Many people are too busy with YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and Smartphones and dumbphones… Many people are too busy with YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and Smartphones and dumbphones and Tamagotchis to read a Sunday paper like they did back in the good ol’ days, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw a study out of the University of California in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The study says that college students are a bunch of slackers: The average time per week an undergraduate spends studying has fallen from 24 hours a week in 1961 to 14 hours today. The decline in study times has been across disciplines, including engineering and hard sciences.

You damn kids, you just don’t know how to work hard.

But before people make wisecracks about how we’re earning Bachelor of Sloth degrees here at college, the study needs to be looked at carefully. Society might not want to write us all off as slugs just yet.

Technology allows us to work in a much more efficient manner than our foreparents. You don’t need to spend time looking at trigonometry tables or fiddling with your slide rule. You don’t write your papers on a typewriter, and you don’t have to spend time wandering the stacks at the library or using a paper card catalog. The study authors say technology can’t explain the decline in study times, since the largest declines in study times were between 1961 and 1981, before technology really took off. But this blanket conclusion is a bit of a stretch. It could be that today we work just as hard as students did in the 1980s but have better tools to do so. It is unreasonable, then, to conclude that study effort is in continuous decline. It is possible that there was an initial precipitous drop in study effort between 1961 and 1981 and that since then effort has remained flat, with technology accounting for the smaller decrease in study time since 1981.

The paper itself is reasonably convincing, and it appears that the authors were careful about noting confounding factors. They do fumble, however, in some of their conclusions, like saying that people who study harder make more money later on, implying a causal relation between these variables. This, of course, disregards the huge probability that those more likely to be go-getters in the classroom are also more likely to be go-getters in the workplace. I would also have liked to see some more of the nuts and bolts of the study itself, handy things like what margin of error was being used, how many students were surveyed and where all the snazzy charts that are thrown at us come from.

Despite these shortcomings, the study is probably not completely bogus. But a decrease in average study times doesn’t mean we’re all just punks who know more about beer than Bramante or more about vodka than Voltaire, or that we can’t use the word “perquisite” in a sentence correctly.

Perhaps the decline in s tudy time is an artifact of the very real change in who went to college in 1961 and who goes to college now. In 1961, one could get reasonably far on a high-school diploma. College education was the perquisite of those who were especially talented, driven or wealthy. Only 10 percent of the population had a college degree in 1960, and 42 percent had completed eighth grade at most. Those who wanted to do just enough work to get by … probably didn’t go to college.

Nowadays, a high school diploma doesn’t get you much of anywhere. Doing enough work to get by now means going to college, earning straight Cs and finding a job. Adding students who want to do the minimum amount of work to get by would move the average study time downward.

Of course, lost in this paper is the question of whether or not any of this is actually important. Let us grant kids today are spending less time with their faces in books than they used to. So what? Is the outcome of all this studying or lack thereof the same or worse than before? We can’t tell – oops – because unlike in Europe, our colleges don’t have undergraduate exit exams, and the GREs and other tests for postgraduate study are by nature skewed by the sorts of students taking them. GPAs might not be the best guide here because of the possibility of grade inflation.

Does the decrease in study times lead to a decrease in skills acquisition? This is ultimately the more important research question, and it is premature for us to bemoan American educational decline based on this one study that measures inputs, not outputs. The study demands some sort of follow-up, both here and overseas, and it seems a tad unfair to draw broad conclusions like “American students are lazy ignoramuses,” tempting as that might be.

One thing is clear, though. At least somebody thinks you should put down this paper and go hit the books.

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