The outlook for colleges and universities is bleak. Recent headlines from the Chronicle of Higher Education include: “43% of College Fund Raisers Don’t Expect to Meet Goals”; “Major Cost-Cutting Begins in Response to Covid-19, With Faculty and Staff Furloughs and Pay Cuts”; and “How to Recognize the Warning Signs of a Death Spiral.” Contributions to colleges from federal and state governments will have to go down. Donations from alumni will fall.
And then there is the money from tuition. Parents have lost jobs. So have students. College fund balances have fallen dramatically. And who wants to pay private, residential college prices for an online education?
If colleges do reopen online this fall, and most are at least planning for the possibility, the first thing they should do is suggest or mandate that students take more classes each semester. In a world in which many colleges are moving to pass/fail instead of letter grades or relaxing standards by simply not giving exams — Cornell just announced you won’t need to take the SATs to apply this year — it’s time for colleges to consider that students and their parents have even less money and patience to spend on a four-year vacation than they did before.
Let’s start with how little time college students spent on educational activities before the pandemic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 2011 and 2015, “on an average weekday, full-time university and college students spent 3.5 hours engaged in educational activities, 2.3 hours working, 8.8 hours sleeping, and spent 4.0 hours in leisure and sports activities.” That’s assuming students aren’t over-reporting their academic commitment. If they are taking a full course load (four classes that meet for three hours a week), that means students are engaged in academic pursuits for less than 30 hours a week. And each semester lasts only about 15 weeks. The college students who are currently home from college and taking classes online are probably spending less time on academic work than their younger siblings in high school.
Even before the current crisis, many students weren’t even taking enough credits to graduate in four years. As an article in the Hechinger Report noted, “You don’t have to have a Ph.D. to do this math: Most bachelor’s degrees require 120 credits, which works out to 15 credits per semester times two semesters per year for each of four years. Yet most students take only 12 credits per semester, which means they immediately fall behind.”
The reasons for this are varied. Among other things, as long as students have 12 credits, they will get the maximum amount of Pell Grant money from the federal government. But colleges don’t do much to encourage higher course loads either. And why should they? Students pay for more semesters, and no one seems to be complaining.
They keep busy. Even (or perhaps especially) the most dedicated, full-time, four-year, residential college student is typically engaged in hour upon hour of extracurricular activities. From student newspapers to racial affinity groups to athletic teams (varsity or intramural), college students are busy from morning till night. In 2001, David Brooks coined “The Organization Kid,” describing the schedules of Princeton’s undergraduates. “I asked several students to describe their daily schedules,” he wrote, “and their replies sounded like a session of Future Workaholics of America: crew practice at dawn, classes in the morning, resident-adviser duty, lunch, study groups, classes in the afternoon, tutoring disadvantaged kids in Trenton, a cappella practice, dinner, study, science lab, prayer session, hit the StairMaster, study a few hours more.”
Maybe Princeton students are studying more hours than your average college student. But having graduated from another Ivy League school only a few years before the Brooks piece, I can say with some certainty that plenty are not. And thanks to grade inflation, the marginal benefit to studying more is fairly limited. You could add several “leadership positions” to your resume without getting anything below a B+/A- in your classes. Students’ time also gets sucked up with campus jobs (now not an option) and with fraternity parties and the ensuing recovery time (also not an option now). Campus protests and political activity — some administration sponsored, some not — may also earn a few hours of student time each week.
Now is the time for colleges to return to their core mission of education, and they should pull out all the stops. If it’s not too late, colleges should encourage children to take summer school classes. Ideally, we should change the Pell Grant rules to allow that money to be used over the summer. Knocking out a general education requirement in the coming months while students are being told to shelter in place and while many summer jobs and internships have been canceled is a no-brainer.
Getting students through college in three years instead of four has been a major goal for Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University. He called the four-year degree “an American idiosyncrasy.” So far, about 5% of students at Purdue are enrolled in such abbreviated programs, which can save money for both students and universities.
Schools can adapt their academic calendars with longer semesters, shorter vacations, and classes that are held on more than four days out of the week and at a wider range of times. And if students are going to stay for four years, they should be able to get a second degree — in a foreign language, for instance.
There is no doubt that professors will object to this proposed increase in their workloads. Sure, students may have time to take an extra class or two, but will professors have enough time to grade all those extra papers and exams? There is a great deal of disagreement over how much professors currently work. One small, self-reported study claimed an average of 61 hours a week, which I and many others find hard to believe, especially when considering how summer workloads are factored in.
Universities have created incentives for professors to spend a lot of their time doing things besides teaching, particularly research and service on university committees. Now would be the time to reduce those requirements. Research, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, should be scaled back for the time being to ensure that professors can not only add classes to their load but also ensure that their online instruction is as effective as possible. Committee service, too, should be scaled back. Without having to worry about anything happening on campus, universities could reduce a lot of this bureaucracy.
Speaking of bureaucracy, colleges could certainly redirect some of their administrative budgets for student life toward academic pursuits, either paying professors to teach more or hiring additional lecturers and graduate students, who could open more sections of classes and offer classes at more times.
All of these things might send the message to students and parents that colleges understand the pressure families feel to make the best use of their money and time during this crisis. And the refocus on what happens in the classroom, instead of the rest of campus life, might have an additional positive effect. A 2014 study found that students who spent a greater number of hours on extracurricular activities on campus (as opposed to classroom studies) were more likely to see their politics move toward one extreme or the other, in most cases toward the far Left.
Kyle Dodson, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced, looked at data from the UCLA’s Freshman Survey and the College Senior Survey. He found that time spent in academic pursuits has a moderating influence on students’ political views. The more time students spend in the classroom, the less likely they were to engage in disruptive or illiberal activities on campus. Sounds like a win-win.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
