DailyBrisk: 08/09/10

Monday, August 9, 2010

Trend Alert: Silver Hair and Silver Embellished Dresses...From Paris

Studying Leisure In College...From Paris

Not only do College students study less, they don't have anything closely resembling the 'college' experience you and I had in the 70's.

Here are the exact questions my College Freshman asked her advisor during our recent tour of the University she will be attending: "Is is possible to start all my classes after 11am?" Answer: "Yes! And we can even schedule your last class on Fridays to end at 2pm. How does that sound?"

I might have piped in a little sarcastically and said "That doesn't sound like college. That sounds like a Country Club. In the dark ages, when I went to college, we were expected to start at 8am. Three mornings a week I had a practicum at the hospital and THAT started at 6am."

Her schedule, although considered a 'full load' of course work, looks like a bankers schedule. Wake up at your leisure. Proceed to the gym. Work out. Grab a yogurt on your way to your first class, which starts at 11am. No hurry. End the day at 3pm. Relax with your friends for dinner. Go to the game. Stay out late, if you like, because you can sleep in everyday.

College Students Don't Study Enough

Philip Babcock (UC-Santa Barbara, Department of Economics) & Mindy Marks (UC-Riverside, Department of Economics) have published Leisure College, USA: The Decline in Student Study Time. Here is the abstract:

In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty-four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study time occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, for students who worked and those who did not, within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that are most relevant to education and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at postsecondary institutions in the United States.