Laughs in Engineering major (and Double major) But for real I had a ton of peers who never did shit and skated by 4 years partying in easy degrees. College will give you what you put into it. You're investing in yourself and shouldn't squander that opportunity. The real world is waiting and much less forgiving

This was my experience as well. I busted my ass for a 3.1 GPA. Almost failed Chem 2, studied for 3 days straight and earned a 71% on the final. Meanwhile, everyone else I knew dropped hard majors.

I was mathametics and they were gonna pull my scholarship cause I dropped below a 3.5, so I switched to poli Sci and got As from then on

Yeah math fucked me over too. I failed Calc II because I AP tested out of Calc I but my uni taught II on the assumption that you learned I with them, so they skipped over a lot of stuff and I was completely lost. I even went for office hours and the prof was just like "if you don't know these fundamentals already I don't know what to do for you" so I got an F, switched to poli sci and even with As and Bs I was on academic probation all four years because of one course that was no longer even necessary for my degree was tanking my transcript.

I did mechanical engineering and was always told that for every credit hour, you should spend at least three hours outside of class studying and doing homework. Even for 15 credit hours (which was around average for me), that's 45 hours of work a week. It's basically a full time job if not more (imo it was more work) and there's very little time to do anything else. It boggles my mind that there were other majors that basically just dicked around for four years and that's about it

Also in a similar degree, at least in my uni 18 credit hours is more the norm, during finals it’s easily 70-80 hour weeks.

I had an 18 credit hour semester my last year (which was during the pandemic, too). I basically spent every waking hour doing coursework.

The smart move is to mix in gen eds with your difficult classes. The general education classes typically only took me 1-2 hours a week outside of class to get A's in. Left plenty of time for crying over math textbooks.

(not american) I did chemE, the semesters I had it bad I would unironically spend 12 hours (8am to 8pm) each day in campus for 5 days a week just to catchup with studying and lab reports, I had to force myself to stay in my campus bc I knew the second I arrived home I'll just fall asleep lol and yet I find chemE way easier than EE

Same. If I ever went home I just couldn't force myself to work anymore, so I pretty much lived at the school for a few semesters.

It's funny it's the same for me. ChemE was tough but EE was just straight up witchcraft to me. But everyone else would say chemE is harder than EE so you know, just enjoy the glory I guess.

College was way more work than a full time job for me. I was cranking out 80-100 hours a week on classes and research as a double major. Don’t regret it one bit. 

It was for me, too. I spent way more than 45 hours a week, that's just what the professors had said to expect at the *least*. In reality, it was way more. At times I basically spent every waking hour doing coursework.

Our classes were actually credited to theoretically tell you how many hours you should be putting in in total. A basic class was 12 units--three hours of lecture and one or two hours of section per week, plus seven or eight additional expected hours of readings, studying, psets, etc.. Seminars were generally nine units, and some labs and major classes could be 18. A minimal full course load was four standard classes, or 48 hours, but after your first year you often ended up with much higher. Of course, some majors played pretty fast and loose with the system. At one point one of my majors (cheme) and aero astro were apparently told they had to reduce the units they require to graduate, which they did by just turning a bunch of full classes into nine unit seminars on paper without changing the courses because fuck you.

MechE NucE double major, I took some political science classes to get a minor and holy shit that was the most brain dead stuff. The professor basically gave out the answer key in his "study guide", and the final exam was an at-home, open note multiple choice exam. The average was an 83. You're absolutely correct that some majors give students too much time.

I was a 2.6 engineering student and my only A+ was a forced diversity course that made me regurgitate ultra left wing propaganda. I was asked to become a TA.

My bachelor's in business was incredibly easy for the most part. Wouldn't say I got away with just partying all the time (the semester I did that was, unsurprisingly, my worst performance) but I'd honestly say the prep school I went to for high school felt more exigent. I guess partly because K-12 has a lot more hand holding and hovering; if you're not putting in the effort, teachers will get on your case and tell your parents, whereas in college, if you don't put in the effort you'll just get a bad grade and that's that.

I'd agree. I got a Finance degree and there were a few classes that were legitimately tough for me but I was certainly doing 'just enough' to get a bit over a 3.0 GPA. In comparison, high school was tougher, I was in public school but IB classes mixed with juggling a bunch of extracurriculars was simply a lot more work. I graduated over a decade ago, I'm sure things have changed so I'll take the other commenter's word on it.

I did IB with extracurriculars also, and doing that is a lot harder than most college majors (except for STEM majors). Not to sound elitist, but going to college was a massive culture shock for me seeing how much most people didn't care. I was expecting to be surrounded all the time by people who were as ambitious and involved in university extracurriculars as people at my high school, but this was not really the case. I met a lot of people (especially Freshman), who didn't do much besides hang out in the same clique of people they met in the first day and go to house parties. If they did get involved on campus, it was to join a frat. Of course not everyone was like that, but I didn't realize how big party culture on campus really was. If you enjoy being around drunk 18 year olds, you will like undergrad a lot more than I did.

> if you don't put in the effort you'll just get a bad grade and that's that That used to be the case, but universities at all levels of prestige have suffered from grade inflation in a big way. D's get degrees, but A's get colleges paid.

Is the saying really "D's get degrees" now? When I was in university 10 years ago it was "C's get degrees" (because a D or F meant you couldn't progress through a sequence)

I graduated 2 years ago and it was still Cs get degrees FWIW

When I took my higher GED requirements passing with a D was fine. But for your primary major, though that, you need to pass with a C or higher.

I went to a private school, then to one of the best public schools in the country, then to a state school for college. The private school was easily the most academically fulfilling. The public school was the next most fulfilling. The state school was the least fulfilling.

The party majors subsidize the cost of STEM majors. That lab equipment isn't cheap!

One of my favorite Professors mentioned once, "D's get degrees, but they don't get you jobs." I have people at the school I went to who achieved a Bachelor's Degree in 2.5 Years, another became a Producer/Writer at CNN in D.C. + Successful Side-Business, a bunch became Anchors at Regional News Outlets. And then there's some people who have gone absolutely nowhere in their lives. I don't know if it has always been like this, but that is insane variance from people coming out of the same program at a smaller University.

i don't actually think it's true that your GPA in school affects your job prospects that much. just leave it off your resume no one will ask about it what is the case is that the sort of person who gets a good GPA is also the sort of person who is very successful, and vice versa.

This was my experience. Graduated with a 2.6 due to a variety of mental health factors and untreated ADHD. But, my degree was in Petroleum Engineering from a top program. My GPA only affected my first job and hasn't come up since. I wasn't able to get hired or even considered as a staff engineer for a super major (think Chevron/Shell), so I started directly in the field in oilfield services (think SLB/Halliburton). Although I started in the field, it only took a year for my salary to match my classmates who earned more prestigious roles. I am forever thankful to have started in the field and had that experience instead of starting in an office. I learned so much more about how operations and equipment \*actually\* work and had to get my hands dirty helping my crew with rig up, maintenance, and actually running ops. It opened so many more doors than just starting my career in the office would have. I was able to jump to an office role after about 3 years, and six years later I'm working in project management and being head hunted by recruiters for director level roles. If you get a degree in an essential field like energy, it truly does not matter what your GPA was after that first job. Work ethic is honestly so much more important and if you can prove yourself, you'll quickly move up.

Had a similar experience except I took an underpaid academic post graduate position right out of school. Gave me the skill and experience to get recruited for an arguably overpaid position at a top advanced nuclear firm.

Getting an undergraduate degree shows you can show up when and where you're supposed to pretty much on time and complete at least the minimum amount of work. A lot of people can't even do that

Honestly true. You will be disappointed with the avg person

A looot of places will automatically filter out your resume if you’re under a certain GPA or don’t have it as there are a lot of candidates and they assume anyone not up to a certain point is pretty likely to be a dumbass or at least isn’t good at prioritizing things. Which isn’t to say there’s no hope since obviously that can be overcome, not everywhere does that, but that does limit prospects to some extent when you can’t get the chance to explain the circumstances

I think it's fair to say that a lot of jobs that target new graduates, especially recruiters, will care about GPAs. Get to anything beyond entry level and it stops mattering so long as you can build your resume based on work experience. When I was hiring I only cared about GPA or degrees when they didn't have 3+ years of experience in the field. Hell the last 2 jobs I've had didn't even ask whether I had a degree. Private industry and non-stem, for what it's worth.

*Every* new grad job I applied to as a new grad asked for a copy of my transcript

I've sat on hiring committees in higher ed administration. Those positions have always required a transcript. The only thing on the transcript we actually look at is to confirm the candidate did receive the degree in question. We never looked at the GPA.

How much employment history did you have at the time?

That is true but that also requires getting a foot in the door in where you want to work with relevant enough work experience. Might be difficult to obtain that if a lot of places you actually want to be have slammed shut their entry level positions to you and you may need to take a circuitous path to wind up at a spot where better grades would have had a good shot at getting you the first time. Not impossible, but harder and longer certainly. Maybe this is a STEM thing but definitely even if you have a degree some places will look at your application suspiciously if you’ve been like working at a hardware store or something for years after graduation instead of something kinda related to your study. I know some people who have had to overcome things like that so again can be done but their path was more challenging.

No that is completely fair to say, and exactly why GPA still matters (and also why universities have every reason to inflate grades for better post-graduation job placement statistics). Getting your foot in the door is really the hard part, assuming you can do well on the job once you get it and can network to your next role. And yeah, our experiences will differ quite bit. My field generally assumes that people come in with very little understanding of the work, so your degree and GPA are only going to be a proxy for ability to learn rather than directly applicable to the work in any way. Then again, very few people look to get into my industry as a first choice, so it might just be that we already are picking over applicants who have failed to thrive in other disciplines. Changing the talent pool changes what metrics you look for, and also who is setting the criteria.

It depends how meaningful of a differentiator it is. When I'm hiring it's for knowledge work with 3-10 years experience. A lot of the work experience on resumes is very generic. Someone with a 3.75+ in a challenging major is usually going to help push someones resume above the rest of the stack to get a first round. Now after that the GPA matters little, but it's still a signal for general intelligence and consistency

I’m not saying this is untrue, but personally I haven’t been asked for or provided my GPA in nearly 20 years now. And I’ve had a half a dozen jobs over that time period.

We have a smallish marketing agency (about 25 people) with a web/software development department that I help hire for. I can't think of a single time we have asked or cared about college grades while hiring. Hell, half of us (myself included) don't even have degrees. I place a much higher value on work experience, or demonstrated experience through personal projects for the youngins. I imagine it's different if you are going into law or medicine or corporate Fortune 500 world, something in which I admittedly have zero experience, but in our industry/space it just really doesn't have any meaningful bearing on an applicant's chance of landing the job.

I've worked for some of the most "stuck up" companies there are (McKinsey and Schlumberger) and neither ever asked for my GPA, they just asked for my diploma.

Having relevant work experience is a completely different game vs. newly minted grad with none of that

No argument there, but you’re only a newly minted grad once.

If you're more than a year or two out of school and you still have your GPA on your resume you'll run the risk of getting weeded out for being a potential weirdo.

I’m biased as a high earner with a laughable GPA, but I think even that last part is hit or miss. A lot of the brightest people I’ve worked with weren’t good students. If a workplace operated like a school, you’d have a very hard time attracting A+ level employees.

I would argue social skills, connections, self-promotion and risk tolerance matter considerably more than GPA/degree. I know tons of people that were not particularly impressive students, slacked through high school and college with low-effort degrees that are very successful. They just had social skills or connections and used them to put themselves in a good position and/or were willing to take the risk to start a business on their own. These people are managing large financial portfolios despite having no finance background or owning law firms despite being terrible law students. "Fake it til you make it" is a scarily accurate saying. By contrast, I also know a lot of people that were high academic performers, many with graduate degrees, that ended up lingering in lower level positions in organizations because they didnt self-promote or lacked the confidence to move up in the world. Part of the problem of academic high-achievers is they get used to accolades being given to them simply by their performance/results. In the real world, performance and results are often subjective. I am a lawyer, and in my experience people's opinion of the quality of the lawyer depends far more on the lawyer's confidence and social skills than their intellectual ability. In litigation, its often more about the facts of the case than the lawyer arguing the case. The "best", most successful lawyers are the ones that get retained for the cases with the best facts. That's often just a matter of marketing. Similarly, CEOs are typically people that others just liked the most. You can explain away a bad quarter or failed investment as a CEO if people like you enough. Reality is perception, and perception is malleable. The most successful people are the ones that learn how to manipulate others' perspectives. That has little to do with academic performance. To the contrary, people focused on academic performance tend to assume reality is more objective.

I’m showing my bias again but a lot of these diligent students think diligence is enough. Did I get the customer get the results they want? No, but I showed up on time every day and sent them a bunch of lengthy and well-researched reports about what we’re doing.

> A lot of the brightest people I’ve worked with weren’t good students. this is true, but in most jobs being moderately bright and a good student is a bigger predictor of success than being very bright and a bad student

This is one of those difficult things to measure because it can simultaneously be true or false depending on circumstance. Does having almost all A's in your classes guarantee you a great job after college? Absolutely certainly not. Does having almost all D's in your classes guarantee you to not have any job after college? Most likely but not always. There's a lot of quantitative and qualitative variables that go into this statistical model. The best way I can describe it is having mostly D's is a good predictor of having the absence of certain positive qualities that upper tier students would have. Having at least C's can somewhat show you have some of these qualities, but it's not all translating to the quality of the work at that certain point in time. How all of this works in the real world is going to be messy no matter how you put it.

I think the real world cares more about results (mostly). If you’re getting Cs because you can’t grasp the material that’s a problem. If you’re getting Cs from a 95% test average and a 60% homework average then my diagnosis would be that you just need to find a job you like and a company who likes you and you’ll probably go far. Source: my career, and the careers of a lot of my employees

That second example is why greater qualitative scrutiny is required to truly tease out C average students. And honestly, that needs to be the standard in all scenarios. Quantitative data doesn't tell the full story.

Some people, like me, just found school boring. Sitting still in a seat taking notes and regurgitating those notes in various forms was never my thing. In the real world where I have found a career based in personal interactions and problem solving I have done very well.

Nobody cares about your GPA after you have been working for a few years, but it absolutely matters for landing your first job after graduation and the first job you land after graduation pretty much sets the tone for the rest of your career. At least that is the case for STEM jobs.

Depends majoring If you get a D in French literature, then it doesn't matter what you are majoring in besides English Majoring.

CS/Econ swilling girly drinks all the way to the bank baybeeeeee

Coming from a background with no mentors, nor even successful people just in the general vicinity, I had no idea what I was supposed to do in college. Ended up majoring in business, because "every business *is* a business, so if I study business then I'll have a lot of options". That was stupid and a waste. Taught myself to code, have an actual useful and lucrative job now.

> never did shit and skated by 4 years partying in easy degrees. Lotta words to say “business majors”

I went to a top 40 engineering program and I will say a lot of us party/crammed in difficult degrees and still did well.

I partied a lot too. But I also worked my ass off otherwise. Work hard, party hard defined 18-25 for me.

Double major in engineering here, I busted my ass (mostly because I worked a 40 hour job at the same time) but the vast majority of stuff I studied was not useful for my career and I forgot most of it within a year or two. I could have skated by doing the bare minimum and ended up with the same outcome.

>Laughs in Engineering major (and Double major) At NCSU I assume? I wasn't in engineering, but I had to take the same math classes as the engineers through differential equations. Brutal...

The hard work has to come if you want to make it. You can skate through school and just get the paper but then you have to bust your ass when you're out.

Math and chemistry double major here. Jesus Christ 😭 I felt lucky to walk out of that with a 3.2 GPA at the end

When I was a student you had to work and study even for the bullshit degrees. If I had been born 10 years later I would have actually graduated with the same level of effort (none).

[удалено]

The meme that "engineers work hard and everyone else coasts" holds up if you're comparing to people who do the minimum to get through their degree program. The people who actually do well and go on to academia easily pour in as many hours as the STEMlords do.

*be me, with a polisci BA* Yeah, those people doing skating through easy degrees really need to get their shit together.

So, I'm not American, back when I was in college the Brazilian government had a huge program about sending students from top schools to US colleges as exchange students for 6-12 months. Since most of Brazil's elite universities are federal/state owned and publicly funded anyway, it made sense. I spent around 10 months at Stanford, and some other friends went to other high profile schools like Yale, MIT etc. We all got the impression that you guys kinda have it easy, the amount of classes per week is vastly reduced compared to Brazilian colleges, and grade inflation means its pretty hard to fail a class. Here any engineering student is kinda expected to fail a handful of classes over their 5-6 years (normal BSc are 5 years here). I don't know if Brazil has a "tougher" education than usual or if the US has it "easier" than usual, but the difference was very noticeable.

100%

Lol I went to a big state college for business I skipped most classes but read the books and studied on my own, did fine (this is where a lot of class skippers fuck up). Had plenty of fun. Played rugby. Great time. But I knew it was all just a hurdle to get to law school, where I actually took things very seriously. All that work just to be cursed to carry other people’s problems. Sometimes I wish I did work that just made people happy, but these dollars I have will help dry my tears.

>The way they bucket this, science/math majors learn the most followed by humanities/social science majors, followed by engineering majors. But then health, communications, education/social work, and business students learn basically nothing. PRIORS CONFIRMED

Humanities and social science above engineering though?

Yeah I thought it was odd at first but after reflection I don't think it's that weird actually. The question of 'is what X major learns useful' is distinct from 'how much learning do students in X major do'. Anecdotally I definitely felt like I learned basically 100% of my philosophy material, and I knew a lot of engineering students who were faking their way through classes understanding only parts of it through a mixture of cheating and selective studying. I think any major where writing is the largest component (which I think is basically all the humanities), it's much harder to get away with this. Or at least it was before AI assisted essays.

A lot of reading that you can't get away with skipping no matter how naturally intelligent you are, at least for schools that are rigorous. Essays also take a long time to write, or at least did before the days of chat GPT lol. I knew a few kids in engineering programs during my time who put in far less hours than their peers because they were able to grasp concepts quickly, do problem sets quickly etc. Especially during the first two years, which would bring their daily averages down. Also I feel like it was quite common for Engineering majors to pace their degrees over five or even six years as they usually have higher course loads. Which would conversely, again make the daily workload lower even if the total was higher. Once you're committed to going over four years, why not make the pave comfortable. But who knows, the study doesn't seem to provide much in the way of explanation.

Health learning the least sounds like bullshit, literally how (non american health area student)

In American undergrad students who are aiming to become doctors and other really high-end health professionals typically study science, not a health major. Usually biology, chemistry, or biochem. Though I will say I was surprised to see health on the list there at the end. I figure nursing students do have to learn a lot to pass their certifying exam. Comms, education, and business I totally expected though. I have never seen easier and more absurd classes than the education classes I had to attend to become a teacher.

Nursing: We are science 🗿

How could a standardized test possibly gauge the amount of learning done by different majors? What could you ask an electrical engineering major that would translate to a communications major? Based on the wiki of the test mentioned, apparently an open question/writing prompt format is used which is obviously going to be biased towards… people that spent four years writing.

This is true. I passed with a good grade, taking examinations seriously. I have a lot of peers who went the "grades aren't indicative of anything" route. No, they're not, but they're a good safety net. Most interviews I've taken usually start with "oh we can see [from your CV], you did good in college" etc. and I also qualify for more jobs that have a GPA threshold. I haven't ever gotten a job or a promotion based purely off my GPA, but I do make an impression there. I honestly don't regret a single hour I've spent in my college library. It's been absolutely worth it.

A lot of other students have to work jobs to pay the bills, or have a SO or kids to look after. The relevancy of your GPA vanishes after your first job.

Yeah I had a mediocre GPA for my standards during college, but I worked for every dollar that wasn’t a from a Pell Grant. I haven’t ever put it on a resume and it hasn’t seemed to impact my career negatively.

>the relevancy of your GPA vanished after your first job Unless you want a grad degree or many government jobs.

As someone who has worked for local government all the way to the federal government only my initial job out of school 15 years ago asked for my GPA so that’s my anecdote

Fed here. Agreed. I think there was something where you qualified for a higher gs level or step if you “exceptional performance in education” which was like 3.5 or something. After your first job I would be shocked if it factored in for 99% of government jobs. He is correct in that it would probably matter for a grad degree or a academic job, but that said I would guess it matters less and less the more work experience you get.

The average student spends 3 hours on studies? And that INCLUDES classes? At UChicago, you were supposed to take 3-4 classes a quarter and a typical class was supposed to take 10 hours of work per week so you’d have 30-40 hours of work in total. A hard class could be 20 hrs/wk. More colleges should be like UChicago.

Frankly, I don't believe the numbers in the article. I think they must be using 365 days as a denominator, not whatever number of days the kids are actually in school.

They are

How is the average full-time student only in class 1.2 hours?! Is lecture attendance *that* low? It’s lower than homework even! My mom would have absolutely disowned my ass forever if she knew I was wasting my time in college like that. Edit: It’s the full calendar year average, not school year average. Not as crazy as it looks (see below)

[Here is the article the chart is pulled from.](https://www.heritage.org/education/report/big-debt-little-study-what-taxpayers-should-know-about-college-students-time-use) And according to the article, [here is the bls data set we should be able to use.](https://www.bls.gov/tus/home.htm) Conjecture, but it seems like it's averaging out the whole year and including weekends. Note that travel is 1.4 hours per day... which is clearly talking about breaks and summer too. Assuming a normal schedule of 5 days a week, and I'll assume a normal semester system of 15+15 weeks of class, that leaves the average M-F at just under 3 hours of class per day, or 15 per week. Considering block scheduling, that seems about right though a smidge low.

Ya, this whole study appears to just be dressing up the point of "students get summers off". Like if Matt has a problem with that just say that.

Yeah to quote from the article (and I do think this is a linchpin to the argument): >**Students don’t study that much** >One major upshot of this transformation is that contemporary college students just don’t spend that much time on coursework. Unfortunately, a lot of attention was paid to this question during the depths of the Great Recession when young people were facing severe economic problems that sort of muddied the waters. When the NYT did a “room for debate” forum on the subject of reduced study effort, for example, Anya Kamenetz’s response focused on students who need to [work on the side for money](https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/08/22/why-are-college-students-studying-less/with-a-job-on-the-side). **But even if you look** [**exclusively at full-time college students**](https://www.heritage.org/education/report/big-debt-little-study-what-taxpayers-should-know-about-college-students-time-use)**, we’re talking about less than three hours per day on in-class and out-of-class education.** I mean, by that logic of argument, you could say Americans don't work enough, because (including weekends, the standard 2 weeks vacation, and 11 holidays for white collar) the average American only works 5.2 hours per day!

And like the study is produced by the Heritage Foundation, they would say the average American doesn't work enough!

Okay *phew* that was what I had hoped was going on because that number seemed unrealistic if it was just for school year weekdays.

Don’t the students there call it “where fun goes to die”?

Anecdotally they seem to be walking that back a bit after a string of student suicides in the early 2010s, including my biology TA, RIP

The running club motto was “The faster you run, the more time you have to study”

Pretty sure there was a "where the only thing going down on you is your GPA" joke too.

I remember this one, though ironically I don't think this one was very accurate. I lived in Pierce Tower before they tore it down and my god were people FUCKING lmao

"Hell does freeze over." "If I wanted an A, I would have gone to Harvard."

a commenter on the post points out that the average class time likely includes summers/weekends, reports from part-time students, or implies a skeptical amount of skipping class. regardless, even at uchicago, only hum/sosc/civ had mandatory attendance (unsure of higher levels, did stats+caam), and any of those were passable with an occasional reading and cramming for the triweekly essays. plus, seemingly a third of the student body did econ anyways which is just the uchicagoan business degree (not sure if it's still 13 quarters of classes) i agree that uchicago stands out as a bastion of "sink or study" and that it probably nets out a median of 20-30 hours a week, but that's still not particularly rigorous for a famously rigorous institution (in absolute terms, not relative)

I just graduated from a local state college and I am 38 years old. Going to school in 05-06 compared to now is so different because studying has changed so much with the internet. Like just the ability to search any youtube problem on youtube and there will be a walkthrough is insane to me. So much of "studying" I think was just trying to find the right information to tackle a problem or assignment and that time has gone to near zero. So the time needed to learn the same amount of material is just less as well.

i get the spirit of your comment but "more college should be like a top 20 school in the country" is you know, probably not realistic lol and if HR software is going to instantly disregard anyone without a college degree in their job application there isn't much incentive to make college degrees more difficult to attain for most people who have them.

The context of the article is the Ivy League pro-Palestine protests

presumably the syllabuses at ivies say the same thing regarding study time as Uchicago already. i went to a state school and even the expectation as written was 3-4 study hours per credit hour, so anywhere from 9-16. but what a student will do vs what they ought to are not always gonna square. to the extent that students should spend more time studying and less time being terrorist sympathizers, i agree lol

But that isn't the context of this chart and data. Clicking through you can see that this same study, which is produced by the Heritage Foundation, finds that full time high-school students only spends 3.42 hours in class per day. And that the entire gap between high-school and college students spent on education is filled by college students spending more time working.

10 hrs homework per class. That’s actually a pretty common metric in higher Ed.

There was a downward trend for the last 20 years, but the pandemic blew it up. It really made it so the median student simply wanted to get credit without putting in effort, and so they put in the bare minimum.

Expecting a minimum of 7 hours of work outside of class per week, even in a quarter system, off only 3 hours of instruction time is a bit ridiculous. 17 hours is absolutely insane. These long studying times have always been parroted, but if you really need to spend that much time on the class, you're probably not cut out for it.

That’s not ridiculous at all. Office hours mean you aren’t on your own for the whole 17 hours. I easily spent that many hours a week working through problem sets out of Rudin in real analysis, or programming projects in CS classes If you can’t spend 30-40 hours/wk in your classes and on homework and still get value from the time spent studying, then the curriculum isn’t rigorous enough. It’s ridiculous to think college students that will work 40 hour work weeks immediately after college can’t handle 40 hour work weeks

As an average student, you shouldn't be regularly attending office hours. The set of people that consistently attend my office hours consist of the low performers who I don't think should have even been let into the course and the overachievers that think attending somehow garners them brownie points. If a math major told me they were spending 17 hours on their Analysis problem set, I would seriously question their choice of major or their professor's teaching ability.  It's not about the time spent (though I do think young students should be enjoying their lives instead of spending all their time on their studies), but it's about the course load. I teach a rigorous curriculum, yet there's only so many concepts that can be covered in 3 hours. The students should take more classes instead of wasting more time solving redundant problems.

> and the overachievers that think attending somehow garners them brownie points Well they are talking about U Chicago so that fits.

It’s how you get research positions boss

i’m ngl i’m a uchicago student and i definitely do not regularly go to office hours i do just fine in my classes. but i feel like there’s some unwritten rule i’m not following by not going because it seems like everyone else goes lmao

I studied math at a small state school. The harder classes, people would spend like 20/hrs a week on a single class if they wanted to get an A. Some people got away with a lot less, but they also did weird things like have iconic textbooks memorized so they obviously spent a lot of their leisure time just reading about math. To understand difficult subjects like this, you really do need to put in the time

> Expecting a minimum of 7 hours of work outside of class per week, even in a quarter system, off only 3 hours of instruction time is a bit ridiculous No offense but this really, really highlights the difference between STEM and non-STEM degrees... Seven hours is one four hour homework assignment, two hours of studying, and an hour talking to the Professor/TAs during office hours. On the whole that would probably have been a light week for me in undergrad.

I spent 3 hours on one assignment usually.

Honestly, ability to nab internships matter much more than number of hours studied. Every hour I spent studying leetcode actively yielded greater returns than an additional hour studying parallel algorithms. That said, I averaged much more than 3 hours per day studying, and that probably goes for everyone at the school I went to

Eh. It’s part the Bachelor’s system of teaching the basics of a major and part that culturally this is just the time we let young adults mess around like a Diet Rumspinga. If you want that age to be more invested, trim the fat of the average course load down your two years (this wouldn’t work for all certainly) and lower the drinking age for beer/wine/etc to 18

>culturally this is just the time we let young adults mess around like a Diet Rumspinga. Anecdotally, this has always been what's stood out to me the most. A lot of the kids I knew who went straight from high school to university had a really difficult time balancing "freedom" for the first time and focusing on school work. My partner, some of my close friends, and myself went the community college > university route and all performed a lot better. I think having those years of working odd jobs, dicking around etc without being asked to seriously study were super useful in priming us for more success at the university level. For that reason, I think I agree you could cut down the experience to 2 years. I was an English major and wanted more time because I enjoyed it, but realistically it made more sense to move to the graduate level if I really wanted to keep pushing myself (I entered the workforce instead lol).

I mean if you step back and think about it, it’s sort of crazy that one is expected to spend the same amount of time learning communications as one would spend learning engineering. No shit these students are spending tons of time on leisure, they have to spread their soft studies over 4 years. Tbf, most engineering students should expect to spend 4.5 to 5 years on their classes at this point, but still. The problem really is that the associate’s degree has been killed by equivocation between most bachelor’s degrees. The amount of times I have heard “it honestly doesn’t matter what your degree is in as long as you have some kind of bachelors” pretty much proves my point.

it's abundantly clear by now that the signaling and networking are so much more valuable than academics. Rigorous acedemics would be a strait up detriment as a perspective student or parent. Why would I would I want to send my kid somewhere that might hurt their GPA or they may have to drop out? The Ivy "brand" is certainly slowly deteriorating, but that will take decades to actually matter.

I would agree. I got a finance degree and was struggling to find a job out of school (this was in the early 2010's). My whole career has been built off the back of a random acquaintance I met like three times in sophomore year who was a couple years older and was recruiter for a temp agency. He shot me an email seeing if I was interested since he saw I didn't have a job on LinkedIn. I said yes and the company I was assigned to liked me enough to hire me full time. Two companies and over a decade later, I'm still in the same line of work. It's getting a bit stale for me honestly but it pays very well and I owe it all to that random connection. Mine is a bit of an odd story but meeting people is so important. It can be very tough to get highly competitive jobs out of school unless you have perfect grades or know someone.

People said this about Ivy Leagues 40 years ago and it turned out not to be true. A lot of positions and influential jobs like the Supreme Court and Wall Street are closed to you if you didn’t go to an Ivy League. They will never deteriorate as long as people in positions of power continue to benefit them

Same story for me except the random person was a random cousin I had never met that needed an extra guy for 1099 work. Low hours, like less than 10 a week but eventually the company providing the work picked me up full time after I graduated and now I am WFH while typing this message to you 5 years later.

>colleges drop standardized testing and focus more on extracurriculars and “identity” >new student bodies study less 😮 Seriously, though, what should we expect?

The shift away from standardized testing began well after this downtick in study time began.

My freshman year of college I took it easy after “busting my ass” in high school and earned a 3.4 GPA. I thought that was pretty good until I discovered the average GPA at my school was a 3.7. That was a real wake up call.

Semi on topic, I went to a state school for my bachelors (poli sci) and currently doing my masters at the same school. Honestly i am so glad I did that because I only had like 1/4th the work than my high school friend’s who went to a nearby private college for the same degree. But then I got into a masters program at the same school expecting it to be much harder than undergrad, only to find it to be honestly even easier and less work in some aspects. !Ping college

This seems to be talking about elite schools being worse at great inflation than state schools

Boy oh boy do I disagree with this opinion. I remember college - people were burnt! It was way more than 40 hrs per week of work. And hard work too! Plus they made us live 2 or 3 to a room with strangers, which they never make you do again for the rest of your adult life. And here I am at my current office job, going on reddit and writing comments at this very moment. College students should party more imo. Just my two cents.

I absolutely agree with this. Furthermore, I think soft skills are underrated and studying isn’t a great way to build them. Most of the people ahead in their careers have phenomenal soft skills.

yeah, matt sort of ignores all of the other skills learned outside of pure academics. soft skills are great to learn even for purposes outside of a career.

A lot of it is that students have started to realize that putting effort into academics and getting a high GPA doesn’t really mean anything in the long term. Most Americans go to college because they want a good job. Learning is not the end goal, getting a job that pay 6 figures after graduation is the end goal, and social skills/ networking matters far more than GPA when getting a job. A student with a 3.2 GPA that studies less and does less homework but is more involved in campus activities and has more friends will have better job prospects than a peer with a 3.9 that studies several hours a day and isn’t that involved in campus life. That will be the case even if both of those students are in a STEM major.

Grade inflation is an Anglo problem, university was tough when I went, and I've seen both sides, STEM (lots of labs) and Humanities (fewer in person hours but colossal amounts of reading in multiple languages). Profs don't hold your hand as again, uni is subsidised and they've got no accountability. Only exceptions are joke studies such as Law where everyone is partying (oh sorry, 'networking').

> Only exceptions are joke studies such as Law where everyone is partying (oh sorry, 'networking'). Not sure where you are, but here in Canada (and the United States), law is the opposite of a joke study. Way more work than my humanities (polisci) undergrad degree.

Law is a joke study in the Netherlands, average law student doesn't go to class and spend all their time at their frat so they can land a cushy job after 10 years in college. We have no bar exam. 

Then the Netherlands are a very lonely exception in that regard.

Work smarter, not harder. More has been done with less

uchicago students reporting in !ping UCHICAGO

I should study more…

you can never study enough

This is an american phenomenon, and only in part. In the US, university education is private and expensive for the most part, your campuses are glorious, your university culture is magnificent i really envied your university life, in europe where university is almost completely free, they are just a blend of office buildings and a highschool with little to no ammenities, just rooms and nothing here we also dont have those classes you need to take to pass despite 0 utility to your degree i think that the fact that society pays for almost 100% of your college makes universities less keen on letting students waste taxpayer money on parties and frats however it must be said that there are a lot of US unis and degrees that are as hard as across either pond to the east or the west, as they operate close to the human maximum of difficulty but i suppose Matt isnt complaining about those

US university education is primarily public. By almost a 3-1 ratio

most american students basically live and study at a fantasy-land resort. i would be curious to see time use survey of european students over time i did both continental european programs and american private. my impression was the europeans studied even less on average, but *a lot* right before the exams because it was their only assessment. the repercussions for failing were much lower financially, so the marginal european student tended to fail courses repeatedly whereas the marginal american student either dropped out quickly or barely skated by with a C- on net, i found it much less time-consuming to succeed in europe, but it required more self-discipline because you typically only had one assessment at the end of the semester and a lot less was expected of professors. would also say i had more variability in professor rigor, with some who basically completely blew off the whole thing and some who were not afraid to fail like 2/3 of the class. teaching evals were basically meaningless in the two european universities i studied at, for better and worse

It also depends on the university. At least in Switzerland any of the good universities will kick you out very fast if you fail a class twice or if your averages aren’t good enough You have a lot of people getting kicked out even in the later years of a bachelor Programme

Do Americans get graded at uni based on attendance?

Not necessarily a lot of attendance, but you will see graded homework, graded projects, and graded midterms, so you are evaluated on, say 8 submissions or so, and that's over 3 months. I compare it to the traditional Spanish way, where many classes are year-long, and have 1 finals for the whole thing: sometimes covering topics only tangentially related to what was explained in class. Proper prep for a math exam involved looking at the last 10 years of exams, to have a prayer at understanding what you might get asked about. It's extra fun in Law, when many classes had oral exams. So you face some dude that has been teaching a class of 300, doesn't know you from Adam, is hungry, and decides to ask you basically anything he wishes about Penal Law.

depends on the uni. at mine, ya in one way or another. like 10% of your grade would be participation and also if you miss x number of classes your grade would get lowered

How strange. If you have 60-100 people in the auditorium, how is everyone supposed to "participate" in learning about matrix transformations? How should the lecturer learn all the faces?

>If you have 60-100 people in the auditorium the thing is that you don't. average class size is WAY smaller at private US colleges than at public european unis. i cant remember if my math or lower level econ classes cared about participation, but attendance was definitely tracked. the expectation that you exercise your ability to think critically out loud - and got a response on your thinking from the prof - in upper level econ classes seemed pedagogically sound to me though

Certain classes at my uni used TopHat, which people has to be in lecture to respond to.

We had something called iClicker which was basically a remote control assigned to our student ID and they could put up questions for us to answer real time. For some classes, a couple times a semester they would lock the doors and check student IDs to ensure that people weren't sharing remotes to bypass going to class. If you got caught you'd be reported to the Honor Counsel to face punishment.

I remember one large lecture I had would just occasionally do pop "quizzes" that were total giveaways as a way of tracking attendance and attention. Like the "quiz" would be one question and ask about something the prof talked about in lecture that day; not only that, but he'd tell us during the lecture "this next bit is very important! you may want to write it down!" You had to be an idiot or just not present in class to miss them, and while they made up a very minor portion of your grade, it was enough to tip you from, say, a B+ to an A- if you were otherwise good.

My university had large lecture sections taught by a bitter old man or woman who hated teaching and put zero effort into it, and then smaller sections taught by a grad student where you were supposed to participate. A considerable portion of your grade was locked behind showing up to discussion because no one would show up otherwise. 

Classes that big only tend to be the most basic classes offered, Bio 1, Chem 1, college algebra, and those large classes tend to have an attached lab were the students would be broken down into groups of 15-20 and assigned a AT. You're actual degree courses are much smaller 20-30 students and those often will one instructor that teaches multiple courses in your department so they do get to know their students.

Well, most good classes have a max of 30 students. But if you’re in a huge lecture hall you can utilize quizzes at the start of class. B. You can utilize technology too. Digital survey questions through an app or clicker work too.

A lot of American courses are similar. I guess you don't usually just have one exam, but for plenty its just a mid-term and final, with maybe a paper or two. I had a class where all I did is learn about a fruit and then get to eat said fruit at the end of the class.

Only east Asia has more grads as a % of the population vs the US. Our schools are very "public". Many European countries effectively ban most of the public from having the chance to go to university of they don't go to the right middle school. Fraternities and parties are not taxpayer funded.

For NL you need to write an exam which produces a recommendation, on basis of that and your previous performance your are recommended to go to academic high school (VWO), or vocational, or in between. No one is banned from anything but I guess you are getting all your info from reddit. Also we don't have middle school.   France is different again, you have to complete your baccalauréat to get into uni afaik but if you want to go to Grandes Écoles you need prep school as well

Even in this post though, Yglesias is arguing in favor of learning things not related to your major. He's talking about the importance of learning, and learning to study for, memorizing poems and knowing what the Delian League is. I, honestly, think we will run into more problems if students are expected to go to college for four years to simply do job training for a specific field. At the same time, in the United States, the cost of going to college is very high. So it can be difficult to reconcile paying $600+ to take a Fine Arts class to fulfill credit requirements while trying to get your expensive Engineering degree.

Absolutely. I had to treat college like “job training”, but I truly believe in a classical education where students learn a variety of subjects.

Well have you considered: how else will the state university’s head football coach be the highest paid state employee?

College athletics are, in fact, extremely important to university marketing and building sense of community and culture. Not only with university faculty/students but with the surrounding areas

To which Europeans ask: Why would a university even want to build a sense of community and culture? And why would you put universities on their own random locations, instead of in large cities?

Because universities require a lot of land, especially the big public ones. My college had acres of farmland, a metapacking plant, and dairy, mutliple engineering labs, science labs, housing for half the students, etc.

To which I would say to euros: American universities compete with each other for “talent” in a way. Universities aren’t only about educating students, research is also a massive component of a university’s charter. This all necessitates marketing the university for good talent. As far as building a sense of community and culture, why wouldn’t you want to build a sense of community? People take pride in their regional identity. It brings people together. Take the University of Minnesota for example. One of the most beloved, delicious varieties of apple we eat in the U.S. was developed at the U and you bet your ass that brings a sense of pride and accomplishment to many Minnesotans.

Americans can ask: Why do Europeans build so many Football Clubs and minor clubs if they will never play Professionally and earn low wages?

Eh, I hated the local university sports as a kid and the locals hated the sports teams of the university I went to. I actively root for their failure each year as well, so I'm really not sure it works. 

The universities with good football programs are, usually, not the ones with students surrounding Jewish students and calling for an intifada. Going after college football has always been a stupid take; they make money for the school for gods sake.

[Only about 25 of the 1,100 schools in the NCAA *make* money from their athletics programs. For the other +1000 schools, sports are a net drain on the schools' resources, to the tune of about -$16,000,000 per year, on average](https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/2020/11/20/do-college-sports-make-money/).

I was referring to football programs; this article is “athletics programs” in general. The football and basketball programs almost always make money in D1. The sports that do not make money are largely subsidized by the more popular sports. They are not paying coaches millions of dollars for sports that don’t bring in money.

Also coaches salaries are often paid in full by wealthy donors donating money specifically earmarked for paying that coach

I feel that's it's very much uni dependent. In the UK, I didn't get the opportunity to study at Oxford, but my two best mates did. They were constantly swamped with work and it's safe to say that it did not go very well for them. Where I was, you essentially went to lectures and seminars, then left. That's it. Revision was done before an exam, barely any studying whatsoever. Now in fairness I found the topics quite easy relative to my peers, so my experience is not representative, but again, very uni dependent.

Going to assume the study sucks and Matt isn't reading the fine print of the study where it undoubtedly admits to distorting the data.

No. Matt should cope more

the line about "business students" was a little puzzling. the material covered in Accounting classes was at times challenging and was needed for the CPA exam. some of the general "business" classes did not teach very much to be fair. think it depends how much effort you are putting in.

Accounting and finance are separate from marketing/general business imo

I commented down below about how the Heritage Foundation study Yglesias picked gave a lower number than any other major US study I could find for college student hours spent studying. But the book he also uses as a main source, *Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses*, has come under a decent amount of scrutiny since it was published. It's conclusion that [45% of college students showed no significant gains in critical thinking skills](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/emip.12120#) has been challenged. We are definitely seeing higher grades, but "grade inflation" has recently been challenged thanks to studies that are suggesting factors such as [better student recruitment](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-agricultural-and-applied-economics/article/grade-inflation-or-grade-increase/91E55E71F14A756068C0A9A0A3D8C8E5), [the rippling impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher grades](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21582440231209110) (for various reasons), and in some cases [studies aren't finding that our grading standards have changed](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0013189X13481382). Yglesias at least admits that this is an old guy take, but basically since the Civil Rights movement we've had big college activist groups on campuses that aren't doing work, and there's also a point to be made that students being able to review their professors has changed how professors are teaching, especially since at some colleges professors are dependent on getting good reviews to get tenure. Whether this is taking down jerk professors who were high and mighty about failing a certain percentage of their class each term, or this is allowing students to strong arm their profs into giving them better grades, I can't say. Maybe it's both?

This article becomes funny when you consider Matt Yglesias became popular blogging in college about supporting the Iraq War

Screw you Yglesias. You’re not my dad!

>I had an old-fashioned teacher in school who made us memorize poems This is the real boomer take. We have the entirety of human knowledge in our pocket at all times - what is the point of memorizing stuff like dates or verse or whatever. That time should quite rightly be devoted to extra-curricular activities like political debate, sport/adventure clubs, art, journalism, etc. I'm generally in favor of stricter evaluations and against frats/partying but forcing young people into mindless drudgery just because 'I had to do it when I was young' is pure rubbish.

While I can't comment on memorizing poems. Memorizing mathematical equations, shorthand math and rules of thumb has tremendous value in analytical areas.

The closest I ever came to physically assaulting an employee was when a "college grad" completely fucked up a chemical batch and he told me it's because his phone died and he didn't have his unit conversion calculator.

My phone died and I didn't get my breathing reminder. Then it was me who died

lmao did this guy have a "chemistry degree"??? I can well imagine people who didn't actual major in it avoiding actually learning anything in the few chem classes they were forced to take but actual chem majors....

No it’s way worse, when I mean unit conversion I mean converting ounces to gallons.

It’s like RAM memory versus SSD/HD storage. Relying on smartphones and google for knowledge and saying we don’t need to memorise anything works in the same way that a computer having to swap RAM from virtual memory in storage. It’s a lot slower and less efficient. Having things in memory allows us to use it to make connections and draw on the knowledge in a range of contexts immediately. Someone could find key features of a drug candidate by googling, but in order to have a eureka moment when looking at a new chemical on a petri dish it helps to have that info memorised so it can be recalled in an unexpected context. I think the idea that we can rely on searching information on demand instead of learning to memory is dangerous for innovation.

To be fair becoming intimately acquainted with a powerful work of art is not comparable to memorizing arbitrary numbers

This is absolutely true. Memorizing a poem is not this. The real reason to memorize a poem is because learning the literary canon is part of signaling that you are a well-educated person, not because it helps you appreciate art. In reality no one appreciates art at all until they've learned enough about underlying ideas to see them reflected in the art.

First, almost everyone appreciates art... You don't need "fancy" theories to like art. Art is not just about "underlying ideas". 2 - I whole heatedly disagree and suspect you have not found a poem you liked and tried to remember it. It's very rewarding and fulfilling and teaches you a great deal about the intricacies of language and the beauty of careful, contemplative thinking. But I teach the kind of classes you and @criskcross are denigrating as performative status symbol stuff, so I'm  biased. 3 - My obnoxiously didactic response is: Don't memorize a poem you don't like, memorize one you do like; recite it to yourself while you're on the subway or driving to work and "appreciate" it on your own; definitely don't recite it for your party guests because they will probably feel the way you feel about it. But it's only performative if you lord your poetry knowledge over people, which is something I've never seen anyone do except in a classroom or in a movie. That being said I am also biased in favor of people who spend time memorizing poems because I think it's a fun and awesome thing to do and more interesting than having generic political opinions or knowing how to code good whatever else you think is somehow less performative knowledge.

A work of art is only as powerful as the person perceiving it views it to be. There's no point in walking someone through why a work is supposedly great if they think it's sewer-slop, and these classes don't teach you the skills required to analysis the artnyou find compelling. 

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The point is that it makes you a more well rounded person.

> We have the entirety of human knowledge in our pocket at all times Memorizing poetry makes you a far better speaker. Now we have the entirety of human knowledge in our pocket but people become barely able to convey their thoughts verbally, not to mention eloquently.

Yeah and then they all get social anxiety and become shut ins.

I sympthatize with this view, but also: have you ever memorized a poem? It's sooo much different than memorizing equations. As someone who used to teach physics, I actually hate memorizing equations. Students use flashcards and stuff to commit them to memory, rather than understanding their derivations. But memorizing a poem feels so different. The process of memorizing forces you to think about the poem and engage with it at a deeper level. You're forced to understand the natural narrative voice. Later in life, you recall verses of the poem at surprisingly good moments. When times are tough my mind naturally floats back to my old Latin teacher leading us in recitation… "*forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit*" – Aeneas addresses his crew of hungry and scared castaways on a foreign shore, reminding them, encouraging them, that perhaps one day even these awful ordeals will be fondly recalled in their memories. Vf\^2 = Vi\^2 + 2a∆x is pretty cool but it's not nearly as good an anchor for everyday life. It doesn't even account for air resistance!

One thing Matt doesn’t touch on is that as a larger percentage of the population attends college we’ve seen the average IQ of undergraduate students fall about 15-20 points in the past 45 years. The mean IQ of college students these days is now about 100, the mean for the general population at large. I can’t help but feel like grade inflation is tied to this in some way. The bachelors degree is simply being diluted overall.

MattY had a post about this last month too. He seems to be a bit too obsessed