LEISURE COLLEGE, USA

Phillip Babcock and Mindy Marks

University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara

Abstract: In 1961, the average full-time student at a 4-year college in the U.S. studied about 24 hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only 14 hours a week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study times occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, overall and within every major, for students who worked and those who did not, and at 4-year colleges of every type, degree structure and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that would be most relevant to education production, and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at post-secondary institutions in the United States.

Keywords: time use; human capital; education; college; Social and Behavioral Sciences; Other Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-05-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/1zd0q0vn.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:ucsbec:qt1zd0q0vn

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().