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Is college worth it? In the midst of an ongoing recovery that has not sparked large- scale job growth, some observers and analysts of higher education have suggested that it may not pay an individual to pursue a college education.
First, there is some question about the learning that is achieved in college-level study. Recently, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa looked at undergraduate learning gains as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment; they were, at best, quite modest (Arum and Roksa, 2011—see also the article about their key findings in the March/April 2011 issue of Change).
Meanwhile a recent paper by economist Philip Babcock also revealed that there's been a steep decline in the amount of time that full-time students spend on class and study combined—from 40 hours a week in 1961 to 27 hours a week in 2003 (Babcock and Marks, 2010). Since these students have, typically, a twelve- to fifteen-hour course load, this indicates that the amount of time spent on homework has declined by between 10 and 12 hours a week within a fairly short period of time.
William R. Doyle is an assistant professor of higher education at Vanderbilt University. He previously served as a senior policy analyst at the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, where he was project director for the center's first publication of Measuring Up, the state-by-state report card on higher education. He thanks Jungmin Lee for her research assistance with this article.
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