Monthly Archives: October 2026

full-time college students spend 90 minutes per day on academics

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According to the American Time Use Survey, the median full-time college student in the USA spends 90 minutes per day on “non-work education activities, such as taking classes, conducting research and homework, administrative tasks, and extracurricular activities except sports.”

The graph with this post shows that more than 45% of full-time college students report spending less than one hour per day on academic work (including extracurriculars). But there is a long tail, with a few reporting 11 hours or more. The mean is almost 3 hours/day, pulled up by the high achievers.

It’s possible that I am naive, but I believe that students at Tufts, where I teach, spend enough hours on schoolwork that it can interfere with their sleep or even feel impossible to accomplish by the deadlines. But the national data show that they are unrepresentative.

If you are spending less than one hour/day on academics, including the time you spend actually “taking classes,” you just cannot be learning much. Maybe you are happy enough to be a college student living together with thousands of peers. But it is really hard to see why your family or the society should pay for this experience for four years of your young adulthood. Millions of families do pay, but they must see tuition as a kind of toll for entry to the middle class. I can see why they might view the toll-takers much as the Billy Goats Gruff viewed the Hungry Troll.

If you are getting so little out of your college experience that it occupies less than one hour per day, you might as well replace any remaining effort with an AI tool. And if your professors are so little involved with your education that you are able to get away with less than one hour per day of instruction plus homework plus extracurriculars, they might as well replace their teaching and grading with an AI.

Credit hours represent a kind of contract. A 3-credit course is supposed to require 9 hours of class plus homework per week, and most students take at least four courses. That takes them to about 40 hours of work per week, or more than five hours per day. If that is the official expectation, yet many students are doing 20% as much work, then the whole thing must seem like a travesty.

Finally, these data suggest that there is a qualitative difference among institutions. Some students are spending half their waking hours on demanding intellectual work. Others are not intellectually engaged at all. They may overlap on some of the same campuses, but they are probably concentrated in institutions that either demand a lot or not much of their students’ time. Nevertheless, the two kinds of institutions are both called “colleges,” and many students and families may not realize the difference.

Technicalities: This is my tabulation using data from Flood, Sayer, and Backman. I’ve amalgamated 2003-2025 to get a sample of 3,074. I do not show the trend during this period. For what it’s worth, the median rises in each decade from the 2000s to the 2020s, so the situation does not seem to be worsening.

In 2013, the National Survey of Student Engagement found that first-year college students spent about 2 hours per day preparing for class. That is a mean, not a median. It may be consistent with the 3-hour mean in the American Time Use Survey, since the latter includes class-time and extracurriculars.

Sources: Sarah M. Flood, Liana C. Sayer, and Daniel Backman. American Time Use Survey Data Extract Builder: Version 3.3 [dataset]. College Park, MD: University of Maryland and Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18128/D060.V3.3. National Survey of Student Engagement. (2013). A Fresh Look at Student Engagement—Annual Results 2013. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research.See also: a conversation with Farah Stockman about American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

a deliberative response to Trump’s building projects?

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Imagine that it’s 2029 and you have been inaugurated as the President of the United States. (Congratulations and good luck.) You can look out from your bedroom window or during a helicopter ride and see a new ballroom, a huge arch, a helipad, a sculpture garden, and other major physical constructions that your predecessor ordered. Which would you do?

  1. Order them taken down to restore the legitimate status quo ante. If by any chance a court or Congress blocked your unilateral executive action (despite the precedents that Trump had set), treat the restoration of a limit on presidential power as a victory. Otherwise, act promptly to demonstrate the frailty of Trump’s unilateralism and to restore the capital city.
  2. Ask Congress to consider legislation to authorize a complete or partial restoration and to appropriate the necessary funds. Encourage Congress to hold hearings and a public debate. Use your veto power if you believe that you must, but lean in favor of honoring the legislative process. Treat the debate as a restoration of legislative primacy and the rule of law.
  3. Convene a representative body of citizens (perhaps randomly selected) to decide what to do, recognizing that there are genuinely competing values at stake. Some people may love the new buildings, or simply want to use the money that could be spent on restoration for other purposes. You would use a deliberative process to symbolize that the capital’s buildings belong to the people, not to the president or even to Congress. You would be trying to set a precedent for other deliberations.
  4. Ask Congress to authorize a citizen deliberation on the topic and to honor the results.
  5. Do nothing.

Before choosing, you might want to get reliable legal advice about whether Trump’s projects were illegal or else within the bounds of unilateral presidential power as that is currently understood. The answer might affect your thinking but would probably not determine your decision.

For example, if I believed that Trump had acted unlawfully, I might order the buildings removed to remedy the violation, or I might hesitate to order a demolition that would also be illegal. If I were told that Trump’s actions were lawful, I might either see a green light to demolish the buildings or else work to narrow presidential discretion by deferring to Congress.

I would also think about this very practically. The fourth option is appealing but would lose its appeal if a bill got nowhere in Congress. I might do nothing instead of expending considerable political capital. After all, an arch can be taken down now or another year, whereas other problems are truly urgent.

That said, this highly symbolic issue could be used to convey worthy points.