LeisureUniversity,USA-UCSBEconomics-Universityof.docVIP

LEISURE COLLEGE, USA  Philip Babcock University of California, Santa Barbara babcock@ Mindy Marks University of California, Riverside mindy.marks@ December, 2009I. Introduction From the fact-based fiction of Tom Wolfe’s “I am Charlotte Simmons,” to the undercover anthropology of Rebecca Nathan’s, “My Freshman Year,” scholars, journalists, and educators, have begun to depict the college campus as a place where academic effort is scarcely detectable and the primary student activities are leisure-based. But if history is a guide, every generation has a tendency to slander its progeny with allegations of decadence and sloth. Do recent characterizations of a change in college culture, based largely on anecdotal evidence, reflect real, quantifiable changes over time in the choices and behaviors of students--or are they the result of a common prejudice sustained by selective examples? To discern whether there have been changes over the past half-century in the level of academic effort associated with college attendance, we examine a wide range of time-use datasets. Figure 1 offers a condensed preview of the results. We find a 10 hour decline in the average weekly study time of full-time college students at four-year colleges in the United States, from about 24 hours per week in 1961 to about 14 hours per week in 2003. As will be described in the main body of the paper, the study time drop depicted in Figure 1 has been adjusted for framing effects of the survey instruments, is robust to alternative choices of datasets, and does not appear to be driven by changes over time in the composition of the college-going population. Study times fell for students from all demographic subgroups, within every major, and at 4-year colleges of every type, degree structure and level of selectivity. We conclude that the change in college culture is real. While it is not clear why study times have fallen, we argue that the observed 10 hour-per-week decline could not have occurred withou