Study: Half of college students learn little in first two years

College students may be setting academics aside in favor of their social lives, according to a new study which showed that nearly 50 percent of undergraduate college students in the United States display a lack of learning in their freshman and sophomore years of college.

After two years in college, 45 percent of students showed no significant gains in learning and after four years 36 percent of students showed little change according to the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which based its study off 3,000 student surveys from 29 campuses across the country.

The low numbers could be due to a combination of instructors paying more attention to their own research and students focusing more on their social lives, according to the study.

“I think what happens is that. . .professors assign a lot of reading to their younger undergrad students to get them used to the workload,” said Mike Barry, a sophomore in the College of Communication. “When in reality they’re just being inundated with reading.”

“This heavy reading gets between being social freshman or sophomores and also trying to get a healthy amount of sleep and exercise. It can’t really be done,” Barry said.

Researchers also found that 35 percent of students report spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone due to greater emphasis on studying in groups and collaborative projects.

Some Boston University students said they believe that professors need to better transition students into the college learning experience.

“Students come from so many varieties of backgrounds that to paint an accurate portrait of the academic gains they make in their first two years of college is impossible,” said Brett Feldman, a sophomore in the School of Education.

“We are all arriving at the starting gate with different academic backgrounds. It’s not surprising therefore, that learning would be varied.”

College students on average spend 50 percent of their time socializing, 24 percent sleeping and only 7 percent studying, according to the report.

While the amount students spend socializing seems accurate, said Dan Mello, a School of Management and College of Arts and Sciences sophomore, the amount of time spent studying is likely an underestimation.

“I think every BU student is different in their study habits, especially with this kind of school that offers so many different courses of study,” Mello said. “BU students love socializing and networking so that statistic is most likely correct, but the seven percent of the study is so rigorous I cannot really see how it could be such a small figure.”

However, assessing students’ learning ability seems unreasonable, Feldman said.

“How do you compare the amount of learning an accounting major does in comparison to a biomedical engineering student to an English major?” Feldman said. “It’s impossible to measure learning over so diverse a student population.”