The Joy of Economics:  Making Sense out of Life
 Robert J. Stonebraker, Winthrop University
 

   To Attend, or Not to Attend

            Eighty percent of success is showing up.

                                                            .....Woody Allen

            When alumni return to visit a college campus, they often ask the same question: have students changed?  I always answer: "yes".  Most instructors on most college campuses agree.  "Students just aren't as good anymore," is a common refrain.  And it's true. 

            Be careful.  Do not quickly malign the intelligence of contemporary collegians.  Individual students are every bit as able as in the past, but the average student is probably less able.  Why?  Each year more and more students attend college.  If larger and larger percentages of the population attend, the average ability level will inevitably fall.  If we want to send everyone to college instead of only the academically elite, the average student simply will not be as bright.  When ability levels fall, faculty members must either award lower grades or lower their standards.  Most have lowered standards.  Students who graduated with a "C" average twenty years ago should take heart.  In today's classrooms, similar efforts might bring B's and A's.

            Yet the drop in innate ability is small.  Most students continue to be very able and creative.  To lessen the tension of final exams, I often include nonsensical trivia questions (for no credit, of course).  One semester I asked my Principles of Microeconomics students to identify heffalumps.  Many students ignored the question ‑‑ after all, it offered no credit ‑‑ and several answered it correctly (a hallucinatory character from Winnie‑the‑Pooh).  But the incorrect answers were wonderfully imaginative.  Do you want to see a sample?  Heffalumps are:

.......     yesterday's special at the cafeteria.

.......     things that accumulate on your head after turning in final exams.  They are caused by pounding your head on the wall after remembering the correct answers.

.......     the accumulations of cut grass deposited on the ground after the lawn mower has passed over a particular spot.

.......     knots you get on your fingers after holding a pencil through a two‑hour exam (ouch!).

.......     the fuzz balls around my room by the end of the semester.

.......     very portly puffalumps.

.......     contagious disease, usually caused by economics.

            These are creative young people.  They have ability; what's often missing is effort.

Where's the effort?   

            Numerous studies verify that current students log fewer study hours per week than their predecessors. A typical student takes 15 credit hours per semester with about 13-14 hours of physical class time per week. If we think of being a full-time student as a full-time job, the typical student should be devoting about about 26-27 hours outside of class to study each week.  That translates into the oft-heard rule of thumb: two hours of study for every one hour of class time.  Regrettably, nearly half of all students report spending only 10 hours or less per week preparing for class.¹

           Why?  Are students lazier than in the past?  Probably not.  More likely the change in study habits simply reflects a change in the relative costs and benefits.  First, the marginal cost of study has been rising over time.  With the relative price of higher education increasing each year, more and more students are forced to work at part-time (or even full-time jobs) to earn enough income to stay in school.  But these jobs take time, and each additional hour on the job is an additional hour that cannot be spent attending class or hitting the books.  The need to work additional hours raises the opportunity cost of calculus homework. 

            Second, for a variety of reasons, there has been an explosion of extra-curricular opportunities available on most college campuses.  In addition to the traditional varsity athletics and Greek societies, students can participate in an increasing array of clubs, interest groups and activities. At my own relatively small institution, students can choose to participate in more than 100 different organizations.  Moreover, our university activities calendar lists concerts, lectures and other miscellaneous events and performances for every night of the week. These groups and activities do generate important benefits.  They broaden the range of student experience, develop leadership skills and enrich the college experience.  However, they also put increasing demands on student time and raise the opportunity cost of study.

            Third, many students see less benefit to study than in the past.  Historically, students faced a wide variety of promising career paths that did not require a college degree.  Students unexcited by scholarly pursuits opted out of academia.  But employees without diplomas today often are stuck in unchallenging low‑paid positions with little or no hope of advancement. Today's students understand that college degrees have become the price of admission to good jobs, even those jobs that don't require mastery of college‑level material.  They understand that often what matters is the degree, the credential, not the knowledge.  Many still come because they want to learn, but more and more come because they see it as their best hope in avoiding dead‑end employment.  Unfortunately, if such students care more about the credential than the knowledge, they have little incentive to study more than is absolutely necessary to squeeze through the system.  They want to minimize the cost of obtaining the degree and, consequently, study as little as possible. The motivation to learn suffers.

Go to class!

            Naturally, unmotivated students are less likely to learn. They also are less likely to attend class regularly and, for many, this lack of attendance is a primary cause of poor performance.  If you're not there, you can't get it.  Borrowing a classmate's notes might help, but it is a pitiable substitute for your notes written in your own words.

            Attendance matters.  Measures of ability such as College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test results or high school class rank are very poor predictors of exam scores.  In tests I once ran on my own students, differences in ability explained very little of the differences in their exam grades.  On the other hand, differences in class attendance were a very significant factor in performance and explained nearly one-half of the differences in their exam averages.  Each class a student missed lowered his/her final average by about three percentage points.  Since the "typical" student missed almost 20 percent of the classes, that added up to a mess of D and F grades. Other researchers report similar results.² 

            Each semester I warn students they are likely to fail if they skip more than an occasional class.  My colleagues do the same. Yet, each semester some students skip anyway, and each semester they fail.  What should we do?  We can try to make our classes interesting and worthwhile, but even the most popular instructors sometimes lecture to empty seats.  Should we require attendance?  Should we force students to come to class?  Many faculty members prefer a laissez faire policy and grade solely on such factors as test scores, quizzes and papers.  Others impose penalties for non‑attendance per se.

Appropriate policy?  

            Some people contend students are irresponsible and that we should require attendance to protect them from themselves.  Economists are skeptical.  Poor attendance might be perfectly rational behavior.  Perhaps a student can master course material merely by reading the textbook.  Perhaps a student has family or job obligations that are more important than class attendance.  Perhaps some instructors ramble incoherently or simply read "lectures" from the text.  In these cases, attendance may confer few or no benefits.  Should we force students to attend anyway?  Moreover, learning to make choices and to accept the consequences of those choices is part of growing up.  If we wipe out students' freedom to choose, will an important lesson be lost?

            Economists generally advocate markets in which consumers make free choices about what to buy or not to buy.  We frown on restricting choice unless there is some compelling reason to believe that free choices will damage others and create external effects.  Might such damage occur in the "market" for class attendance?

            Maybe.  Sporadic attendance can impede class discussions and slow the pace at which material can be covered.  The best classrooms are those in which students and faculty share in the pursuit of knowledge.  But a sense of shared exploration is difficult to build or maintain when students pop in and out at will.  Students who skip classes, ask off‑the‑wall questions that were answered last week, and then mooch missed notes and material from conscientious classmates can poison the academic environment.

            Taxpayers share the damage.  State appropriations cover most of the educational costs at public colleges and universities, and government‑funded financial aid underwrites additional student costs at both private and public institutions.  Students who sleep in and blow off class are wasting taxpayer money.  If colleges and universities want the government gravy train to continue, they had better ensure that the dollars are used wisely.

            Are there good arguments to protect the students' freedom to choose?  Yes.  Attendance by all students in all classes is not necessarily efficient.  Are there also good arguments to restrict that choice?  Yes.  Students may ignore the adverse effects they impose on classmates and taxpayers when choosing whether or not to attend.  Decisions to cut class that a student perceives to be in his/her self-interest are not necessarily in the best interest of society.  What should we do?

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Notes:

1.         See http://nsse.iub.edu/pdf/NSSE2005_annual_report.pdf, page 43.

2.         See Romer, David, "Do Students Go to Class?  Should They?", Journal of Economic Perspectives, volume 7, number 3, Summer 1993, p. 167 (8).  Marburger, Daniel R., "Does Mandatory Attendance Impact Student Performance," Journal of Economic Education, volume 37, number 2, Spring 2006, pp. 148-155, also concludes that attendance matters.

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Testing Yourself

To test your understanding of the major concepts in this reading, try answering the following:

1.         Describe what has been happening to the average academic performance of college students and explain the economic logic; include a discussion of the changing marginal costs and benefits of study.

2.         Discuss the economic arguments for and against requiring students to attend class.

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