Your Kids Are Not 'Taking Notes'—College Edition

“Back in my day” comments resound from professors and parents alike when they look out upon the sea of laptops known as a college lecture hall. The fact is college has changed in radical ways in even the last 10 years. With their devices, these students are not focused on taking notes, and they don’t even need to attend class. But they aren’t entirely to blame for their habits. Screentime mediates most academic courses as well as offering reprieve from studying. 

The average university student spends most, if not all, of his or her classroom time looking at a screen—with serious repercussions for material retention, confidence, relationships, and the classroom environment. And they certainly don’t get offline when they step out of class. Stanford students spent 50% of their waking hours online before the Covid-19 pandemic and 78% during the fourth quarter of the 2019-2020 academic year, for which all classes went remote. The latter has become the norm, even though most students have returned to campus.

Since the pandemic, most professors across the U.S. have continued to record and upload their lectures to an institution-wide platform such as Sakai, Netclassroom, or Canvas. This means many students are still free to choose to recline in bed and breeze through audio recordings at their leisure rather than face the elements and their peers. Attendance requirements remain impossible for professors to enforce, and students are still more likely to be granted extensions on assignments—and even have assignments and tests simplified or cut—than they were before 2020, according to professors whom I consulted. Dr. Jon Askonas, assistant professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, explained that professors have pushed back, but it seems that students demand extensions and other shortcuts so forcefully “that rather than needing a truly exceptional reason to grant an extension, a professor needs one to deny it.”

Students still text, scroll through social media, and shop their way through many credit hours, but even those not pursuing degrees in computer science are likely to need their computers as more than typewriters because class materials are now often only available online. College textbooks are not much more expensive now than they were 10 years ago, but sales have plummeted. Online textbooks may or may not save students a pretty penny, but the class administration platforms are the primary avenue for students to receive and return assignments. Students can complete work even as they sit in class, and they hardly make a dent in their printing budget. Universities might save trees, but at what cost? 

The average university student spends most, if not all, of his or her classroom time looking at a screen—with serious repercussions for material retention, confidence, relationships, and the classroom environment.

The digitalization of course materials planted the seed for sites like Chegg, which rakes in cash helping students cheat by offering page-by-page guidance for assignments and tests. If you thought Sparknotes was bad for classroom performance, you’ve seen nothing yet. Forbes reported that Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig wants higher education to take a page from companies like Uber or Amazon that are borne of the on-demand economy: “I don’t know why you can’t binge-watch your education…My view is education is going to have to come to us over the devices we have.” Ideas like these define edtech’s future. 

Forget binge-watching education; what about plain binge-watching? College students spend 17 hours per week on social media, and in 2018 they streamed shows and movies more than 14 hours per week. With so little time for the classroom, it is no wonder that students Chegg their homework and quizzes and opt out of attending lectures and seminars. University administrators are taking the same shortcuts by replacing university mental health and career counselors with AI tools. As students turn to AI to help them with their college applications, colleges may soon deploy AI to run admissions and teach. And we know better than to think AI indifferent. Lack of vision for the college experience means it is consumed by Big Tech. As Askonas saw back in 2019, “Humanism has long been overthrown by dreams of maximizing satisfaction, metrics, profits, ‘knowledge,’ and connection, a task now to be given over to the machines.”

A handful of universities have taken sizable strides in recovering a grounded, healthy college experience by reducing tech. For example, Franciscan University offers the “Unplugged Scholarship” to students who give up their phones over their undergraduate course of study, and Wyoming Catholic bans phones schoolwide, disposing students toward their robust outdoor programming. And professors across the country are forbidding laptops at lectures and trying out oral exams and in-class assignments, especially as ChatGPT sets off their alarm bells at last.

In conclusion, more tech on campus often means students experience less of all the things that make college worthwhile. We need studies on all of the tech students use and how it is affecting their education, from Canvas to ChatGPT, as well as how else students spend their time on campus to see what it is they are seeking online. College, like kindergarten, is still an important period of growth for many young Americans, and college students also need public support and protection.

Elizabeth Self is the Outreach Coordinator for the Institute for Family Studies.