Are Americans Near Being Willing to Deal with the Broken Univeristy

In a review of 2008 federal data, the Minnesota Office of Higher Education found that 84 percent of students attending college in Minnesota worked compared to 79 percent of students nationwide. On average, Minnesota students worked 28 hours a week.

Shannah Mulvihill, director of university relations at the Minnesota State University Student Association, said nearly half of students at Minnesota's seven state-run universities who responded to an association survey last year work 20 hours a week or more while going to school.

Mulvihill said she was surprised at how many students said that work affected their studies.

"Nearly half of the students who responded to the survey said that the number of hours that they worked is negatively impacting their academic success," she said.

Mulvihilll says students are in a tough spot. They can work fewer hours, but be saddled with more student loans when they graduate. Their other option is to work more and take fewer classes, which means taking longer to get a degree.

Leslie Mercer, associate vice chancellor for research and planning at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, said a 2005 survey of MnSCU students showed 62 percent said work limits the time they study.

"They report that they don't have as much time to read and to study as we would probably like them to," she said.

In a perfect world, Mercer said, students would concentrate on earning heir degrees, while working no more than 10 to 12 hours at an on-campus job.

"Once you get beyond that I think it gets more problematic," she said.

However, Mercer said most students need to work more than 10 to 12 hours a week.

Grouping students into seven academic disciplines, the study shows wide differences in the number of hours they put into schoolwork outside the classroom. Among students concentrating in engineering, 42 percent say they spend at least 20 hours per week on such study, well ahead of any other group.

They are followed, in descending order, by students studying physical sciences, biological sciences, arts and humanities, education and social sciences. Business majors ranked last, with 19 percent saying they spend 20 hours or more each week on schoolwork

It is a fundamental part of college education: the idea that young people don’t just learn from lectures, but on their own, holed up in the library with books and, perhaps, a trusty yellow highlighter. But new research, conducted by two California economics professors, shows that over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping. According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours.

The decline, Babcock and Marks found, infects students of all demographics. No matter the student’s major, gender, or race, no matter the size of the school or the quality of the

SAT scores of the people enrolled there, the results are the same: Students of all ability levels are studying less.

“It’s not just limited to bad schools,” Babcock said. “We’re seeing it at liberal arts colleges, doctoral research colleges, masters colleges. Every different type, every different size. It’s just across the spectrum. It’s very robust. This is just a huge change in every category.

As far as being "broken". I think thats some hawkeye hypebole.

I think Id be more worried about how weve just given up as a nation with any lofty goals just because they "Cost too much"

Then we could talk about all those people who are in grad school chewing up time and money because they dont want to join the working stiffs...what ever gave us the idea that training people for careers when they already have a clearly stated aversion to work was a good idea?

Is it that youre just against educations in the liberal arts?

I think we, as a species can live quite happily without religion, BUT we cannot live happily without culture and the arts.

Over the past half-century, the amount of time college students actually study — read, write and otherwise prepare for class — has dwindled from 24 hours a week to about 15, survey data show.

And that invites a question: Has college become too easy?

Ashley Dixon, a sophomore at George Mason University, anticipated more work in college than in high school. Instead, she has less. In a typical week, Dixon spends 18 hours in classes and another 12 in study. All told, college course work occupies 30 hours of her week. Dixon is a full-time student, but college, for her, is a part-time job.

“I was expecting it to be a lot harder,” said Dixon, 20, of Haymarket. “I thought I was going to be miserable, trying to get good grades. And I do get good grades, and I’m not working very hard.”

Declining study time is a discomfiting truth about the vaunted U.S. higher-education system. The trend is generating debate over how much students really learn, even as colleges raise tuition every year.

Some critics say colleges and their students have grown lazy. Today’s collegiate culture, they say, rewards students with high grades for minimal effort and distracts them with athletics, clubs and climbing walls on campuses that increasingly resemble resorts.

Academic leaders counter that students are as busy as ever but that their attention is consumed in part by jobs they take to help make ends meet.

I have this hopelessly utopian notion that a college education is valuable in and of itself, and that college isn't a machine into which one feeds money into one end and out pops a high-paying job at the other

If we genuinely believed that higher education was only good for preparing graduates to earn more money in their chosen professions, then we should replace all the colleges with trade schools

Then you should be alarmed at how lightly the current generation is invested in the University.

PARIS - The boundless admiration that some have for the diploma machine that is Harvard worries me by its lack of hindsight. Of course, this private university - the richest in the world - does not lack laurels, but do not forget that laurels grow well on manure.
Our French universities are as poor as church mice and any professor who crosses the Atlantic comes back depressed by what he has seen: investment in research, well-equipped facilities, high-tech amphitheaters and libraries, and salaries a soon-to-retire French university professor can only dream of. America is a young country that invests in its youth and in knowledge! This production of gray matter is the reason behind its technological lead and the source of its hyper-power. The American dream! How could you not be tempted!
In Isabelle Rey-Lefebvre’s recent article (see Le Monde from May 16), we learn that “44 Nobel Prizes, 46 Pulitzer Prizes and 8 United States presidents hail from its ranks.” Sacrebleu! Based on sociologist Stéphanie Grousset-Charrière’s book The Hidden Side of Harvard, the article showcases the advantages and inconveniences of the university’s unique education. The latter are logical counterparts to the former: teachers are never absent even when they’re sick; they interact directly with their students; tests and assessments aren’t used to punish students; positive feedback is deemed more “constructive.”
Teachers As Employees, Students As Clients
From afar, this method of teaching is both interesting and innovative, and it is true that thoughtfulness is better than contempt or humiliation. But Harvard did not invent this motivational method: it flourished in Europe after Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. What is worrying about this student-teacher relation has nothing to do with the fact that it is constructive and attentive. It is worrying because it is about pandering to the students. Because tuition is so high, they expect their professors to be knowledgeable, competent and efficient, but also submissive. The client is always right.
This pandering is why students get to evaluate their teachers; those who weren’t deemed “convincing” enough are fired, thrown out like an old piece of furniture! In the country where the doer trumps the thinker, the payer evicts the payee. This is nothing new: Nero’s preceptor Seneca complained in On Benefits that human relations in Rome were based on debt. He wanted to replace this commercial relationship by a more benevolent relationship, like the one between Gods and men.
Letting your children start their adult life with so much debt should be illegal. There is nothing wrong with dismissing bad professors, as long as the student-teacher relation is intellectual and not commercial. At Harvard, the educational is linked to the economic, and the intellectual is linked to the clientele.
Knowledge v. Earning Power
Debt means debtors. American students aren’t as interested in knowledge as they are in income, if only to pay back their debt! It isn’t easy to motivate children to learn; is it necessary to saddle them with debt to transform their meager scholarly appetite into a hyper-motivation for university? Free market economists say debt fosters motivation. Psychoanalysts tell their patients the same: pay to know yourself. One can clearly see how masochistic the system is!
Max Weber acutely described this logic in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - John Harvard was a young Puritan pastor of the early 17th century. But is debt the only way for knowledge to blossom and flourish? Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook not through economic masochism but through another, more joyful impulse! Neither Marie Curie nor Albert Schweizer nor Bergson nor Camus nor Sartre got into debt to create their work.
Even though we know that French professors aren’t paid as well as their German or British colleagues, is it necessary, in order to reassert the value of knowledge, to decide that the only way they’ll get a raise is if they “Harvardize” their teaching methods? That is to say by abandoning free, selfless teaching methods for a tempting yet childish client-employee system? Some already think and act this way.
But at a time when students in Quebec are protesting against university tuition hikes and when American student debt has passed the $1 trillion threshold, it may be time to invent cheaper and less castrating solutions than “Harvardizing.” Let us start with the following premise: knowledge is immaterial, abundant, communicable and not automatically mercantile. Remember that in Greek, school (“Skholè”) doesn’t’ mean client or debt, but “leisure.”