> most students are overcommitted; college is expensive, so they need good grades for a good return on their investment; and AI is everywhere, including the post-college workforce.
Yeah. Overcommitted to partying and skipping class.
Has this author ever been to an average American university?
Let's rephrase it to "most of even the best students" then.
I went to about the cheapest US school that had a decent math program. It costs $17,500/yr between tuition, rent, books, and rice and beans.
That's a lot of money. It's over $10/hr in pre-tax income, even if you work full-time all year, which isn't an easy bar to clear in the sort of towns with cheaper universities. Wages don't scale well enough with more expensive tuition for there to be substantially better options.
Classes are another 22+ hours each week (you could complete school in 3-4 yrs instead, but that makes it even harder to afford and doesn't really reduce the workload enough to make a difference, however I'll also factor in a 15-hour workload later).
The rule of thumb is that you should study 3 hours for every hour of class. I found that approximately correct. Some classes took a lot less. Some took a little more. Combined with the self study you need in adjacent topics, 3hrs is a fair bit low.
During the school year then, you have something that looks like a 128hr/week schedule, or 100hr if you're finishing in 4yrs, and still 60hr/week even if you're finishing in 4yrs and racking up $70k in debt.
Don't get me wrong; I had free time (I worked more during the summer, less during the school year, allowing loans to cover the slack, which bought extra time here and there), but it wasn't exactly a party either. When I skipped class it was because I had to work, had to study for some other more pressing class, or found it more efficient to study the book than to try to understand that particular lecturer.
This matched my experience 30 years ago. Work 20 hours a week, but tuition and living expenses were a lot cheaper back then ($215-$330/month for a room! $900/quarter tuition). The 3 hour for every 1 hour of class is especially true for computer science, and skipping class in favor of self study worked well if the lecturer was really bad. Lectures were pretty much bonus reinforcement if useful at all, a lot of what you learned relied on self study.
A lot of students didn't do what I did, and they washed out pretty quickly (I had a lot of classmates from HS that didn't last the first quarter). My first quarter was pretty harsh (only got one 4.0, and a 2.7 in a chemistry class I had no reason being in), but I wised up quickly. It was hard going from High school where I could do all my homework in the time between classes, to college where I had to do real actual studying.
My experience was only 7 years ago. I don't think it's a generational difference so much as the fact that a university is a big place, enough so that even if you engage actively with 100+ people you won't see the whole picture.
It has gotten a lot more expensive and competitive. I’m almost embarrassed to mention how crazy cheap my school was in 1995 compared to 2025. Also, I doubt I would have gotten in with my high school achievements even though I graduated in a fairly decent cum laude position. Life for kids these days is a lot tougher.
The numbers I quoted were current prices for the school/city I attended (UND, if anyone wants to cross check). When I attended prices were lower, but so were wages and a number of other things, roughly proportionally AFAICT.
I could maybe see your point about admittance (I had something like a D average, maybe C- or C+ or something, in high school), but I think my financial estimates were about correct. Is something majorly incorrect?
Even if so, there are a dozen cheaper states in the country with halfway decent programs (if any future internet denizen is reading this, Fayetteville Arkansas is actually great for math right now, both in quality and in cost/jobs). I doubt my observations are too far off-base for a typical student trying to go to school economically.
> The rule of thumb is that you should study 3 hours for every hour of class. I found that approximately correct. Some classes took a lot less. Some took a little more.
lol stop the cap.
Its more like 0.5 hours of grand total work for every hour of scheduled class, since most kids are skipping 50% of the classes and using "chat" (a really fetch name for a new digital drug btw) to make up the rest.
What people are telling you in the comments is that your perspective is not universal. I've personally only ever skipped one class in my time in undergrad (as an American at an American university), and not for a party. I'm not a special case or anything, those classes are very expensive!
Isn't it basically a remedial class, or rather a class for people who did the minimum of HS math? I would expect it to be filled with more partiers than studiers, and also that plenty of the people in it would already know a lot of the material that's covered (so why not ditch?)
In 2012 I took my first course in undergrad. The teacher asked everyone to introduce themselves and say something they liked to do. Every single student, except myself, said they like to party. That was shocking to me. Most students weren’t skipping classes though.
Their writing skills were also abysmal. Frankly if they were that bad by college they didn’t seem likely to improve in my opinion.
I've been taking one class at a time for the last six years at what I think is an average American university. The twenty somethings that your comment is aimed at have been my lab partners and such. You're describing maybe 10% of them. As a group they're all over the map.
As learning goes, I'd say anybody taking more than two classes at a time is overcommitted. They might manage to get A's but I speak with these students about the courses we took together a year or two after the fact and it's clear to me that taking four or five classes at once is an awful strategy for retention.
Yeah. Overcommitted to partying and skipping class.
Has this author ever been to an average American university?