Campus Idleness Has Bred Extremism

By Frederick M. Hess

Thursday, December 21, 2023

 

‘Don’t these people have something better to do?” It’s a question I’ve been asked repeatedly in recent years as students and faculty at prestigious colleges have beclowned themselves.

 

In the wake of Hamas’s barbaric assault on Israel, the moral turpitude on campus has gotten the lion’s share of attention. But there’s something that gets far less attention than it deserves: How do these people have the energy to carry out this insanity? Where do students at Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, MIT, and Yale find the time to tear down posters of kidnapping victims, bully fellow students, cheer calls for genocide, conduct sit-ins, and make all those pro-Hamas posterboard signs? Don’t they have classes to attend and work to do?

 

The surprise is that these students don’t have all that much work to do. Many are bored, and all that time on their hands may give them an appetite for mischief. Many are lonely. The surgeon general recently warned about an American “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” particularly among those ages 15 to 24. In that age group, time spent in person with friends has plunged by 70 percent since 2003, down to an average of 40 minutes a day in 2020. College-age youth are spending five or six hours a day online, surfing videos, gaming, and scrolling social media. And few have jobs. In the 1980s, 40 percent of America’s college students worked full-time (35 hours or more); by 2020, that figure had fallen to one in ten. There’s also been a substantial decline in students working part-time. In 1995–96, 42 percent of undergrads held part-time jobs (34 hours or less). By 2018, that number was down to 30 percent.

 

The restlessness is less pervasive at regional institutions and community colleges, where students are far more likely to attend part-time, live at home, be older, and have kids or jobs. Among community-college students, nearly a third work more than 30 hours a week and 15 percent have two or more jobs. Students are far less likely to hang out in dorms or on a manicured quad and are more focused on transportation, work schedules, and child care. At these institutions, the vibe is more about getting down to business than gearing up for trouble: Busy students just don’t have as much leisure for performative rebellion. Tellingly, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators’ report on “Advancing Racial Justice on Campus” quoted an official at one “commuter school” who fretted that, absent “formal outlets set up for consultation, support, or awareness of what advocacy can be,” busy students will “just go home at the end of the day.”

 

The nation’s 200 or 300 elite colleges and universities constitute only a small slice of American higher education, but they have an outsized impact on the nation’s culture — and serve as the pipeline to America’s executive suites, law firms, and elected offices. At Harvard and similar schools, some 98 percent of undergraduates live on campus, basting in a progressive hothouse where there’s a patina of intense busyness but not much actual work. This is a recipe for alienated, aimless students to fuel the toxicity that has seeped out from colleges and into American institutions.

 

At the nation’s most influential colleges, students are increasingly exempted from meaningful expectations of rigor — a process that has been accelerated by concerns about student social and emotional health.

 

In The Real World of College, Harvard scholars Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner tell tales of worried students. One says, “I have a 4.0 GPA and I got a B-minus on my English paper…. Things like that keep me up.” Another feels the pressure of “tests, readings, and stuff,” explaining, “If you’re studying very late at night, it’s even harder to fall asleep.” The authors write that, though “the extreme skeptic might counter that these conditions always existed,” it’s “irrefutable” that today’s students are struggling with mental-health issues. There has been a real change in how students at elite colleges respond to stress.

 

Permitted to wallow in victimhood, students unsurprisingly will. The editorial board of the Harvard Crimson has fretted that students are trapped in “a vicious cycle of sleep-deprived overachievement” and subjected to the “absurd expectation of constant productivity.” Another editorial advised students to avoid getting sucked in by “Harvard’s sometimes toxic academic culture” and to set aside time for “Netflix breaks.”

 

But what if the problem isn’t undue strain? What if it’s actually excessive comfort?

 

It’s tough to fathom what kind of “absurd expectations” Harvard’s student journalists are complaining about. In recent decades, grade inflation has exploded at selective colleges (Harvard’s average GPA climbed from 3.0 in 1967 to 3.8 in 2022). And grade inflation is particularly evident in the programs most populated by student rabble-rousers — which tend to be the “studies” rather than STEM. At Yale, for instance, last year more than 80 percent of students in certain programs — women’s studies; gender and sexuality studies; education; ethnicity, race, and migration studies; and African-American studies — received semester grades of A. (In economics, engineering, and math, the figure was a less otherworldly 50 or 55 percent.) Moreover, students at elite colleges know that, once they’re admitted, earning a diploma is practically assured, since these institutions tout their 96 percent completion rates.

 

And it’s not as if the typical college student is working especially hard. Last winter, in a survey of four-year-college students, 64 percent said they put “a lot of effort” into school. Yet even among these self-described hard workers, less than a third said they devote even two hours a day to studying. In 2010, economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks calculated that in 1961 the average full-time student at a four-year college studied about 24 hours per week; by 2003, that was down to 14 hours. We’ve normalized a college culture in which students believe that 20 or 25 hours of class and study time combined constitutes a full week and, as sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa observed in their 2010 book Academically Adrift, few courses “require substantial reading or writing.”

 

In a finding that should surprise no one, research suggests that hard work is good for students’ mental health. In the 2017 book iGen, Jean Twenge notes that “students who spend more time on homework are actually less likely to be depressed.” A 2018 paper by Georgetown’s Anthony Carnevale and Nicole Smith noted that, for low-income students, having a job can boost a student’s work ethic and help develop valuable soft skills. It all brings to mind Jonathan Haidt’s concern that we’re manufacturing fragility by denying youth the opportunity to develop into autonomous adults.

 

But elite college students have come to see academic work as an intrusion on the things that really matter to them. In the Daily Princetonian, a student recently lamented that the “mindless pursuit of academic rigor,” professors “known for assigning 200 or more pages of reading each week,” and “extremely time-intensive problem sets” mean that Princeton students “are often described by campus activists to be far less engaged with political protests than students at peer institutions,” as in the case of “Princeton’s lackluster Divest protests” (calling for divestment from fossil-fuel producers). The argument is telling. Academic rigor is apparently a problem when it becomes an excuse not to join a pro-Hamas rally.

 

Students who are lonely and idle need something to fill their days. If they lack a sense of purpose, they’ll seek one out. Increasingly, digital life has crowded out fraternities and sororities, activities like club sports and TV watch parties, and even dating and keg parties. As a result, for students seeking real-world companionship and belonging, protest has increasingly become the only game in town.

 

Readers of a certain age may remember campus “shantytowns,” the ramshackle constructions of 1980s-era anti-apartheid protests demanding divestment from South Africa. A college friend of mine, a bright guy who wasn’t political, was bored with school and liked the people at the shantytown, where there was plenty of weed and hacky sack. At the time, I didn’t quite get how this guy wound up as a protester. One night he asked me, “So, what is ‘divestment,’ anyway?” And then it struck me: The particulars of the cause weren’t the point. The allure was the camaraderie and having a cause.

 

When it comes to academe, simple diagnoses are always regarded as suspect. But the truth is that students should work harder. Doing so would speed up completion and reduce the cost of college, help combat anomie, better prepare students for the vicissitudes of college and life, and leave less time for performative jackassery.

 

What would this take? Here are five places to start.

 

Reset the culture of college. Today, student evaluations and rating sites such as Rate My Professors wind up rewarding faculty for granting easy A’s and assigning less work. As George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan observed in The Case against Education, “students struggle to win admission to elite schools. Once they arrive, however, they hunt for professors with low expectations.” For faculty, a commitment to rigor means more assignments, more time spent grading, more student complaints, and less time for their own agenda. This is particularly true in elite institutions, where teaching is mostly a distraction for faculty focused on research, publication, and grant-gathering. Colleges need a cultural reset that addresses expectations, course evaluations, and incentive structures.

 

Set meaningful expectations for student work. Full-time students should be working a 40-hour academic week, between classes and studying. (The University of Cambridge, to take a U.K. example, tells students they should devote 42 to 46 hours a week to “academic studies” and expect additional academic work during vacations.) Expectations for course-taking and class workloads should be raised accordingly. At publicly subsidized institutions, in particular, taxpayers have a right to expect that students study, learn, and master skills — not cosplay Jacobinesque games.

 

Regularly assess workloads and grading. To breathe life into those heightened expectations, legislatures and boards of trustees should demand better data. Annually, they should receive surveys on student workloads, audits of course assignments, and examinations of grades and grading practices. Given the collective-action problem by which faculty have clear incentives to go easy on students and lower standards, it’s vital that boards and legislatures adopt guardrails and provide oversight.

 

Embrace an accelerated, three-year bachelor’s degree. Colleges should pare down the number of credits required for graduation and push students to take an additional class each semester. Not only would this engage students in more productive pursuits, it would also shorten the time needed to complete a degree. At elite colleges, in particular, this would yield massive cost savings. Of course, students at country-club colleges are loath to rush through a pleasant four-year staycation or to leave their friends behind, and faculty don’t want to have to adjust their schedules, courses, or assignments. College officials are resistant because they worry that the programs offered will seem less impressive if it’s possible to finish them faster. What’s needed is a new set of norms. Creating one will require systemic efforts to encourage and reward campuses and students for speeding things up.

 

End credentialism. Students view admission to elite universities as the finish line instead of the starting gate. Once admitted, they expect to coast through (so long as they avoid the science building) and pocket their golden ticket to high-paying careers. This is abetted by graduate schools and employers that treat fancy diplomas as a proxy for merit, talent, and work ethic. Doing so makes life easier for corporate employment attorneys and HR staff by eliminating the need for hiring tests. As I wrote for National Review in 2022, “an inconsistent… legal double standard allows employers to routinely use college degrees as a hiring test, regardless of relevance to the skills required,” even as courts are suspicious of “other hiring tests (such as skills-based assessments)”; this leaves employers “fearful of exposure to lawsuits charging that the tests are unfair or discriminatory.” If courts started subjecting college-degree credentials to the same kind of scrutiny applied to other hiring tests, and if employers put more emphasis on experience and skills and less on alma maters, that unhealthy status quo could quickly change.

 

The performative bullying and woke madness we see on campus today are luxury products. When concentrated numbers of youths aren’t productively occupied, this is the toxic result. By all means, policy-makers and advocates should push back on woke excesses directly. But the root problems are an epidemic of boredom, a lack of meaning, and an expectation of being coddled. Idle hands are still the devil’s workshop.