Am I wrong to feel cynical about most college students?

(If you want the TL;DR as to why I'm so annoyed, just skip to what I quoted from Caplan's book in "premise 4")

I recently read Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education, a truly eye-opening book, and one part stuck with me more than anything: the way the typical American college student spends his/her time is just... astounding. Caplan was only interested in establishing the signaling model of education, so he only mentioned the hilariously minimal amount of time students spend actually educating themselves as a part of his larger case that colleges do more credentialing than teaching.

But I couldn't help but linger there, thinking this fact alone calls for a discussion of its own, and that is this: most college students are guilty of an enormous moral misdeed, and the hedonistic culture on American universities is actually hideously corrupt. Let me explain my reasoning.

Premise 1: If one accepts financial assistance from another person for a given purpose, that person is guilty of a serious moral failure if the overwhelming majority of that spending is used for recreational enjoyment rather than for the purpose stipulated.

I think this is a fair generalization. Imagine a hypothetical person who promised to do X with $10,000 of your money biannually for four years, and then you discovered that they spent no more than 14 hours a week doing X and 85 hours a week doing Y, where Y is typically some form of self-indulgence. You would be outraged, no?

Premise 2: Most college students receive some kind of financial assistance (50% from parents, and 74% overall from public tax funds).

“$120 billion in federal student aid goes out each year in the form of grants, work-study, and loans. Students use financial aid to pay for 92% of college education costs. 71% of college-bound students seek federal aid to pay for college.” The typical college student receives a parent contribution of about 40% of the total cost of tuition per semester, and about half receive at least some financial assistance from parents. 55% of “scholarship and grant” funds come from the state or federal government.

Premise 3: The primary purpose financial assistants of college students have in mind is for students to actively pursue an education and a professional future; if they were to discover that the overwhelming majority of college students use the overwhelming majority of their time for other purposes (such as to take a near four-year vacation from all personal responsibilities), they would be entitled to feel morally aggrieved.

The fact that this premise has been the primary target of criticism when I have presented this argument to my college peers seems very telling to me. One friend responded by saying (I'm quoting verbatim from text)

"I think it's very weird to think parents get to claim moral high ground out of pure ignorance. I think all you can expect of college students is that they meet whatever demands the colleges set for them. The function of the colleges surely is to set adequate standards up such that meeting them results in learning. Otherwise, again, why use the institution at all? Nothing's happening at a college that isn't available on the internet."

Well, I'm a college student, so let me just say that at least one of us thinks the purpose of college financial assistance aspires to more than merely passing classes (independently of education and professional preparation), and that this is taken as an obvious premise by everyone offering financial assistance (whether through public funds or directly).

This assumes that college students can do no more with their opportunity than to merely pass classes. This is being very charitable to college students and very naive to what a reasonable third party would think, or even the parents. There is so much more that a student can do than to merely fulfill the degree requirements and achieve a diploma. May I remind you just how easy it is to achieve a college degree if your only goal is to graduate: simply take the most undemanding classes you can possibly imagine, sleep through your major, and walk away with a bachelor's in sociology or "communications" or business

(not to pick on sociologists/et al; obviously you could make this rigorous if you actually tried to maximize your education in the social sciences, loaded up on stats classes, maximized your accumulation of general knowledge about society and history and culture, pursued the highest level of undergraduate training, participated in undergraduate research, etc. ).

But I think if we're taking the statistics I offer below on how college students actually spend their time you will doubt that this is the typical student majoring in the social sciences/humanities/vaguely vocational "business" and "communications" tracks.

One way you see this is in the way college students characterize their experience to their parents vs their friends. We all know of college students who have managed to deceive their parents into thinking that they are doing more than 14 hours a week of studying.

Another measure of this is the fact that when I tell most college students these numbers, they flush with embarrassment and guilt and confess to me that the "14 hours of studying" is really "10 hours of checking facebook and watching YouTube, but just in a different location (the library) + 4 hours of cramming right before class and in the early morning".

Likewise, when I tell parents this, they often show great surprise. But why be surprised/embarrassed/less than transparent toward parents if the terms of the arrangement are implicitly known to all involved parties?

Premise 4: But the overwhelming majority of college students do not actively pursue an education or professional future, do enormously and measurably less than they could to use their education in a way that would fulfill their potential for success, and while their four years away in a hedonistic blur.

Bryan Caplan:

Indeed, today’s college students are less willing than those of previous generations to do the bare minimum of showing up for class and temporarily learning whatever’s on the test. Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying. Effort has since collapsed across the board. “Full time” college students now average 27 hours of academic work a week—including just 14 hours spent studying.

What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa frostily remark in their 2011 book, Academically Adrift, If we presume that students are sleeping eight hours a night, which is a generous assumption given their tardiness and at times disheveled appearance in early morning classes, that leaves 85 hours a week for other activities.

Arum and Roksa cite a study finding that students at one typical college spent 13 hours a week studying, 12 hours “socializing with friends,” 11 hours “using computers for fun,” eight hours working for pay, six hours watching TV, six hours exercising, five hours on “hobbies,” and three hours on “other forms of entertainment.” Grade inflation completes the idyllic package by shielding students from negative feedback. The average GPA is now 3.2.

Asian students at my university related to the director of international student affairs that the #1 most surprising thing about the American university experience is how little the students study and how much partying goes on. It takes an outsider to see just how corrupt this culture is.

Premise 5: A moral failure becomes only graver and more heinous when it is of a greater magnitude.

This is reasonable and should be uncontroversial in any other context.

Premise 6: But the magnitude of college assistance, despite the statistics in Premise 4, is absolutely staggering.

Admittedly, my concern is only taking aim at the students who both receive assistance and lead a college life along the lines of premise 4, but I am growing increasingly frustrated after having read Caplan's book by the feeling that this cohort represents many, many more students than people may care to admit.

Conclusion 1: So, to the extent that premise 4 characterizes college students receiving financial assistance, this ethical transgression is made even more shocking and egregious.   

Conclusion 2: As a result, college students so characterized are guilty of a hideous ethical transgression.

Strong language, I know; but just imagine this kind of prodigal behavior in any other context. Imagine the hypothetical I described in premise 1 and consider how you would respond to a personal case of financial exploitation. It is possible to be taken advantage of financially even if the funds are mediated through third parties, as is the case with public tax funds rewarding this reprehensible and irresponsible behavior.

Premise 7: But to be guilty of a hideous ethical transgression calls for a profound feeling of personal moral failure, shame, and repentance, without which a person can fairly be said to be horribly immoral.  

Premise 8: But, as far as I can tell, most college students feel no shame or penitence whatsoever, and even joke about and make light of how little effort the put into college/how much of a “wild time” it was.

Premise 9: To be both unrepentant about, flippant, and delighted by a grave moral misdeed is to be guilty of an even graver moral misdeed.

As an aside, most of my immigrant-student friends do not need this argument to convince them that college recreational culture is immoral. My friends who aren't immigrants feel very differently and will often make great fun of the fact that they are fratting their way to the finish line in a haze of substance abuse they will barely remember.

Conclusion 3: Thus, the college students so described deserve a profound feeling of personal failure and shame.

Conclusion 4: Thus, the college students so described are horrendously immoral.

Premise 10: People who are guilty of hideous moral transgressions which they take amused satisfaction in warrant the strong moral disapproval and disgust of wider society.

Conclusion 5: So, the parties not responsible for the misdeed should and are entitled to show great moral disapproval and disgust toward the college students guilty of the transgression described.  

This follows deductively from the preceding premises (admittedly, I stated the argument less formally than it could have been for the sake of readability, but it should be obvious that if the premises are accepted, the conclusion should also be accepted. To make this more clear, I restated the argument below).

TL;DR Most college students unethically exploit and abuse the trust and generosity of parents and society.

The point being that if parents and wider society were primarily intent on giving college students a 4 year vacation, there are many more direct ways to do that (fly them out to a private island; send a check with "go wild" on the purpose line). Given that we do not do this, I take it that we intend for college students to do something more with their money than primarily self-indulge for 4 years. But that raises the question of what would be a good measure of how seriously college students are pursuing their education and professional future.

One great way to do that would be to look at how they spend their time, no? So, when we discover that 14 hours a week of studying is the average (many, many more do even less!) and that 85 hours go into primarily various forms of recreation, what are we to conclude? I think one obvious inference any reasonable third party would make would be that these students are not pursuing an education primarily; rather, they are primarily pursuing a vacation.

To be sure, this argument relies somewhat on your intuitions about whether 14:85 hrs is a reasonable, morally permissible ratio of play to work. I personally do not feel that it is and am galled by the way college students spend their time. If they were paying for their vacation on their own that would be one thing, but most college students receive a variety of forms of assistance. That acceptance of assistance which is obviously implicitly and explicitly morally conditioned on aiding one in the pursuit of an education and career makes the moral decisions of college students much more serious and obligation-laden. But I don't see this moral sense of urgency in any of my peers (except those who are first and second generation immigrants/international students).

Edit: Just to be clear, I did not claim that one must commit all of their time to studying; only that they should use their time in a way that is consistent with the purposes of the financial assistance. Spending only 14 hours a week studying and 85 waking hours a week on various forms of recreation does not strike me as working within the reasonable bounds of actively making the most of one's opportunities for education and professional pursuits, which presumably is why most financial assistance is given to students.