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<p>Does it? I think even a casual examination of a typical school would discover a great number of students who, frankly, aren’t really doing anything. </p>
<p>But don’t take my word for it. Consider the following snippets:</p>
<p>*About 20% of college students say they frequently come to class without completing readings or assignments, a national survey shows. And many of those students say they mostly still get A’s…</p>
<p>Students report spending about 31/2 hours a week preparing for each class. That’s about half what instructors expect from a typical student…Of those who frequently didn’t do homework, 29% of freshmen and 36% of seniors got mostly A’s…" *</p>
<p>[College</a> students ‘get away with’ poor preparation - USATODAY.com](<a href=“http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-11-10-nsse_students_N.htm]College”>http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-11-10-nsse_students_N.htm)</p>
<p>*Once on campus, the students aren’t studying.</p>
<p>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…In survey after survey since 2000, college and high school students are alarmingly candid that they are simply not studying very much at all…In one CIRP survey subset last year, analyzing predominantly private institutions considered to be mid-level or high-achieving colleges, some 32 percent of college freshmen somehow managed to study less than six hours a week — not even an hour a day. Seniors studied only slightly more, with nearly 28 percent studying less than six hours a week. And other surveys of today’s students report similarly alarming results. The National Survey of Student Engagement found in 2009 that 62 percent of college students studied 15 hours a week or less — even as they took home primarily As and Bs on their report cards.*</p>
<p>[What</a> happened to studying? - Boston.com](<a href=“http://articles.boston.com/2010-07-04/bostonglobe/29288580_1_college-students-students-and-professors-college-admissions-officials]What”>http://articles.boston.com/2010-07-04/bostonglobe/29288580_1_college-students-students-and-professors-college-admissions-officials)</p>
<p>At the same time, other than community colleges, practically every college runs an admissions process of some sort where some applicants are rejected. So how would it feel to be the parent of a hard-working student who is rejected from such a school, only to watch that same school then admit plenty of students who are more interested in partying and socializing than in studying?</p>