Autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness (Keats), is also when too many young Americans head to college, where too many of them will study too little under the undemanding supervision of faculty who teach too little. Colleges illustrate the seepage of rigor from American life.

Since 1990, college enrollment has increased by 6 million students (29 percent). Reasons for this include government tuition subsidies and “college for everyone” rhetoric. And “degree inflation”: irrational requirements for job applicants.

A former fellow of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, Preston Cooper, reported in 2023 that applicants for a $35,600-per-year job driving an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile (a 27-foot-long motorized hot dog) had to have a bachelor’s degree. 

In 2000, only 16 percent of prime-age workers earning $35,000 (in today’s dollars) had such degrees; by 2022, 24 percent did. In 1990, 9 percent of secretaries and administrative professionals had bachelor’s degrees; today, 33 percent do, and a higher proportion of job listings require applicants to have one. 

This “paper ceiling” is especially egregious in state and local governments, where 63 percent of those earning between $40,000 and $60,000 have bachelor’s degrees or higher. Only 28 percent of such earners in the private sector do.

A recent report from the Burning Glass Institute and the Strada Education Foundation says 52 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed: in jobs not using their college learning. Meanwhile there are 750,000 industrial jobs unfilled.

Frederick M. Hess and Greg Fournier of the American Enterprise Institute document that “students spend far less time studying” than formerly. In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college studied 24 hours a week; today the figure is 14 hours. 

A 2016 analysis based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that “the average full-time college student spent only 2.76 hours a day on all education-related activities” (classes, out-of-class studying), a total of 19.3 hours per week.

The 2011 book “Academically Adrift” reported that first-year students spend 6.3 hours a week doing assigned reading, part of a total of 14.3 hours preparing for classes, a decline of about 50 percent from a few decades earlier. 

Today, Messrs. Hess and Fournier say, faculty tend to think the figure is just 4.9 hours preparing for classes. This is though only 40 percent of students hold jobs, down from 79 percent in the mid-1990s.

Many students consider writing a 750-word essay “long.” Although 64 percent of students say they devote “a lot” of effort to schoolwork, only 6 percent report spending more than 20 hours per week studying and doing homework. 

In 2024, 74 percent of first-year students reported no reading assignment longer than 11 pages and no writing assignment longer than five pages. And 51 percent of seniors said they had written nothing longer than 11 pages in their final year.

But as effort declines, grades rise. Messrs. Hess and Fournier say, “At institutions like Harvard and Yale, the mean GPA is 3.7 or higher, and 80 percent of grades are at least an A-minus.”

Economist Arnold Kling says that despite the limited “natural demand” for college education (“students who are excited by academic subjects”), graduate schools continue to churn out more Ph.D.s (almost 60,000 in 2022) than the growth of undergraduate enrollment justifies. 

So, artificial student demand must be stimulated. Mr. Kling says “colleges adapt by offering dumbed-down courses and grade inflation.”

And by teachers teaching less. Mr. Hess and a research associate at AEI, Richard Keck, say light teaching loads have become badges of professional status — and require schools to rely on teaching by graduate students or part-time adjunct instructors. 

Tenured or tenure-track professors teach less and less. Most are on nine-month contracts requiring them to teach 13 weeks in each semester, or 26 weeks of the approximately 40 covered by the contracts — often about 15 hours a week each semester.

Instead of teaching, teachers chase grants or participate in “publication inflation,” filling the more than 24,000 “scholarly journals.” This dilutes the quality of what is published — 215,000 articles between 2015 and 2019, most of them ignored.

The College Board, administrators of the SAT, says college applicants taking the test will no longer need to demonstrate comprehension of 500- to 750-word reading passages. Instead, the passages will be of 25 to 150 words, suited to the attention spans of young minds formed by browsing social media. 

The board says the ability to comprehend passages of “extended length” (the length of this column, not “Middlemarch”) is not “an essential prerequisite for college.” What worse can be said about higher education today?

The Washington Post