Time Usage by College Students: Knowledge Acquisition, Degree Value, Work, Sleep and Fun

Abstract

Modern professors often lament at least the perception of declining amounts of time that today’s college students allocate to knowledge acquisition relative to students from earlier eras. Employing a recently commissioned, 1,000+ response data set this paper investigates the hours allocated to learning and numerous other activities for students who attended college from the 1960s through those still in college, to investigate time usage over seven distinct time frames. The focus is on how time allocations have differed and potential justifications for those differences. The results reflect how time allocations have changed over the generations.