College students hitting books less, study shows
Add this to the common lament that things aren’t the same as they used to be: College students are apparently not studying anywhere nearly as much as they used to.
How much less? According to two California economics researchers, a lot. The average college student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week, while today’s average students studies for about 14 hours a week.
The study, called “Leisure College USA” and accepted to be published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, was conducted by Assistant Professor Philip Babcock of the University of California Santa Barbara, and Assistant Professor Mindy Marks of the University of California Riverside.
Babcock and Marks analyzed time-use surveys and concluded that the decline cuts across every demographic: A student’s gender, race, major, SAT scores, according to a story in the Boston Globe.
But lest you rush to the conclusion that the reason for the decline is connected to the rise of mass media and the many technological gadgets that can attract young people, consider that the researchers
