Imagine this: You’re 18 years old, and you’ve decided to spend the next four years forgoing the job market in favor of studying European history. You drive hours away from your family home and move everything you own into a small dorm room with just a bed and a desk.

You would expect that such a person adopting this semi-monastic existence aside a library and classroom buildings, and spending tens of thousands of dollars for this purpose, would throw their every being into memorizing French monarchs, debating the breakup of the Carolingian Empire, and penning lengthy essays on the rise of Napoleon. They would develop a rich understanding of European intellectual history and gain the ability to speak off the cuff on the intricacies of the development of modernity. They would be able to cite several dozen books they had read on French and British history and create a portfolio of essays spanning several hundred pages. Just think of what a motivated young adult could accomplish when wholly focused on intellectual pursuits without moneymaking as a distraction.

One would think that this four-year-long intellectual foray would demand intensive study. Sixty hours of study a week would seem appropriate for the most motivated of students. Fifty hours a week would seem about right for those who are challenging themselves and pushing their intellectual boundaries. That is about 10 hours per week longer than the average full-time worker in the U.S., who works 40.5 hours per week. Given that residential college students typically don’t have children, housework, responsibilities, or a long commute, this seems perfectly doable and, again, appropriate given the fact that a job has been forgone in favor of spending tens of thousands to learn. For students who recognize that they may not be the most gifted, 40 hours of studying per week seems like the absolute bare minimum of effort that should be put into time at a university. After all, college is only in session for roughly 32 weeks out of the year, already rendering it akin to a part-time job.

And yet the average college student in the United States spends 19.3 hours per week total on studying and sitting in a classroom.

That’s according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey. Other studies have reached similarly dismal conclusions. In a 2010 study for the American Enterprise Institute, Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks determined that college students spend 20–25 hours per week in class and studying, including 14 hours per week studying.

This means that an average college student spends 20 hours per week on education for 32 weeks out of the year. That’s the equivalent amount of effort to working a full-time job for less than four months.

At that rate, it would take 14.7 months of studying for 40 hours per week to accomplish the equivalent of what the average college student does in four years.

Worse, it doesn’t seem like anything worthwhile is coming out of that year’s equivalent of studying. A professor at New York University found in 2011 that there was no measurable improvement in students’ complex reasoning, critical thinking, and written communication skills after their four years in college.

The fault for this situation rests on students, professors, and university leaders alike. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of students choosing classes with professors who demand the least effort, professors bowing down to those demands to win students’ favor, and university officials only caring that students pay up and professors accomplish research.

This isn’t just scandalous. This is outright illegal.

As explained by the Manhattan Institute earlier this year, colleges that accept federal funds are supposed to abide by the feds’ definition of a credit hour. Under this definition, a credit hour should “reasonably approximate[] not less than one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week.” This means each credit hour requires a federal minimum of three hours of work per week. Your average 3-credit course, therefore, should approximate a minimum of nine hours of work per week just to abide by the requirements of the law.

Most college students take about 15 credit hours, with 12 hours being the federal minimum requirement to qualify as a full-time student. Fifteen credit hours equate to a legal minimum of 45 hours of work per week. That blows the 20-hour reality of the water. In other words, the taxpayers are being robbed en masse, and college students are being given an illegally substandard education.

I attended the University of Notre Dame, where most classes tended to be legitimately vigorous. Other classes, however, particularly in a certain department, were a joke. One course (during COVID) required me to submit two 1,000-word essays during the entire course of the semester and required zero readings. That took me maybe 10 hours. The professor also stopped holding classes after COVID hit. That means, therefore, that the entire 3-credit course should have legally been shortened to a single week.

The least colleges should do is police the requirement that students spend six hours per week studying independently for a 3-credit course. If they’re not doing that, colleges are not in good faith trying to fulfill the federal requirement for a course credit.

Attendance in class, moreover, should be mandatory rather than, as it generally is, optional. I regularly drive in downtown Atlanta, where Georgia State University is located. Suspiciously, there seem to be way more cars turning into the university parking garages the first week of the semester than at any time thereafter. A study this year found that the average attendance rate in the U.S. college classroom is 71.5 percent.

Predictably, the result of four years that consist more of recreation than education is failure. Recent college graduates are regularly found by their employers to be ill-equipped to succeed in the workforce. A 2023 study by the American Association of Colleges and Universities found that only 44 percent of employers strongly agreed that college graduates were prepared to succeed in entry-level positions. Only 49 percent of employers agreed that college graduates were “very prepared” when it came to critical thinking. Only 54 percent of employers said the same when it came to written communication.

Particularly during this time of the rise of artificial intelligence, universities should be doubling down on their mission to cultivate human minds. If they continue their total abandonment of their mission to educate, they will spin themselves into further irrelevancy as potential students discover that independent education by means of the internet offers better learning opportunities than sitting in classrooms with professors who require nothing of them.

Universities have a duty to ensure that their students are engaged in intensive academic pursuits. Students should not be getting A’s — or B’s — by coasting on 14 hours of total studying per week. Federal student loans cost taxpayers $197 billion annually as of 2021. If colleges want to keep receiving that money, they should be fulfilling their most basic obligations.

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