What Do Students Learn in College?

They might attend their lectures, do additional hours of study and get good grades; but... what are students learning in college? A recent article in the New York Times asks just this question: "what are America's kids actually learning in college?". Thanks to Peter C for sending on the link. According to the NYT article, "a provocative new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, makes a strong case that for a large portion of the nation’s seemingly successful undergraduates, the years in college barely improve their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing." The authors are Professors Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. A Google-Books preview is available here.

Arum and Roska's research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardised test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. More details on the authors' research project are available here. According to the authors' analysis (of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions), 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills, including: critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing (during their first two years of college). According to the authors, "many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but — more troubling still — they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment."

In relation to academic commitment, education economists would draw attention to the idea of non-cognitive skills. Pedro Martins has shown that a targeted program related to non-cognitive ability – study skills, motivation, and self-esteem – can improve student achievement at state schools in Portugal. In work that I have done with Liam and Colm, there is a clear demonstration of academic advantage for Irish university students who are more future-orientated and more conscientious. A targeted program (providing academic and social supports) was evaluated in the setting of an Irish university by Denny, Doyle, O’Reilly and O’Sullivan (2010); the results suggesting it was an effective means of improving academic outcomes for socio-economically disadvantaged students attending Irish universities.

Returning to the NYT article, it interprets Arum and Roksa's research to indicate that "students are hitting the books less and partying more. Easier courses and easier majors have become more and more popular. Perhaps more now than ever, the point of the college experience is to have a good time and walk away with a valuable credential after putting in the least effort possible." A study by three Cornell economists found a large increase in enrollment in courses with a median grade of A; after a new policy which introduced the publication of course median grades on the Internet. This is suggestive of students enrolling in classes where it easier to obtain higher grade-scores; an issue which I raised before in relation to the Irish Leaving Certificate: the final examination at the end of second-level education Ireland.

Recent research by Brian Jacob, Brian McCall and Kevin Stange (all from the University of Michigan) specifically addresses the issue of the consumption-value of college education. Jacob, McCall and Stange report that students "appear to value several college attributes which we categorize as consumption because their benefits arguably accrue only while actually enrolled, including college spending on student activities, sports, and dormitories." In addition, research by Babcock and Marks (discussed on this blog before) documents that academic time investment among full-time college students fell from 40 hours per in 1961 to 27 hours per week in 2003. Another article from the NYT tells us that Arum and Roksa's research is "consistent with the findings of the National Survey of Student Engagement, which has polled more than 2 million students at more than 1,000 colleges and universities over more than a decade — and reported that many spend little time studying or writing."

According to this article in the Huffington Post, the Collegiate Learning Assessment "has its share of critics who say it doesn't capture learning in specialized majors or isn't a reliable measure of college performance because so many factors are beyond their control." Nonetheless, it looks like this debate is set to grow more widespread in the future. It also resonates with last year's debate in Ireland about the issue of grade inflation. Introducing a research component into the undergraduate curriculum could be one way to improve students' skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing. In 2005, Trinity College Dublin launched a summer programme offering undergraduate students, typically from Science and Engineering, the opportunity to work in research for an 11 week period, on projects in laboratory environments.

The Secret Powers of Time

RSA's animation of a Philip Zimbardo lecture on how perceptions of and attitudes to time affect behaviour.

Framing on Seinfeld

Understanding Blocks of Time Use

I discussed student time use with one of my professors several weeks ago. He mentioned the importance of considering how time is allocated across activities in sequence. For some individuals, study-time may be interrupted by other activities, whereas other individuals may avail of contiguous study sessions. This could affect how study time affects academic achievement. Another nuance of study time that was recently mentioned on the blog is the degree of attention exercised during study-time; this also has implications for academic achievement. While the scheduling of study-time could be investigated using the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), measuring the degree of attention exercised during study is more challenging.

A recent NBER paper (Increasing Marginal Value of Time in Recreation - Raymond B. Palmquist, Daniel J. Phaneuf, V. Kerry Smith) considers the scheduling of time use in "blocks". They focus on leisure time and begin with the premise that leisure activities usually take place in discrete blocks of time that are surrounded by time devoted to other commitments (i.e. non-contiguous scheduling). An economic insight is that it can be costly to transfer time between blocks. They suggest that traditional methods for valuing time using labour markets miss important considerations (due to the costs of transferring between blocks of time).

The Palmquist, Phaneuf, and Smith paper uses non-employment time commitments to infer the shadow value of time spent in recreation. They use a survey that elicited revealed and stated preference data on household time allocation. The results from their work support the hypothesis that there is an increasing marginal value of time for recreation as the block of time increases.

10.37am: Monday

New figures suggest that irish people are the most miserable in Europe. Apparently, we spend the equivalent of more than a working day -- nine hours and 28 minutes -- every week griping about something. And women are more likely to moan than men. A majority (59pc) of both sexes agreed on that.

Our objects of grief (in order) are the weather (see previous papers on weather and well-being here and here), traffic, feeling tired and our workloads. And we are at the peak of our grief at 10.37am each Monday. "That's when more of us are whining and moaning than at any other time of the week."

The survey was conducted by Uniroyal Tyres and involved asking 4,000 Europeans about the frequency of their gripes. More details are available in the Irish Independent here.

The Economics of Attention

Your attention is a scarce resource. In the Information Economy, this is more critical than ever. Before I elaborate on the economics of attention, I want to motivate its importance based on previous posts about scarcity in resources that are not land, labour, capital or enterprise. We've heard about the knowledge economy, information economics and time-allocation. While knowledge, information and time are important, it may be time to turn our attention to, well... attention - the new scarce resource.

To illustrate how economists think about 'non-traditional scarce resources', I'll begin with a discussion on time use (or time-allocation). This resource is the closest in essence to attention (with knowledge and information being more similar in their nature; also, attentive use of time is needed to acquire knowledge and sift through information). Time-allocation is the first-stage decision in various production functions; on top of this comes the application of attention. As time-use has been discussed quite a bit on this blog, it's a good place to start. Here's a paper about student time use and academic performance; here's one about whether the recession is making students study harder.

More recently there was a link to the presentation at Google by Zimbardo and Boyd on time perspectives. In the MetaPsychology review of Zimbardo and Boyd's book, the point is emphasised that time cannot be replenished - in contrast to other goods, such as gold, diamonds, etc. Therefore, you have to be more careful about how to spend your time. Zimbardo and Boyd ask: "Why do we often spend our money more wisely than our time?"

I agree with Michael Daly that the ability to recognise our time perspectives and to switch between perspectives efficiently is important (see a brief summary of the perspectives here). Aaron Swartz suggests that "time perspective” is a concept which Zimbardo has essentially come up with himself, but which he feels (not without some justification) is rather important.

I'm inclined to agree - after reading about and working with the consideration of future consequences scale (CFC) a lot - "time perspective" seems to offer a more comprehensive theory of how we interact with "time". There of course may be scope to use both the CFC and the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory in a research project - a recent article by Adams and Nettle in the British Journal of Health Psychology does just that.

In addition to time-allocation and time perspectives, 'attention' plays an important role in how human behaviour produces outcomes. The most illustrative example I can think of is the recent debate on student time use and online social networking. The question that we debated was "does Facebook hurt your grades?". The conclusion offered by Aryn Karpinski (at Ohio State University) is that her research does not suggest that Facebook directly causes lower grades, merely that there's some relationship between the two factors. "Maybe [Facebook users] are just prone to distraction. Maybe they are just procrastinators".

An attempt has been made to replicate the results of Karpinski's research. Eszter Hargittai, associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University and a fellow this year at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, says the following: "We found no evidence that Facebook use correlates with lower academic achievement". More details on this are available here.

The main point I want to make is based on the opening comment in this post: that attention is a scarce resource. While students may allocate their time across activities such as study and online social networking, how much attention are they giving to each activity? Are they so zoned into Facebook that that they can't cope with the Twitter Mania, but when it comes to study is the intensity a lot less? Is designated study time interrupted by SMS text messages, tweets and the like? Or is there just less concentration applied to the activity of study?

On his MindBlog, Derek Bownds states that concentration is the issue of our time(s) (sic). He mentions a NYT article by John Tierney on the science of concentration. A clip from this is below:

"You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. You can drive yourself crazy trying to multi-task and answer every e-mail message instantly...Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfactions of... the focused life."

With attention and concentration such critical issues in the production functions for study, research and a whole range of activities that feed into the knowledge economy, I have taken a renewed interest in mindfulness - something which Michael has mentioned on the blog. A number of times. Liam also linked to a lecture by Kabat-Zinn on mindfulness - originally presented to staff at Google.

The framework I am most interested in, however, is what this blog post is essentially about - the economics of attention. Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. It's not new - Herbert Simon was perhaps the first person to articulate the concept of attention economics when he wrote:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

Simon noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information (Simon 1996, p. 143-144). We have such systems now - you can skip the ads on TV if you want! You can also block out email spam.

"Attention economics" today is largely concerned with the problem of getting consumers to engage with advertising (sellers compete for scarce attention). However, it would be worth developing a stream in attention economics that relates to academic production functions, the knowledge economy, health behaviour and well-being. A final thought: we should all be careful with those little drops of dopamine. And bear in mind that business is going to get your attention using style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of the new media (see Richard A Lanham - The Economics of Attention).


Simon, H. A. (1971), "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", written at Baltimore, MD, in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, The Johns Hopkins Press, ISBN 0-8018-1135-X.

The Weather and Work

Marie Connolly (Princeton) has a paper in the Journal of Labor Economics (2008, vol. 26, no. 1) about the weather and intertemporal substitution of labour. A rainy day is associated with lower enjoyment of leisure, more hours at work and higher wages. Connolly tests the model using data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), supplemented with information about daily weather.

The question arises - are individuals not constrained in terms of their working-time decisions? Connolly describes a few recent papers that have looked at jobs held by individuals such as taxi drivers (Camerer et al. 1997; Farber 2004, 2005) and bike messengers (Fehr and Goette 2002), in which workers can effectively choose their daily hours of work. She also mentions that daily work time is calculated in minutes in the ATUS, which allows fine-grained analysis. She finds that, on rainy days, men shift on average 30 minutes from leisure to work.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it, eh?

Early to Bed, Early to Rise... Depends on the TV Schedule in Your Time Zone

The Chicago Journals website provides a useful summary (here) of a recent paper in the Journal of Labour Economics: Hamermesh, Daniel S., Caitlin Knowles Myers, and Mark L. Pocock (2008): “Cues for Timing and Coordination: Latitude, Letterman, and Longitude.”

...Daylight Saving Time has its roots in the Standard Time Act of 1918... Last year, Daylight Saving was extended by four weeks. Although the prime-time television schedule is a “relic of the technology of radio transmission” — it was created when signals could not be broadcast across the country — it remains a powerful cue. Reflecting on his own weekday television watching schedule, Hamermesh recalled, “I lived twenty years in the Eastern Time Zone, I used to stay up until 11:45 p.m. to watch the monologue on the Tonight Show. Living in Texas, I typically turn out the lights at 10:45 p.m., when the monologue is done."

...The authors... use...the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which enabled them to observe how Americans split their time between their three most time-consuming activities: work, sleep, and television watching. After merging ATUS with sunrise and sunset data, the authors found that while natural daylight patterns have some effect on people’s life patterns, the demands of global business—market openings, etc. — and regular television schedules, demarcate the boundaries of most Americans’ lives.

Can't Get No Leisure

Kooreman and Kapteyn (1987) note that time not spent on market
work has traditionally been disaggregated into two distinct categories: time spent on housework and leisure. This is the context which makes the findings in Ramey and Francis ("A Century of Work and Leisure", forthcoming) so interesting. Ramey and Francis develop comprehensive measures of time spent in market work, home production, schooling, and leisure in the U.S. for the last 106 years. They find that "hours of work for prime age individuals are essentially unchanged, but that per capita leisure and average annual lifetime leisure increased by only four or five hours per week during the last 100 years."

Professor Valerie Ramey (University of California, San Diego) investigates long-run trends in American time use in a number of papers and makes all the data that she uses available on her website.