New report: College students only spend 16% of time studying or in class

If the new semester has you thinking about your upcoming workload, consider this. A new study shows that college students today spend only 16 percent of their time studying or in class and lab, far less than students in previous decades. Nine percent of their time is spent on working, volunteering or club activities, and the rest (75%) is on sleeping and socializing.As a result, almost half of all undergraduates in the country show no academic gains in their first two years of college, and student performance gains are "disturbingly low," according to the report. Thirty-six percent of students left college without any "significant improvement in learning," as measured by performance on the Collegiate Learning Assessment.The CLA is a test that "gauges critical thinking and analytic reasoning," according to The Week. That means that the authors of the study didn't measure learning in any specific field, but rather critical thinking ability, which critics say isn't the best measure of a college education.The average GPA of the students surveyed might surprise you: 3.2.From ABC News:

"These are really kind of shocking, disturbing numbers," says New York University professor Richard Arum, lead author of the book, published by the University of Chicago Press.He noted that students in the study, on average, earned a 3.2 grade-point average. "Students are able to navigate through the system quite well with little effort," Arum said.

The report is based on a book called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. It surveyed 3,000 students at 29 unnamed universities.