College Is Way Easier Than High School

In college, you won’t be able to start essays the night before they’re due. Professors expect you to engage with the material continuously, even outside of class.

That’s just one of the horror stories my high school teachers told me about college.

Or at least, it could have been. I wouldn’t know. I was sitting somewhere in the back of the classroom with one earbud in, only half paying attention.

By that point, I had been desensitized to those scare tactics. I had heard middle school teachers give the same spiel about high school and elementary school teachers give the same spiel about middle school. I had listened to my first-grade teacher grimly warn us that “they don’t put up with that behavior in second grade.”

It’s a nice narrative that life gets progressively harder, and progressively more is expected of you. But the reality is more like this: K-12 schooling is a full-time job, professional work is similar (but with more freedom and less supervision), and college is the four-year vacation in between.

I’m majoring in math and computer science at a prestigious university. I’m more than halfway done, and I currently have a 4.0 GPA. It has been an absolute breeze. Even with clubs, job applications, and social activities, I have more free time than I know what to do with.

For example, I’m writing this at just past noon on a Wednesday. My only class today ended at 9:30 this morning. I could have skipped it without consequence, and many students did, but the professor was covering a cool topic that I wanted to hear about. My schedule for the rest of the day is totally free, except for a club meeting at 7:30 tonight, which I will only attend because I’m friends with the club’s president and there’s pizza.

Meanwhile, my sister in high school is presumably filling out a worksheet about the events leading up to the Civil War. If she stops writing, her teacher will soon ask her to continue. If she checks Instagram on her phone, she’ll be scolded within seconds. And God help her if she whips out a laptop and starts laying down a blog post.

At the same time, my father is in an office somewhere responding to urgent problems. There are teams of people who rely on him to do his job well. He might be fired if he stands up and walks out, but he’d never consider it—there’s too much to do.

And I’m sitting here wondering why I have a blank Word document open. Is this for another blog post? Oh, never mind. It’s just my to-do list.

A Bachelor’s Degree Doesn’t Show Proficiency

I could be convinced that graduate work is more intense than this undergraduate stuff. To earn a PhD in a real subject, I imagine you need to know something about it, and that takes time and effort. But a Bachelor’s degree doesn’t show proficiency. It barely shows interest.

Read an introductory book on any subject, and you will know more about it than the average college graduate who just earned a Bachelor’s in that field. Furthermore, you will be better read than that graduate.

Indeed, almost no one reads a full book worth of information about their major over the course of their college career. Most undergraduates avoid reading about their major at all. Seasoned professors know this and have stopped assigning reading entirely, but some of the greener ones still pretend that “Read pages 100 through 105” is a request students take seriously.  Of course, any student will tell you that’s a complicated way of saying “No homework.”

I actually have one professor who unironically assigns reading and quizzes us on it in class. I just guess on the quizzes; you can usually infer the answers from the wording of the questions. As I recently declared to some of my classmates, I will not be bullied into reading the book. They laughed, but they agreed.

The Two-Hour Rule

Sometimes a young kid will innocently ask a college student, “Is it true that you only spend fifteen hours a week in class?”

This figure is rightly shocking to the typical K-12 schoolboy, whose life has always been forty-hour workweeks plus homework.

If the college student wants to save face, he responds, “Yeah, but the rule of thumb is that you spend three hours studying outside of class for every hour you spend in class.”

This brings the total hours worked to sixty a week, a believable number for a Supreme Court justice. Sometimes the rule is instead reported as two hours studying per hour in class, making for forty-five hours a week. That’s still ridiculous, and I know very few people who believe it.

Students who do spout the two-hour rule often describe the library as a sort of second home. They insist that they sometimes spend many hours a day studying among the books. But do they really?

Just today, I was walking past a line of desks in my own university’s library. There were three students in a row with their laptops open. The first was browsing Facebook, the second was playing Fortnite, and the third was playing League of Legends. (Admittedly, that was an uncommon sight. More often, the library dwellers have homework open on their laptops while they use their phones in their laps, so it at least looks like they’re being productive from a distance.)

I guarantee you these are the same people who complain about forty-five hours of work a week. If they actually worked for a fraction of the eight hours a day required of K-12 students, and didn’t mix in marathon social media sessions, they would be in and out of the library before lunch.

Those who describe college as more difficult than high school should turn their attention from their classes to their mirrors. For them, it’s easier to do eight hours of forced work than two hours of work when no one is looking over their shoulder.

But laziness isn’t the only bad habit afflicting the small subset of students who say college is hard.

Notetaking Is Worse Than Drinking

If you’re deciding between notetaking and trying alcohol, I would recommend Coors Light. Taking notes in class is possibly the most academically detrimental habit there is. And while alcohol and notetaking both slow your thoughts, at least drinking can be fun.

The problem with students who take notes is that they usually see it as a substitute for trying to understand lectures. These students stop thinking the moment their notebooks hit their desks, preferring to robotically transcribe everything the professor writes on the board.

When the professor surprises them with a question, they flip furiously through the pages of their notebook, trying to match keywords from the question with a bullet point in their notes, which they then regurgitate exactly. I could write a Java program that replicates the behavior of these future janitors. And my program would get better grades!

If a notetaker misses a class where an important concept is discussed, he doesn’t sweat it. He just sends out a request for “the notes” and stashes them away to review before the exam. At first I thought this was a funny request—shouldn’t he have to specify whose notes he wants?—but I’ve realized it’s completely unambiguous. Everyone who takes notes takes them identically, as word-for-word copies of what the professor says and writes, free of any personal revelations about the material. Unfortunately for our absentee, this makes learning from the notes impossible. The person who wrote them didn’t understand them, so he has no chance.

It’s no wonder notetakers call college hard. Maybe I should amend the title of this article. College is way easier than high school for people who think.

There’s a philosophy that it’s okay to take a few notes, as long as you understand what you’re writing down and you don’t let it replace internal consideration of the class’ core ideas. I used to be sympathetic to that view, but I’ve come to believe that storing information for later is always a distraction that diminishes comprehension in the present. Having a notebook on your desk during a lecture is disrespectful to the lecturer, period.

Even some good students part ways with me on that. I admit it’s not a wildly popular position. Telling people you don’t take notes is like telling people you don’t drink. They may look at you funny, but you still feel a tinge of pride because you know your abstinence makes you better than them.

Let Us Give Thanks for the Easy Life

I have a message for K-12 students who are worried about college. The stories you’ve heard are exaggerated. You will be able to start assignments the night before they’re due. You won’t have to stay up late reading. You won’t work anywhere close to the forty hours a week expected of you now. The originators of frightening myths about the college workload are a vocal minority of notetakers, Fortnite players, and other morons, who are cruising towards dead-end jobs at Starbucks.

Put simply, college is easy. I often stop and give thanks that I no longer have to work full time. I give thanks that my role as a student doesn’t interfere with the activities I enjoy.

I know the professional world awaits me, and when I get there I’ll have to put my nose to the grindstone again. But I’m ready for it. Excited, even. God knows I’ll be fresh and well-rested.