed around that level ever since. In other words, baby boomers experienced the most rapid decline in academic standards, but today’s students are working about as hard at their degrees as millennials and Gen Xers.
Kids these days seem to be doing everything but studying: starting tech companies, running extracurricular activities, and of course, protesting on the lawn. This may sound like a classic “back in the day” speech from a disconnected old man, but it’s actually my own experience. I recently graduated from Harvard University, and I was struck by how little time my peers and I spent studying for our degrees.
Complaints about the declining work ethic of students are not new, dating back to an 1894 Harvard committee that claimed students were starting to turn in mediocre work. Are today’s students really lazier than their predecessors, or am I yearning for some mythical academic Golden Age?
Thanks to new data, we know the answer.
It’s true that students after World War II worked much harder than anyone who came after. In the early 1960s, the average college student worked about 25 hours a week. By 2000, that number had dropped to about 14 hours, a 44 percent drop, and it’s stayed around that level ever since. In other words, baby boomers experienced the most rapid decline in academic standards, but today’s students are working about as hard at their degrees as millennials and Gen Xers.
The simplest explanation for this slide is technology. I can type essays and analyze data in ways my grandparents couldn’t — much faster. I can also (and often am) more easily distracted by technology. Yet the technological excuse doesn’t hold water, because the biggest decline in academic effort occurred from about 1960 to 1980, long before personal computers became widespread, according to economists Phillip S. Babcock and Mindy Marks, who studied the available data.
Marks sees the Vietnam War as a more plausible explanation for the steep decline in stringency. During the war and the military draft, professors gave students higher grades to avoid being expelled and then sent overseas. The Vietnam era saw grade inflation steeper than ever before. Once standards dropped, it was hard to pick them up again.
More recent data from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) shows that the effort students put into their academic studies has remained stable since 2000. Students today work about as hard as, or even slightly harder than, 20 years ago. This finding is confirmed by other data sources.
Another relevant shift, starting in the early 1980s, was a rise in college tuition—large enough to outpace the growth in median income. This forced more students to work part-time to pay for college, a change that left less time for studying. Moreover, as college tuition rose, more families saw it as an “investment” in a future high-paying job. The share of freshmen who considered “Being Financially Prosperous” an “essential” or “very important” goal rose from about 40 percent in 1966 to just over 80 percent in 2016. As a result, students now spend more time than ever on preprofessional extracurricular activities like internships and networking clubs, further reducing the time they spend studying.
Over the past few decades, an unspoken contract has developed in which students trade less studying for high grades. Professors are more lenient in giving grades because they recognize, consciously or unconsciously, that less effort in the classroom does not necessarily mean less hard work.
The real question, then, is not whether today’s students are lazy. They have not only upheld the study habits of their parents, but also the work ethic of their grandparents: the total time they spend on extracurricular activities and part-time jobs more than offsets the decline in schoolwork since the 1960s.
Nor should we wonder whether we should abolish extracurricular activities and return to the academic focus of the mid-20th century. As long as tuition remains sky-high, students will continue to view a college degree as a financial asset and will spend significant time on their professional preparation.
The focus should instead be on how students spend their free time outside from work, either academic or extracurricular.
It turns out that there has been a steady decline in college partying since the Great Recession, as well as a steep decline in general socializing among young adults. This is likely due to the ubiquity of smartphones and social media. College students now spend nearly nine hours a week on social media. Add to that five hours of streaming television plus five hours of surfing the Internet each week. (These latter estimates, from older studies, are likely underestimates.)
It’s no wonder that students who are spending less time together and more time glued to their devices are also showing record levels of anxiety and depression. Of course, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the relationship between technology and mental health, but it’s fair to assume that trading face-to-face time for scrolling isn’t a recipe for a meaningful or enjoyable college experience.
There’s no need to turn back the clock to the days of typewriters and slide rules, but our universities could benefit from prioritising old-fashioned interaction. Quality time with friends is an antidote to the high-stakes extracurricular and pre-professional juggling act that defines modern student life.
It’s been six weeks since I graduated, but it didn’t take long to discover that I was a misguided curmudgeon, too focused on my generation’s commitment to academia. Our work ethic is fine; it’s our social habits that need attention.
