Published July 9, 2010

New research out of UC Riverside (go UC!) shows college students study less, way less, than they used to. And I can’t say I’m surprised.

Is this how the kids study nowadays? (Ian Ruotsala via Flickr)

As WBUR’s resident millennial, I wasn’t graduated from college all that long ago. It seemed like all of my college peers either had ADD and took Adderall for it — or didn’t have ADD and took Adderall to stay wired on exam nights.

Radio Boston intern Huw Roberts, who recently earned his degree from American University in Washington, says a friend ran an Adderall ring in freshman year.

I remember that studying was rare, often in groups, and disrupted almost constantly by instant messaging and stupid video-watching. A distracted generation, we were.

We mastered the art of the BS — a skill acquired in high school — and the art of repackaging old work into something new. (But not cheating. I didn’t cheat.)

Thing is, we all skated by. Often with good grades.

I talked about this with Hubbub intern Talia Ralph, an incoming senior at Emerson College:

I don’t study too much. The library at Emerson is definitely one of the campus’ most under-used facilities, at least until finals week — and even still, most people in there are clamoring for a computer, not a study cubicle.

But ask any Emerson student what we’re up to, and we’ll run off a list that makes a lot of people’s eyes get wide (I’ve seen this happen in person: I work at the admission office, and we scare parents and kids away all the time simply by answering their questions about our schedules). I have friends that run radio stations, direct and edit feature-length films, create full-scale marketing campaigns for major corporations – and go to school full-time.

It’s true. I was working full-time as a journalist while going to school. It made my head spin, but my career was too important — more important. And for many of my peers, that job financed their very education. (Thankfully, I attended a state university and have generous parents.)

Huw will be on the show today to talk about this phenomenon, along with the study’s lead author and the president emeritus at Harvard. It’s a perfect topic for this university town.

How much do/did you study? Tell us your habits — bad or good — in the comments.