College Students Don’t Work All That Hard � The Quick and the Ed

College Students Don’t Work All That Hard � The Quick and the Ed

College Students Don’t Work All That Hard

by Chad Aldeman

The title of this post isn’t meant to be incendiary or to imply that this generation works less than the previous one or anything of that sort. It’s simply a true statement: College students just don’t work that hard. The Department of Education appears woefully ignorant of this fact in proposing two definitions for a “credit hour.”
The definitions are supposed to help in cases like those of American InterContinental University (AIU). AIU’s accrediting agency caught the institution awarding nine credits for a three-hour class. The accreditor called the practice “egregious,” but renewed AIU’s accreditation anyway. With the new definitions, the Department is hoping to have more leverage over accrediting bodies in future situations like this.
The Department has sought a way to protect financial aid expenditures from abuse by explicitly defining what constitutes a “credit hour.” It has created two definitions, and the first one is all about time, defining a credit hour as, “one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out of class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit,” or equivalent amounts of time through other schedules. This is called the “Carnegie unit,” and it’s a commonly repeated maxim letting students know about how much they should work for each class.
The problem is that very few students actually put in this amount of effort. Every year, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE, prounced “nessie”) asks college students about their perceptions of their college