College students should study more

How on earth could a college student enrolled full-time only have 1.2 hours of in-class instruction per day? Back in my day, when we had a foot of snow on the ground and had to walk barefoot uphill in every direction, a 15-credit-hour semester amounted to 3 hour-long courses on MWF and 2 hour and a half courses Tu and Th. Even subtracting 10 minutes for time between classes, it comes to 2.83 hours per day, using a real-world example- my own freshman year. Am I splitting hairs, or does this seem wrong to anyone else?

I wonder how much time is left over in a 24 hour period after you get your daily recommended sleep, study and exercise. On to of the required work and class time.

This doesn&#x27;t make any sense. A full-time student spends at least 2.4 hours in class per day <i>by definition</i>. Most universities consider a student full-time if they take more than 12 credit-hours per semester, and a credit-hour is one hour of in-class instruction per week. That works out to 2.4 hours per weekday. In practice most students take 15 credit-hours, which means they spend three hours in class per day.<p>The chart is from <i>The Heritage Foundation</i>, so it&#x27;s a lie but I assume not fabricated from whole cloth. Did they count weekends and holidays in the denominator, perhaps?

For difficult coursework where you really need to learn the material inside and out in order to have any chance of success in the next course in the series, the lecture:study ratio needed is about 1:3.<p>If one is taking three such courses, perhaps ten hours in lecture per week, then around four hours a day, seven days a week will be needed for study. (It&#x27;s true that some people grasp material quicker than others, but often that&#x27;s because they&#x27;ve had some prior introduction to it.)<p>This is pretty demanding and it&#x27;s why a lot of people switch their majors to something less time-consuming. However, this lecture:study&#x2F;practice ratio is entirely normal for vocational programs, e.g. learning to weld, etc.<p>&quot;If I hold up one corner of a square and the student cannot workout the other three for himself, I won&#x27;t go any further.&quot; - Confucius

The problem here is the sheer cost of college. Since college is so damn expensive, it creates a lot of risk aversion. You can&#x27;t flunk a student or take away their scholarship because they&#x27;ll end up with a lifetime&#x27;s worth of debt without any degree. That&#x27;s potentially life ruining. College as a whole is way more risky. The baby boomer idea of using college to explore one&#x27;s passions becomes untenable when a single year costs 80k.<p>The paradox here is that while college is extremely expensive, it&#x27;s also still very much a gateway to white collar, middle class life. So you end up with a lot of students who are forced into college by their parents, who don&#x27;t really want to be there, and who need decent grades. So yeah, they&#x27;re not going to study that hard. To avoid this, we need cheaper college, and more routes into the middle class that don&#x27;t involve college.

The problem with this argument is you have slackers like me who <i>specifically</i> chose my major because it was something I was good at so had to put in minimal effort to get passing grades.<p>The last college essay I had to write I started at the beginning of class, walked it to campus before the class was over and got an A.<p>And, as they say, D&#x27;s get degrees.

As the chart shows, the real spike in grade inflation is when the US government effectively used GPA as a measure for whether or not young men were sent off to patrol villages next to rice paddies in Vietnam.