Homer Simpson-When I Was 17

Apropos Martin's post below, further evidence on under-age drinking amongst top American students.

"If we had to pay fees, we'd take it more seriously"

In the sometimes heated disputes about the abolition of university fees & their possible re-introduction the focus is generally on the effect that it might have on progression to university and on the issue of educational inequality. There has been relatively little discussion about how student behaviour might change.
The Irish Times has an interesting article by Roisin Ingle based around interviews with students in UCC and one theme that emerges is that students might take their courses more seriously if they were paying fees. Another theme was that while some students saw the merits in the re-introduction of fees there were very strong social pressures not to reveal this.
Of course one cannot infer anything from a few interviews like this but the article is nonetheless worth reading.

Get thee to a library: downward trends in study time

Do students study less now than in the good old days i.e. when their professors were students? One hears a certain amount about this but I thought it might be nostalgia. But here is some hard evidence that suggests dramatic falls in the amount of time spent studying by American undergrads.

LEISURE COLLEGE, USA
Babcock, Phillip & Marks, Mindy
In 1961, the average full-time student at a 4-year college in the U.S. studied about 24 hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only 14 hours a week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study times occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, overall and within every major, for students who worked and those who did not, and at 4-year colleges of every type, degree structure and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that would be most relevant to education production, and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at post-secondary institutions in the United States.

The Falling Time Cost of College: Evidence from Half a Century of Time Use Data
Babcock, Phillip & Marks, Mindy
Using multiple datasets from different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2003. 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. Declines were extremely broad-based, and are not easily accounted for by framing effects, work or major choices, or compositional changes in students or schools. We conclude that there have been substantial changes over time in the quantity or manner of human capital production on college campuses.

Student myopia and the Points Race for university in Ireland

An article in todays Irish Times brings the news that the "points race" for university entrance is back. Of course it never actually went away since there is significant excess demand in general, the number of applicants being about twice the number of places.
However the article does record evidence of a fall in demand for degrees leading to qualifications in sectors hit by the down-turn notably construction (like architecture, civil engineering) and also law. This trend kicked in last year. This makes sense, doesn't it? Well not if you believe human capital theory which says that people choose their education to maximize (discounted) life cycle earnings. Remember by the time this year's university entrants start out on their careers (in 4 or 5 or 6 years time), the worst of the recession will be over. So it looks to me that students are putting far too much weight on current events. Or, more likely, their parents are. Of course other markets, like the stock market which has lots of highly sophisticated, highly paid agents, also display excess volatility. However decisions in that market are taken very very quickly whereas one hopes that decisions about career choice are made in a more sedate fashion.
I wonder is this an argument for moving to an American style system where professional degrees are at graduate level, taken after a fairly general undergraduate degree? At that point, students would make much more mature decisions. It would also remove much of the pressure at the Leaving Certificate level so pedagogy could be focused on actually learning useful skills and not rote-learning and the mindless accumulation of points. It would also help students from low SES backgrounds to access these professions since once they get into university they tend to do okay.

The socio-economic gradient in students expectations

One of the most striking, not to say depressing, features of education everywhere is the presense of a strong socio-economic gradient: poorer kids get less education and fare worse in general than richer kids by pretty much any criterion in any country. Understanding why is a mammoth task.
Given that gradient, one would expect it to be reflected in students expectations: low SES students should expect to do worse than high SES one's. Its simply the rational thing to do.
Good comparative data on such expectations is hard to come by [I think] but the PISA 2000 data [and possibly other waves] has a measure of how students expect to end up and one can compare it with where their parents actually are. The index is due to Ganzeboom et al (1992) and though it may be not how an economist would do things it seems to make sense.
So below I graph students expected SES against their father's for Ireland and Sweden. As predicted, it slopes up. Its interesting that there are flat bits at the bottom. Rightly or wrongly, students there don't think SES matters. Perhaps its a case of how, in Bob Dylan's memorable words, "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose".
Sweden, of course, is a much more egalitarian country than Ireland. Other evidence shows that the dependence of one's education on one's parents is particularly high in Ireland compared to other OECD countries [shameless plug for my own work below]. So I would have expected the gradient to be steeper in Ireland than Sweden. I bet you would too.
Wrong! Sweden's is noticebly steeper: in numerical terms the correlation is 0.25 in Sweden and only 0.19 in Ireland. Why I don't know.

Chevalier, A., K.Denny, and D.McMahon (2009) “Intergenerational Mobility and Education Equality”. In Education and Inequality across Europe. Eds P. Dolton, R. Asplund, and E. Barth. London: Edward Elgar.

Ganzeboom, H.B.G., De Graaf, P. and Treiman, D.J. (with De Leeuw, J.) (1992), “A standard international socio-economic index of occupational status”, Social Science Research, 21(1), 1-56.