The recent lamentable travails afflicting American academia — falling public support, suppression of free expression, declining integrity of research as evidenced by seemingly widespread plagiarism — mask a longer-term but I think serious problem: American colleges and universities are disseminating less knowledge than they did a generation or two ago, largely a consequence of falling academic standards.

Most advocates of this viewpoint stress things like the growth of new academic “disciplines” that are distinctly non-disciplined and devoid of serious important context — new ideologically motivated majors like “gender studies” or, a generation earlier, black studies. Some talk about the decline in enrollments in time-honored explorations in such subjects as English literature, philosophy, or American history. In this century, we have a smaller proportion of students majoring in intellectually demanding fields, while enrollments have been robust in majors that seemingly are superficially vocationally relevant but intellectually somewhat vacuous, like marketing or communication studies.

But I have been concerned about the decline in learning within disciplines, partly because we have reduced course requirements in intellectually demanding subjects. At my school, for example, students in our College of Business used to be required to take courses in intermediate economy theory, considered relatively demanding and rigorous material. No longer. But even within courses, demands on students have moderated. When I first taught my course in American economic history, I required students to read parts or all of six books. When I stopped teaching it recently, I required one textbook and a small number of short supplement readings. Fairly typical.

But I always thought: “This does not apply in the tougher STEM disciplines. There the standards are as high as ever.” But then a friend of mine, a former engineering dean and the current president of the Ohio Society of Professional Engineers, Dennis Irwin, sent me an article he wrote for the OhioEngineer magazine. He points out that “a 136-140 semester hour electrical engineering degree was common three decades ago. Now that degree is typically 126 hours or so.” Important subject matter is no longer required. Also, useful cross disciplinary courses taken by students late in the last century generally are not taken any more: “[F]or example, no more do electrical engineers take statics, strengths, thermodynamics, and engineering materials.” Students take more general education courses, many of dubious rigor.

Irwin attributes the change in large part to financial considerations and decisions by university administrators to try to cut costs by substituting cheaper general education courses for more costly engineering ones. That is no doubt true. The faculty role even on fundamental curricular issues seems to be becoming diluted. 

As I see it, the college community more generally is not working as hard as it was two generations ago, during the Golden Age of Higher Education, defined as the 1950s and 1960s (of course, when I was in college and started teaching). Empirical evidence backs it up. Some government survey data suggest the average college undergraduate in the middle of the last century spent 40 weeks on academics; more recent 21st-century data suggest the number now is more like 28 hours a week — 30 percent less. But the average undergraduate grade in the mid-1950s was about a C+, while today it is around a B or B+, and in the Ivy League probably minimally B+ or even A-. Doing less for more (higher grades). 

Meanwhile, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a brouhaha has erupted at James Madison University (JMU) where the new head of the economics department, Charlene Kalenkoski, gave dramatically lower than normal annual evaluations to a half dozen of her faculty, allegedly because the professors gave too many low grades! (Full disclosure: Kalenkoski is a former colleague of mine, and we even once coauthored a paper together). We can’t have the lives of students ruined or their self-esteem shattered because they received a “D” grade!  The apparent JMU message: We are going to punish faculty who do not promote the grade inflation that has, in my opinion at least, contributed to markedly less work — and learning — by contemporary college students. Keep the kids reasonably happy, and don’t demand too much of them.

All of this is consistent with broader trends in American society. Despite low unemployment, the proportion of adult Americans working today is materially lower than it was than when this century began. Arguably, some of it reflects a prosperous society with generally rising incomes deciding it wants to take some of the fruits of economic progress in the form of more leisure. But is it wise to let what is supposed to be the best and brightest of the next generation — our future leaders — spend only 28 hours a week for maybe 32 weeks a year (896 hours annually) preparing for their future, especially when many have parents working up to twice as much?

Richard Vedder is Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University, Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, and author of a forthcoming book, Let Colleges Fail: Creative Destruction in Higher Education.