Nowdays you can hear it everywhere that college students are lazy, care more about amenities on campus than studying, and that in general their quality has declined over time. In this post I write about a working paper that evaluates this trend, and try to hypothesize what drives it.
Indeed, Babcock and Marks (2010) show that there has been a clear decline in study hours per week from 1961 to 2003. Back in the day about 24 hours per week was the standard, by 2003 this declined to 14. That’s a 10-hour decline. In general, colleges state that a 30-hour per week studyload is appropriate.
ZeeConomics 