I thought it might finally be time to stop talking in generalities about the Arum and Roska book, but I suppose, realistically, that time may never come.
There are many reasons beyond study time for why college is too easy: despite astronomical tuition rates, a shortage of (tenure-track) faculty afforded the time and institutional support to properly teach their subjects; related, classes that are too large for students to reasonably learn material that requires dialogue and discussion, e.g. in the humanities; a culture of obsessive parents who would prefer to take responsibility for their adult-aged children rather than have their children take responsibility for themselves in college; the conversion of colleges from places of teaching and learning to luxurious fantasy camps loaded with distractions, and so on. Here, however, I'm going to focus only on the issue of declining study time as a function of college being too easy.
(I should say that the Post's slightly alarmist headline about college being 'too easy' is really about people not learning what they need to in college; so the purpose of this post is not to argue for putting students through some sadistic educational hazing process, but to argue for making college more about productive learning.)
That college students spend less time studying should not be surprising. This is the case because, the way we conceive of college and instruct our young students today, you achieve 50 percent of your incentive to go to college before you even show up on campus, just by getting in; and you achieve the other 50 percent of your incentive to go to college just by graduating, which can be done by doing anything but outright failing your courses. At no point does actually learning anything figure prominently into this incentive scheme.
For one, college is an admissions tournament. If you went to Harvard, for example, very few people care what you learned at Harvard, or how well you did at Harvard. Even if Harvard really does offer the greatest education in the world, most people could care less. The fact that you *got in* to Harvard is what people care about. Judging by our lousy college graduation rates, the world is littered with college dropouts from middling and low-tier colleges and universities; yet I'd imagine very few of these people enjoy the resume points and romantic admiration of the Harvard dropout. Nor do we write news articles on famous dropouts hailing from the likes of Southeastern West University of the North.
Of course very few people aim to get in and drop out of college; but when getting in is such a big deal, it's not hard to forget that getting in is just the beginning. The point is that, for too many parents and employers, just getting into a selective college or university, even if it's not Harvard, is enough. We teach our high school students that winning the admissions tournament means they're smart and prepared for whatever the world throws their way. We may not intend to send the tacit message that we value the fact that they won the admissions tournament more than what they do with their winnings; but we shouldn't be surprised when students' priorities for going to college include getting in and finishing, but not much in between.
The second part of this equation, then, is completion. And again, when we treat college as merely a credential that qualifies you for white-collar employment, while our employers simultaneously scorn the academic experience as not of 'the real world,' are we surprised that students will do the bare minimum in order to graduate with a respectable degree that doesn't disqualify them from candidacy for a white-collar job? This topic--employers demanding a college education for menial office work, then turning about and demeaning education as irrelevant--is for another post; but the more we make higher education about white-collar vocational training and 'job competitiveness,' the less we can expect students to learn in college. After all, if a student is only enrolled in college to get a high-paying job, and the high-paying job boss is the first to tell the young college intern that what s/he's studying in college is but a minor part of what she should expect to do at the office, then why should this student study for even a second longer than it takes to get a credential and get out?
Alas, the most telling bit of information, buried, of course, at the very end of the Washington Post article, is this:
Colleges that rate high in study time are typically small liberal-arts schools, often set in remote locales. Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., and Centre College in Danville, Ky., all report more than 20 hours of average weekly study for freshmen, seniors or both.
Despite the trends toward vocationalizing the college curriculum, there are still many people who go to college primarily to get an education. Not surprisingly, then, liberal arts institutions, increasingly maligned in the unthinking press for their audacious mission of providing a rich and holistic education designed to prepare citizens rather than employees, boast students who spend the most time on education. Of course, there could be many different reasons for why students in remotely located liberal arts colleges spend more time on their courses; but I would be curious about what Arum and Roska have to say about vocational incentives and study time. I would expect an inverse correlation.
