College students should study more

My crankiest old guy take yet

Among last year’s cavalcade of Big Ideas movies, Alexander Payne’s quiet period dramedy “The Holdovers” was, I think, considered somewhat slight, despite being well-regarded. But although it lacked any literal nuclear explosions or dramatic political speeches, the film wrestled with one of the major social themes of our times: a kind of structural transformation in the value proposition of elite education that I think about whenever I see a new campus controversy.

This is not so much the plot of the movie (no spoilers here) as the backdrop to it. Paul Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a teacher at the fictional Barton Academy in the 1970s. Barton is an elite boys’ boarding school, but even though the students are mostly very rich, the accommodations are not particularly nice.

Part of the ethic of this kind of school is that students live under rather spartan conditions, away from the comforts of their parents’ posh lifestyles. And Hunham, who teaches ancient history, is a particularly strict old-school teacher. He maintains high standards for discipline and for learning. He assigns a lot of reading, expects his students to do it, and gives them bad grades if they don’t. He expects students who receive bad grades to suffer consequences. In his understanding of himself and his job, this is the role of an elite educational institution: Wealthy parents hire Barton to put their kids through the paces, because they think that this will be good for the students in the longer term. The school is providing a service, and part of the service they are providing is harshness.

According to Hunham, at least, those are the values Barton was founded on, and the values the prior headmaster who hired him believed in.

But Hunham is at odds with the new headmaster, who believes his job is to keep wealthy and well-connected parents happy, which means doing what they want and not flunking their precious darlings. The new headmaster’s approach, while not admirable, does seem to be an analytically correct assessment of the market — Barton is a private school that needs donors and paying customers. There may have been a time when the donors and the customers wanted what Hunham is offering, but they don’t anymore. And in the movie, this is connected thematically to a decline in the character of the American elite. One scene set in the Barton chapel pans across the memorials to Barton graduates who died in various wars of American history, including many alumni who perished in the world wars. But only one Barton student died in Vietnam, a Black kid who attended the school on scholarship because his mom ran the cafeteria. A kid, we learn, who wanted to go to college but didn’t have the money, so he enlisted.

This is not what the movie is “about.” But it’s the setting, the swirling cross-pressures facing elite educational institutions 50 years ago.

And I think a key to understanding contemporary education discourse is understanding how those pressures were resolved in favor of ever-more-competitive admissions, but much lower standards for conduct and academic performance.

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. But even if you look exclusively at full-time college students, we’re talking about less than three hours per day on in-class and out-of-class education.

This lack of attention to academics makes a difference. In 2011, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa published “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” which made a huge splash at the time but is now rarely discussed. They used data from a test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment and showed that while some students learn a lot in college and have notably improved academic skills, a very large minority do not. They note that the actual amount of learning varies substantially by college major. 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.

Again, this came out in the context of the Great Recession, so a lot of the dialogue around it consisted of progressives arguing that this stuff was a distraction from the problem of youth unemployment.

I was inclined to agree at the time, and I think Arum and Roksa blundered with a 2014 followup book that specifically pegged the economic struggles of then-young millennials on shortcomings in their college education rather than macroeconomic circumstances. Over the past decade, as macroeconomic conditions have improved, millennials have caught up. Which is just to say that Arum and Roksa’s critics were right — this doesn’t explain very much about big picture economic outcomes. That being said, given the role of higher education in American society, the portrait they paint of schools where many students don’t learn anything is still important. They show that lack of learning is associated with lack of time spent on schoolwork, and Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks have shown that over the decades, students have been spending less and less time on studying — “full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing about 27 hours per week.”

There’s a lot one could try to say about why that is. But one major reason to hit the books is to get good grades, and over time, it’s become easier and easier to get good grades, which means there’s less and less reason to be studious.

Why grades inflate

When I was in college during Larry Summers’ short-lived presidency of Harvard University, he made a big push to try to reverse the trend toward grade inflation that had occurred over the previous generation. And if you zoom in on exactly when I was in school in the early 2000s, you can see that it was working. My particular cohort of students was the only one on record to experience slightly declining grades.

And I would note that Summers barely even did anything. He just said, in clear and forceful language, that he thought the grading had become too lax. That meant professors who privately had a bit of Hunham in them felt that they would be backed-up if they got a little harsher. I was enrolled in one large class with a distinguished professor who pulled a few papers (including one of mine) out of her TA’s grading stack and re-marked them lower in front of everyone.

Summers ended up losing that job, largely over other controversies, and his successors did not continue the effort. So the early aughts blip is just an oddity on the chart, an exception to the rule.

I think it’s an important exception, though, because it shows that a reversal is possible.

Some professors strongly agreed with Summers and started handing out harsher grades as soon as they got the green light to do so from administrators. TAs were happy to go along with instructions to be tougher, if that’s what their bosses wanted. And most professors, I assume, don’t have incredibly strong feelings about this and just want to be roughly average, so when the behavior of the outliers starts to shift, the behavior of average professors shifts as well. Of course, people would complain. The nascent Summers-era crackdown was turning A-s into B+s and B+s into Bs. That generated some whining from students, but ultimately, to restore old-school academic values, schools will need to hand out Cs and Ds that put students at the risk of real negative consequences, like loss of scholarships, getting kicked out of school, or heading into the job market looking like a real fuckup. And then you get the problem that Hunham confronted: Is this what students and their parents want?

As Catherine Rampell wrote back in 2010 and 2011, it’s pretty clearly the case that private colleges and universities led the charge toward grade inflation, with the public institutions that serve the majority of students following.

Because selection effects are such a big deal in education, the primary basis of competition is to attract the highest-quality applicants. And applicants want, in part, a fun consumption experience. That means creating plenty of paths for students to take courses that are graded very generously, ones where a lot of work may be assigned in a formal sense, but it’s pretty easy to get away with not doing it.

Nothing is inherently easy

As everyone knows, this isn’t even across all classes and disciplines.

If you take a math or science class, you will get problems sets. If you can’t answer the problems correctly, you will get a bad grade. And depending on your background and talent, you may need to work very hard to answer the problems correctly. That being said, I like the Hunham example because it’s a reminder that there’s nothing inherently easy about humanities subjects. You can give students in an ancient civilizations class a test that requires them to accurately reproduce a lot of detailed information about the Peloponnesian War and give them a low grade if they fail to master it.

In a traditional liberal arts education, you might expect people to learn to read and even compose in Greek and Latin, which seems like it would be hard. I had an old-fashioned teacher in school who made us memorize poems. This is a great example of something that almost anyone can do — part of the historical origin of verse is that, for whatever reason, it’s easier for our brains to remember — but that requires meaningful effort. To this day, I can recite “Spring and Fall” or “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by heart, but it took a lot of time and practice when I was in that class.

The way things have shaken out, though, is that STEM departments tend to have a lot of grant money and don’t particularly want to deal with annoying undergraduates, so they put rigorous courses on the board to weed out weaker students.

Humanities departments, by contrast, have to justify their relatively meager budgets in terms of student interest, which means they need to try to give the people what they want, which is easy classes. It doesn’t necessarily have to be like that. People pay to attend group exercise classes where the whole purpose is for the instructor to challenge the students and push them to work harder than they normally would. Students would learn more if they worked harder, and they would work harder if the grading were tougher, and “I would like my child to learn a lot in school” isn’t a particularly outlandish idea.

It just isn’t the direction students and their parents have gone over the past 50 years.

What are we doing here?

The idea that the declining studiousness of American undergraduates is a source of profound economic problems has been, I think, pretty overwhelmingly debunked by events. But I still think it’s a sort of skeleton key to unlocking a lot of campus controversies.

Institutions function better when they have clear missions. A mission helps draw the line between what’s important to the institution qua institution and what a person who works at the institution cares about. It also helps to structure disagreements. If two people with very different ideas about what should be done can at least agree on what they are trying to accomplish, that sets the stage for some kind of resolution. A mission is also a good way of managing diversity. People with very different backgrounds and values can find ways to set their differences aside and cooperate toward a common goal, if they have a common goal.

It seems like if there were to be a clear goal of a university’s undergraduate program, it would have something to do with educating students.

But colleges seem increasingly uninterested in holding students to a high standard of work. The market has decided that the customers are mostly interested in peer effects and having a good time, and schools are rewarded more for being good at selection than for being good at education. This leaves students with lots of downtime that they expend in various ways — I started a blog, Milan is going to be Opinion Editor of the Yale Daily News, Maya wrote a bunch of great columns for the Crimson, others get involved in noisy activism, and probably the most common activity is partying — and the faculty’s main job is research. When controversy strikes, though, there isn’t really an organizing principle of educational excellence (or even adequacy) to appeal to in order to help figure out what to do.

And even if it’s not an economic crisis, I do think it’s regrettable. If nothing else, it’s pretty literally a big waste of a lot of people’s time and a nontrivial amount of money.

Beyond that, though, I suspect it would be healthy for society if young people heading off to managerial jobs were put through the intellectual paces a bit more. It’s obviously not a crisis that you can’t count on everyone to know what the Delian League was. But there’s something inherently edifying about working hard and mastering a corpus of knowledge. It’s the job we used to hire higher education to do, and without it, we’re all a bit adrift.