When I started college in 2013, there was a general ratio that most professors adopted in assigning coursework: for every 1 hour of class-time, 2 hours of independent study outside class. For those keeping score, the average full-time student in the humanities will take 4 classes per semester, each meeting for 3 hours per week. That’s 12 hours in class, 24 hours of independent study, and 36 hours of total time spent on coursework. A full-time job, one where your primary task is to educate yourself in a subject that interests you, with the guidance of experts in that subject.
Of course, this is not the experience of the majority of American college students. Most of them do not attend 4-year full-time universities. Most of those that do work part-time or full-time jobs on top of their responsibilities as students. I worked 15 hours a week, and had friends who regularly put in 20 or 30 hours, sometimes across 2 or 3 gigs. That’s 51 hours of work for me, and 66 hours for those on the high-end of the spectrum. While those numbers add up, the college years start to look less like the period of pastoral leisure that liberals romanticize and right-wingers resent; for many serious students, it will be nothing short of grueling.
Of course, 50 or 60 or 70 hours per week is an unsustainable pace. Exhaustion creeps in, physical and intellectual. Time gets cut, mostly from those precious 24 hours of independent study. Readings are skipped, writing is outsourced to ChatGPT, problem set answers are shared or found online, exams are crammed for at the last minute. With each shortcut taken, students learn less. Whatever information they retain tends to come not from the primary texts, but from the lecture hall and the seminar room, through the mediation of a professor who is as exhausted as his or her audience.
In my recent experience teaching, many students have openly asked me why they’re expected to do readings at all. Won’t the important points be covered in class? Why are we reading a full 200-page novel this week if we’re only going to talk about a few themes and threads within it? Won’t the exam only cover what was on the slides, anyway? So why can’t we just read the slides? By the way, will the slides be posted online? “Thanks for understanding!” The assumption here is that the lecture exhausts the value of the text, or at least exhausts anything that’s worth the student’s time.
You can pass a literature or philosophy course without doing the readings. This has probably been true since before Aristotle lectured in Athens. But mastery of a subject area comes from independent thought, from working-through, from those hours outside the classroom spent reading and writing and thinking.
Put simply, homework is not optional. It is, in my view, the single most important part of a college education, because it is the site where the student is forced to rely on their own resources, where they cannot depend on the passive absorption of the teacher’s words. But anecdotal experiences and empirical studies suggest that students are spending less and less time doing coursework outside of class, and that the time they do spend is of lower and lower quality. Those 2 hours recommended per hour of class time are often passed with the book open on the table, next to two or three screens all drawing the students’ attention in different directions. Before they know it, they have to go off to work waiting tables, bagging groceries, walking dogs, staffing Amazon warehouses, driving Ubers, and so on.
I simply do not believe that it is possible for the average student to become genuinely and deeply educated under these conditions.
Conversations about college-for-all tend to emphasize graduation rates. CUNY, like many other public systems, loves to announce that they have conferred degrees upon this many students from these particular class and racial backgrounds. And those degrees demonstrably improve students’ lives, in ways that have been well-documented—as long as students don’t take on massive amounts of debt to attain them. These working class students are highly driven and highly intelligent, moreso than many of the wealthy kids with whom I went to 4-year liberal arts college. But they are for the most part not given the resources that I had and that many of my peers had.
The most precious of those recourses is time. The time to needed comb through a few pages of Kant, or a few hundred pages of Balzac, without distractions or worries or exhaustion, without having to rush across town to a minimum wage job and without the guilt of spending the afternoon in the library instead of at home caring for a loved one who depends on them. College-for-all means homework-for-all. It names a struggle over the working day, a struggle to reclaim the time we need to educate ourselves; to take back that time not only from our employers, who could not care less about our literature courses or psychology exams, but also from the addictive apps and websites that steal the few good hours we have left after a hard day at work.
As I’m approaching 30, a quote from Marx’s 1844 notebooks has taken on new relevance. It makes the rounds on Twitter every month or so, but that shouldn’t cheapen its theoretical and practical importance:
The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.
As the public university is turned into a job-training facility where the only real requirements for graduation are class-attendance and a pulse, Marx lays out quite clearly the terms of the bargain we have all made. The paradigmatic acts of leisure that Marx describes, the great joys of life and of college life as we’ve known it, at least since WW2—thinking, loving, art-making, athletic competition—are all being absorbed into the machine of capital. This is an act of class-warfare, an attempt to dispossess the working class of those few tools they have left to fight that war: their minds, their bodies, their joys.
We must defend not just the right to a college degree, which has been reduced to a certificate that licenses its holder for, perhaps, a slightly higher paying job, a job in which said holder may even get the chance to exploit someone just below them in the organizational hierarchy. We must defend the right to an education, a real education. This begins by defending the time it takes to read, to think, to fail, to work, to work-through, to become educated.
I was lucky enough to be part of the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Vermont. The premise was: 30 first year students, any major, want to learn the "great books," will also live together (we had 5 "suites" with 6 students each in one section of a dorm). It was, without a doubt, one of the best years of my life. 1st semester was the Iliad, the Odyssey, Greek tragedies, Peloponnesian War...other stuff as well I'm not recalling. 2nd semester, Dante, Hamlet, Anna Karenina, Frankenstein are the first things that come to mind. Anyway you get the idea. I have no idea the hours we read each week but I just remember I was reading and writing all day, every day. And then when you weren't reading/writing, you were sitting around with your classmates, since you lived together, talking about whatever you were reading. Lots of partying as well. This was in 2011. The program, as far as I know, doesn't exist anymore. Where will an 18 year old like I was be able to have this experience in today's world...
Five, I think I’m only a year younger than you, but even through my privileged and carefree college years (2014-2018) I was surprised by how little time there was to truly engage with the readings I was assigned. I had this idea that in college, I’d have free time to read Kant if I wanted to but I could barely make the time for excerpts of Kant assigned for class. I worked maybe 16-20 hours a week on campus, dropped to 8 hours a week by my senior year, but still was always a bit behind on assignments. I don’t have many regrets but I wish I took a year longer to finish school to really have that time to engage with the text and make more time to talk about it with people around me.
I’m just now starting to find the time to get back to those dense college texts to read through on my own.