Academic disengagement: Important new historical evidence

During the publicity tour for Ivory Tower Blues, the suggestion was made by David Strong (President, University Canada West, a small private university in British Columbia) that students ‘have always been disengaged.’ He made this claim on national radio, on CBC’s Cross Country Checkup, which devoted the 2-hour show to the issues raised by Ivory Tower Blues, with me as an in-studio guest.[i]

This is a very curious claim for a university President to make, because it implies that it has always been a norm for university students to be disengaged. If this has been the case, what sort of scam have universities been running on the public? How could they in good faith claim year after year that universities represent ‘excellence,’ justifying billions of dollars of university funding each year. We did not deal extensively with historical evidence of disengagement in Ivory Tower Blues, but simply argued that in the past there have been some minimally engaged students, especially from wealthy backgrounds, for whom the ‘gentleman’s C’ of a bygone era sufficed to keep their bill-paying parents happy. However, we made the point that these types of students did not expect grades higher than Cs and therefore did not have a disengagement compact with professors. They simply blended in and did not affect standards in the system. To claim that universities have condoned academic disengagement as a norm is to suggest that higher education has been a fraud for centuries, but I do not really think most people would argue this.

Still, there has been little empirical evidence to counter this cynical view until very recently. A report with such evidence was released last month. It compiled and compared the results from a variety of quantitative surveys of ‘study time’ back to the 1960s and other studies back to the 1920s.[ii]

This report traces student ‘study time’ using the recent NSSE surveys, and other large sample sources (NLSY79, 1981; HERI, 1988, 2004), along with data from the 1960s (Project Talent, 1961), showing a very obvious linear decline in student effort. Over that time, full-time students have apparently gone from treating university as a ‘full-time job” in the 1960s, involving about 40 hours per week (study time of 25 hours plus class time of 15 hours), to a part-time job in the 2000s, involving about 27 hours per week for study and class time combined. Studies using other methods confirm this trend, but extend it back to the 1920s, showing a consistent trend for full-time students to treat university as a full-time job between the 1920s and 1960s, followed by a linear reduction in academic effort from the 1960s to the 2000s.

The authors of this report controlled for a number of factors other than student effort that might have produced these results. For example, they examined ‘framing effects’ (how the question is worded), whether the definition of ‘full-time’ student has changed, as well as ‘composition’ effects. For this latter effect, they examined the possibility that only certain types of students have become less engaged, a favourite argument among those who believe that rising tuition costs have made it necessary for more student to work at outside jobs. However, they found that all types of students have been putting increasingly less effort into their studies since the 1960s to bring us to the new norm of university as a part-time activity:

No group appears to have bucked the trend. Study times declined overall … for every subgroup. Working students studied less than others, but study hours fell for students in each category of work intensity, including those who did not work at all. Students with more educated fathers studied more than others; however, study times declined for students in all parental education categories. Similarly, study times declined for all race and gender categories … . Interestingly, women used to study about the same amount as men, but study more than men in recent cohorts. Engineering students studied more than other students and the gap has widened. Study times fell for all choices of major … . Students at liberal arts colleges studied more than other students, but study times fell at all types of colleges … . Lastly, data on SAT scores and school size, available for the later sub-period, show declines in study time for students of all ability levels, and at universities of all sizes and levels of selectivity. (pp. 15-16)

In my next few posts, I’ll examine more historical evidence and will look at how Canadian and American universities compare internationally.

[ii] Philip S. Babcock and Mindy Marks, The Falling Time Cost of College:

Evidence from Half a Century of Time Use Data (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, April 2010, Working Paper 15954), http://www.nber.org/papers/w15954 (accessed 4 May 2010).