Back when I went to school at Washu in St. Louis, studying was a competitive sport. In fact, it was just about the only “sport” that anyone really recognized (you mean we have a football team? Get out of here!).

I can’t tell you how many times I overheard variations of the same conversation between two or more people on campus…

PERSON 1: “I was in the library studying for 12 hours yesterday.”

PERSON 2: “12? I was there 13, I didn’t see you…what floor where you on?”

Really, I can’t even guess how many times I heard that conversation through my years there. Hundreds? Thousands?

Seriously.

Over the years I’ve come to realize that this sort of thing isn’t really the norm at most colleges. Friends who went to different schools look at me like I’m crazy when I tell them that story and it makes me wonder about a lot of different things.

I understand that some schools are obviously better than others (or maybe different is a more politically correct word), and everybody has different study habits; but I guess I didn’t realize how large the gap is.

Back when I was in school…

I had a friend who didn’t go to Washu that was always trying to get me to go do stuff with her. One time she asked me to go somewhere and I said that I couldn’t because I had to study. She replied:

“Oh, do you have a test tomorrow?”

She was utterly mystified when I told her that I didn’t have a test anytime soon…I just needed to learn the material and generally study.

What about you?

What were your study habits in college? Did you coast along until it was test time and then cram for all you were worth, or did you generally study constantly throughout the year?

Was your college library packed with people all the time, or just right before midterms and finals? Did your school newspaper publish top ten lists of the best places on campus to study?

I had another friend who…

…went to school at SIUC (Southern Illinois University in Carbondale) who told me that she took so many physics classes for her major that she was practically a physicist. I remarked that I didn’t know she had studied Calculus…

She replied: “Oh I never took calculus, I said physics not calculus”.

When I asked her how she had studied physics without knowing calculus, she just stared at me blankly.

Is it any wonder that…

…our economy is in tatters and so many people are out of work? People tell me that they graduated with a near 4.0 from their school but can’t find a job…yet they’re baffled when I suggest that you can’t really learn physics without calculus and maybe their crappy school didn’t prepare them very well…

The point of this article isn’t to bash other people or their crappy schools, or to brag that my college is better than yours… to tell you the truth, I’m not really sure WHAT this article is about.

I guess with such disparity across the board, it’s no wonder that we’re seeing a convergence into new forms of online education from some of the higher quality schools like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc. Is that the market telling us something?