Complaints about declining student work ethic are not new, dating back to 1894, when a Harvard University committee claimed the quality of students’ work was declining. So are today’s students really lazier than their predecessors, or am I nostalgic for a fictitious academic discipline? Golden age?
Thanks to new data, we now have the answer.
It’s true that students after World War II studied much harder than their successors. In the early 1960s, the average student studied about 25 hours a week. By 2000, that number had fallen to about 14 hours, a 44 percent decrease, and has remained at that level ever since. In other words, while the Baby Boomer generation experienced the steepest decline in academic standards, today’s students are working just as hard at their studies as Millennials and Gen Xers.
The simplest explanation for this decline is technology: I can type essays and analyze data much faster in ways my grandparents couldn’t, and technology also makes it easier to get distracted (and it often does). But the technology excuse doesn’t hold water, because the biggest declines in academic effort occurred between about 1960 and 1980, long before personal computers became widely available, according to economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy Marks, who studied the available data.
Marks thinks the Vietnam War is a more plausible explanation for this sudden drop in rigor. During the war and the draft, professors gave students higher grades to keep them from being kicked out and shipped overseas. There was more grade inflation during the Vietnam War era than at any time since. Once standards were lowered, it was hard to recover.
The effort students put into their academics appears to have remained stable since 2000, according to the latest data from the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute (HERI). Students today work just as hard, if not harder, than students 20 years ago, a finding backed up by other data sources.
Another important change in the early 1980s was the rise in college tuition, which outpaced the growth in average income. This forced more students to work part-time to pay for tuition, reducing the time available for study. Also, as tuition rose, more families viewed it as an “investment” in a future high-paying job. The percentage of freshmen who considered “becoming financially well-off” a “must” or “very important” goal increased from about 40 percent in 1966 to just over 80 percent in 2016. As a result, students now spend more time than ever on career-preparatory extracurricular activities, such as internships and networking clubs, further reducing the time available for study.
Over the past few decades, an implicit agreement has developed that students will get higher grades by working less, and professors, consciously or not, are lenient in grading because they know that less effort in class doesn’t necessarily mean less effort overall.
The real issue isn’t whether today’s students are lazy. They’ve not only inherited their parents’ study habits, but also their grandparents’ work ethic. The total amount of time spent on extracurricular activities and part-time jobs more than makes up for the decline in academics since the 1960s.
Nor should we ask whether we should abolish out-of-class activities and return to a mid-20th century focus on academics. As long as tuition costs remain high, students will continue to view a college degree as a financial asset and will devote ample time to professional preparation.
Instead, the focus should be on how students spend their free time. Outside Whether it be schoolwork, extracurricular activities, or work.
As it turns out, there’s been a steady decline in college partying since the Great Recession, as well as a sharp decline in young people’s social activities in general, likely due to the rise of smartphones and social media. Students now spend nearly nine hours a week on social media, in addition to five hours of streaming TV and five hours browsing the internet (the latter estimate comes from an earlier study and is probably an underestimate).
With students spending less time together and more time glued to their devices, it’s no wonder they’re showing record levels of anxiety and depression. While there’s certainly much we don’t know about the relationship between technology and mental health, it’s safe to say that replacing face-to-face time with scrolling isn’t the secret to having a meaningful, enjoyable college experience.
We don’t need to go back to the days of typewriters and slide rules, but colleges can benefit from prioritizing old-fashioned socialization. Quality time with friends is an antidote to the tightrope walk of high-stakes extracurricular activities and career preparation that characterizes modern college life.
Six weeks into my graduation, it didn’t take me long to realize that my generation was misled by the academic obsession. Our work ethic is fine. It’s our social habits that need improvement.
