Philip Babcock is an assistant professor of economics at University of California, Santa Barbara. He and Mindy Marks, an economist at the University of California, Riverside, recently issued a report on the decline in studying time among college students.

My co-author, Mindy Marks, and I found a whopping 10-hour decline in time spent studying outside of class for full time students at four-year universities between 1961 and the 2000s. We think it’s because standards or requirements have fallen at universities.

Though we can’t measure student learning in college, we do know that universities set standards for academic effort. We know that students don’t come close to meeting these requirements, and that the shortfall has quadrupled over time.

Universities are marketing themselves as havens for fun and recreation, and students are taking them at their word.

Why did post-secondary institutions allow this to occur? It’s hard to know for certain. One theory is that increased market pressures have empowered students, causing colleges to cater more to students’ desires for leisure. Students do appear to prefer leisure and easier classes. A given instructor in a given course tends to receive lower ratings from students during terms when he or she grades less generously or requires more.

The Delta Study finding that spending for non-academic and recreation facilities has been increasing relative to spending on academic instruction also seems consistent with this explanation. Recreation facilities are a great way to advertise a lifestyle. One college even sent out Frisbees and chocolate chip cookies in its recruitment package. The message couldn’t be clearer: Come to our college. It’s a vacation spa. It’s Club Med.

Some have argued that the decrease in study time has to do with advances in education technology. It’s true that the Internet and word processors have made it easier for today’s students to write papers and search for references. But because the largest portion of the study time decline happened between 1961 and 1981, before these advances could have been a factor, and because declines also occurred in majors that don’t rely on writing papers or searching the library, we doubt this explains much of the story.

Others have argued that students are studying less because they are spending more time on work or internships. But the study time decline is clearly visible both for students who work for pay while in school and for those who don’t. And while we don’t have data on internships and other unpaid work-related activities in the early data sets, the later data show that students don’t spend enough time on these activities to explain a 10-hour decline in studying.

Rather, students appear to have shifted time away from their studies toward leisure. If universities are marketing themselves as havens for fun and recreation, the time-use data show that students are taking them at their word.