Is GenY Studying Less?

Keith O'Brien of The Boston Globe recently asked, "What Happened to Studying?" Based on research about to be published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. How much does today's average student study?

Just 14 hours.

Professors, administrators, students and parents are taking a hard look at the research, wondering what could account for so few hours being devoted to studying: "The easy culprits — the allure of the Internet (Facebook!), the advent of new technologies (dude, what’s a card catalog?), and the changing demographics of college campuses — don’t appear to be driving the change, Babcock and Marks found. What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors’ unwillingness to challenge them."

Essentially the two professors who conducted the research believe that professor/student relationships are based on doing as little as possible. Students complain about hard assignments and give negative course evaluations, so professors trying to keep their jobs make assignments less complicated and receive positive course evaluations.

Another interesting aspect of the research showed that students themselves were concerned about how much they were studying, stating that they "didn't know how" to successfully study.

What do you think?

Is this a reflection of students raised by helicopter parents used to negotiating with or bullying their high school teachers? Has technology simply streamlined aspects of research that used to take hours? Have rising tuition costs forced a greater percentage of students to work while in school, leaving them less hours for study? Should colleges be doing more to ensure their students know how to use the resources provided? Should high schools?

Read the full text here. And let us know your thoughts!