Most 3 credit hour classes are really 2.5 hours. And almost no one spends 36 hours hours outside of class on a 12 credit schedule unless they messed up and signed up for 4 difficult classes in the same semester. You definitely aren’t spending that much time outside of class all semester long.

You also have to consider that a semester is 16 weeks. The first week or 2 of each semester is very light.

So we’re talking 30/52 weeks a year for most people.

For most people, you’ll never have that much free time again in your life.

College feels like a lot of work because you aren’t good at time management yet. And you remember the last few weeks of each semester where you are actually extremely busy.

> The first week or 2 of each semester is very light.

Please tell that to the undergrad STEM professors, please. Almost all of mine had an assignment first class that was due by the third class.

Freshman engineering is generally Calc I, Physics I, Chem I, and English Composition/Writing and often some random engineering/computer thing. I assure you that schedule sucks even harder that it looks like it sucks, and it gets more time consuming as the years progress.

While there were lots of Party Hardy(tm) types in the College of Arts, the ones I knew who were taking their degrees seriously were working every bit as hard as the STEM folks. Possibly, they were working harder as they needed a lot more extracurricular work and achievement since what they were doing didn't have nice, clean objective measures like STEM does. They spent a lot of time being unpaid labor at functions and networking like crazy.

By contrast, no matter how many hours they worked me at my summer internship, it simply never compared to the grind at school.

I have a CS degree. My wife has an engineering degree and then went to medschool. Both of us had 4.0s.

We both agree that we had far more time in undergrad than at anytime since.

We frequently had small assignments the first week, but they were universally not worth much because many people aren’t even in the class yet since drop/add ran through the whole first week. They were also not very much work.

The point is there is no way you were spending 12-16 hours per class the first week.

I never spent that much time in Physics I, Calculus I or any English Class. The only classes I spent that much time on or more were higher level project based CS classes.

And even then I wasn’t spending that much time on them till closer to midway through the semester.

Then you get nearly the whole month of December off—Spring Break, Thanksgiving, and Summer.

No one expects anything from you at a summer internship. Companies don’t expect anything from experienced employees in the first couple months. Harder than a summer internship doesn’t say much.

On top of that you’ll never have fewer responsibilities than when you were at school.

It just seems like you had no free time because it’s the time in your life when you haven’t learned time management yet, and you remember the last few weeks leading up to final exams and semester project due dates.

> Both of us had 4.0s.

You are so far removed from the ability of the average student that your personal observations about college simply don't generalize.

> I never spent that much time in Physics I, Calculus I or any English Class.

Do you understand just how far out of the norm that is?

Not everybody is coming from elite high schools and can blow through a college 101 class. The vast majority of engineers fight through all three of those--especially an English composition class. I had friends who did poorly in Calc I, dropped it but stayed in the class just so they plowed through it next semester. These aren't people "fooling around" with bad "time management". They were bog standard state school students who needed to get through, get out, and start making money. They were first college generation who didn't have rich parents backing them. They were motivated and got out in 4 years--something that most college students regard as difficult.

> No one expects anything from you at a summer internship.

Seriously? As a summer intern I always had deliverables. When I became a manager instead, we always had deliverables for co-ops and interns.

I didn’t go to an elite high school or college (my wife did though) my high school was awful. My parents got divorced my junior year and we were on food stamps after that. I went to a state school. And not even a flagship state school.

I dropped out the first time—2 years into a history degree—because I was working full time.

Eventually I moved home, and started over with CS. Despite CS being a lot harder, I had plenty of free time to work on a startup, build side projects, and play video games.

The reason was because a few years of experience made me much better at time management and prioritization.

I’m not saying you or anyone else was bad at time management as an insult. It’s just that college the time in your adult life when you have the absolute least experience at time management, so most people are very bad at it.

But also when you average it over the whole semester, none of my friends, even the ones who were bad at their classes spent 3 hours per credit hour outside of class. The ones who were bad at it tended to just skate by with Cs.

> As a summer intern I always had deliverables.

No one cares about those deliverables though. They aren’t trusting summer interns to do anything that really needs to get done.

Imo those numbers are pretty inflated unless you’re taking a full load of the hardest classes offered. Usually you pair some GE requirements or electives with heavier material. I really don’t want do some sort of humble brag here, so I’ll just say that if I followed your math it would come out to like 90+ hours. I promise, I was not that diligent.