At a school like Harvard, with their much-touted financial aid where students aren't supposed to have to hold down outside jobs to pay for tuition, how do students end up with very little time to do work? Class itself should take, what, three to five hours on a typical day? That leaves a lot of time for homework and studying. Do people just overwhelm themselves with too many extracurricular activities?
There's been a steady decline in amount of work students are willing to put in for study over the past decade.
By and large undergraduates at university just refuse to put in the hours for study. If you assign any reading of more than 50 pages, maybe 5% of the class will read it. Some of them are incapable of focusing for that long, some of them simply refuse to. what they do instead differs from person to person, but what is clear is that students simply expect less work and given the rampant grade inflation professors often go along with the students expectations.
From my experience (Brown), students often have on-campus jobs, take more classes than the norm in order to graduate early or edify themselves, and involve themselves in a variety of extracurricular activities with often intensive time requirements (i.e. sports). All of these contribute to stress. If you are out of town for a debate tournament and then have an exam on Monday morning when you get back, you feel a bit stretched.
You can always take enough classes (or hard enough classes) to take up any given amount of time. Or if you're into extracurricular activities, same thing. Consider the quote in bold at the top of this Harvard prof's personal page:
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~hgeorgi/
Even if a student takes a more moderate approach, workloads can be highly unpredictable (even to the professor), which creates the same problem.
I can speak from personal experience as I actually kept strict logs my senior year of how much work I was doing. Mind you at the time I was taking some grad classes, but it really wasn't unusual work loads compared to the people around me. I spent between 15-25 hours in class per week. I worked (teaching assistant) about 10 hours a week. I spent about 50-60 hours per week on homework, labs and general studying. And I did a varsity sport, which took about 3-4 hours per day. On most days, I would wake up at 5am, go to practice, go straight to class, stay on campus and study until 10 or 11 at night and then go to bed. Weekends would be similar. If I was lucky, I would get 1 night off a week.
I don't know where some of the other commenters get the idea that students these days don't take the time to study. I can't comment a lot about Harvard, but at my school, it was difficult to come across a student who wasn't taking a full load of courses (more often than not double or triple majors), involved in several extracurricals and often doing work study.
(Not at Harvard) I worked jobs some semesters and not others. Even when I did not have outside employment, I was still constantly busy.
A lot of this was poor time management and over-stress on my part, but that's what I was in college to learn to manage. If I went back Quantum-Leap style I would be able to chew through everything a lot easier.
