Cornell students are still studying more than the national average. But for some undergraduate colleges, not by a whole lot. The New York Times is running an article on the poor quality of higher education, lamenting that the amount of time students spend studying has declined precipitously. (While grades, no doubt, have continued to increase.) Not surprisingly, a large number of the students showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years. If the test that we used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college. In a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying — about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying, according to the labor economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy S. Marks.
We can actually compare these national statistics to Cornell's own experience using Cornell's survey on undergraduates, which asks students how many hours a week they spend on academic work outside the classroom:
What's striking in the above table is how much the number of hours worked varies by college. Engineers and architects work almost twice the amount that my own ILR brethren work, who clearly need to be assigned (or tested on) more reading. And it probably floats a lot of people's boat that Hotelies study at all.
I think it's also important to note that college should be more than just about studying; it should also be about conducting research, service-learning, leading extra-curricular activities, and physical fitness.
But as Elie mentioned in his recent post, there are a lot of upper-middle class kids not doing any of the above while drinking five nights a week. So at the very least the faculty could be making certain that they study more.
