A new report from the Manhattan Institute claims college students aren’t putting enough time into their studies.
Rick Hess and Greg Fournier say students should be putting in at least 35 hours per week for combined class time and studying, but the actual number is between 20-25 hours … perhaps less.
Being employed during college has nothing to do with it, either. Today, about 40 percent of full-time college students have jobs, while in the mid-1990s the figure was almost 80 percent.
According to the National Survey for Student Engagement, today’s college freshmen spend a combined 9.3 hours per week working on and off campus, 5.3 hours “participating in cocurricular activities,” and 11.9 hours “relaxing and socializing.”
Students at elite schools may be even less conscientious about hitting the books.
Nevertheless, two-thirds of full-time university students say they “put ‘a lot’ of effort into schoolwork.”
College faculty must raise their expectations for student work: reading, writing, problem sets, and related out-of-class assignments. Indeed, colleges that accept federal funds are already expected to abide by the federal definition of a credit-hour, which “reasonably approximates not less than one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week.” Merely to comply with federal law, therefore, a typical three-credit course should entail a minimum of nine hours of student work each week. Assuming a 12-credit course load, students should be required to spend at least 36 hours attending class or doing homework each week. …
Of course, part of the solution to lowered workload expectation has to rest in the K–12 education system. Students are not working hard in college partly because they are not being challenged in middle and high school. Moreover, because grade inflation is rampant in K–12 as well as higher education, students have been conditioned to expect good grades for minimal work. Rather than waiting for the K–12 system to get its house in order, colleges should raise the bar themselves.
Joanne Jacobs points to a former high school English teacher who says “one reason English teachers assign short excerpts rather than whole books is that students won’t do the reading at home.”
Instead, teachers “are urged to have students read together in class, then discuss challenging material.”
IMAGE CAPTION & CREDIT: A college student catches a nap in class; Nestor Rizhniak/Shutterstock.com
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