Higher Ed Dumbed Down

[Winston Smith]

...or maybe the RA cartel are just so much better at teaching today that it doesn't take students as long to learn the same amount.  Yeah, right.

Taking the Study out of Students

Judging from the amount of time students spend studying, higher education has dumbed down. In 1961, according to researchers Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, the average college student spent 24 hours per week studying. But today, that figure is down to 14 hours, which is actually less than half of the study time colleges say their courses require. Could advances in technology explain the drop? Probably not, say Babcock and Marks, because “most of the study-time decline took place prior to 1981, well before the relevant technological advances.” They continue:

The study-time decline is visible across disciplines, despite the fact that some disciplines, such as mathematics or engineering, feature little or no paper writing or library research. We conclude from the evidence that the Internet and word processors are, at best, a small part of the answer.

Babcock and Marks paper is “Leisure College, USA: The Decline in Student Study Time,” published by the American Enterprise Institute, August 2010.

Posted on 08/06/10 11:13 AM by Alex Adrianson

[RespectableGent]

It's because in order to increase business they're all turning into those "working adult" schools which allow a student to attend school part time while holding a full time job. Schools like UoP are where the money is at.

Colleges naturally degrade in a downward spiral towards diploma mills during recessions. Less homework. Fewer books.

See, during a recession colleges tend to be flooded with applicants of dubious quality. They're obligated to accommodate them.

[Armando Ramos]

...or maybe the RA cartel are just so much better at teaching today that it doesn't take students as long to learn the same amount.  Yeah, right.

The authors weren't buying it either.  In fact, they admit there is no uniform measure of college student learning, and hence no standards to measure what, if anything, students learn.

Because there is no uniform measure of student learning in college—no exit exam for undergraduates—it is difficult to determine conclusively whether students are, in fact, learning less in college than they used to. It is possible that achievement standards have not declined, even though student effort has. College instructors may have become so masterful at delivering knowledge to their charges that today’s students are able to match or exceed the achievement of their predecessors without putting in much effort. (As college professors ourselves, we are flattered by the idea that we possess these magical talents, but we find it hard to believe.)

But their most interesting conclusion was that regardless of what, if any, study is required, those who put in the most effort studying wind up making the most money.  

We find that postcollege wages are positively correlated with study time in college. The increase in wages associated with studying is small in the early postcollege years, but it grows over time, becoming large and statistically significant in the later years. By 2004, one standard deviation in hours studied in 1981 is associated with a wage gain of 8.8 percent.  We do not claim to have proved a causal effect, but we conclude—consistent with common sense and the intuitions of educators—that increased effort in college is associated with increased productivity later in life.

By that logic, the student who puts in maximum effort at his diploma mill school stands to make more money than the student who puts in minimum effort at his fancy Ivy dumbass factory school.  

So again research proves that the value of any degree is in the effort made to obtain it and not in the accreditation, prestige or unmeasurable standards of the issuer.