“Joe College has joined the group Lower My GPA…”
College students who use Facebook have significantly lower GPAs than those who do not, according to a new study highlighted by TIME Magazine.
The study, which will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association on April 16, surveyed 219 undergraduate and graduate students and found that the GPAs of Facebook users typically ranged a full grade lower than those of nonusers — 3.0 to 3.5 for users versus 3.5 to 4.0 for their non-networking peers. It also found that 79% of Facebook members did not believe there was any link between their GPA and their networking habits.
“Maybe Facebook users are just prone to distraction,” doctoral candidate Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State University, the study’s author, tells the magazine. “Maybe they are just procrastinators.” What I want to know is how they found enough non-Facebook users on a college campus to make up a control group.
Bonus: …and Twitter makes you amoral.
I’m not sure I’d say they had a “control”, since they didn’t actually document any effect that Facebook itself was having on students. It doesn’t seem to me that this is any more interesting a result than something like, “Students who go to more parties have lower grades than their peers who go to fewer parties.” In fact, I’d think that would be essentially *the same* result.
I thought this bit was especially profound:
“Students who spent more time working at paid jobs were less likely to use Facebook, while students who were more involved in extracurricular activities at school were more likely to use Facebook.”
Really? Shocking!
Comment by Paul — April 14, 2009 @ 5:37 pm
Come on. This is obviously because people without Facebook pages are LOSERS, who are often also NERDS with crazy-high GPAs.
It’s okay though, I don’t hate. Those guys do my Chem homework for me while I’m Facebooking the ladies. Peace.
Comment by Cool Kid — April 14, 2009 @ 5:49 pm
There is more to college than simply earning the highest GPA one conceivably could. A large part of the benefit of attending college is building a social network that will help the individual out after graduation. In the business world, who you know is often as least as important as what you know. Facebook can be a useful tool in keeping connected to one’s social network.
With the exception of a technical position, I’d hire the socially savvy individual with a somewhat lower GPA over the loner with a 4.0 GPA in a heartbeat.
Comment by Crimson Wife — April 14, 2009 @ 5:52 pm
As a thoroughgoing B student, CW, you don’t need to convince me that we are more than our GPAs. I’m not sure how seriously to take this “study” (I suspect not very), but that said, I wonder how successfully Facebook, Twitter, et al translate into “social savviness.” Is the the loner the one with the 4.0? The more time I spend on social networking sites, the more I feel like the loner.
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — April 14, 2009 @ 6:12 pm
The new study may be silly in some ways, but the question of distraction is not.
I recently ordered a book by Irwin Edman, The Contemporary and His Soul (1931). It arrived today; I opened it to a random page (43) and read:
“It remains to be inquired why the capacity for absorption has vanished, a capacity the absence of which is bound to breed despair. The habit of reverence has vanished because we are, on the whole, a rootless generation, and because we tend to be absorbed in our origins rather than in our purposes. The capacity for absorption has vanished, largely because, especially in America, the contemporary lives, to put it briefly, in cities and among words. He has both too little time for that steady contemplation which is an absorption in the world and in things; he has too many odds and ends of time for brooding, for the internal canvassing of his own doubts and insufficiencies.”
Comment by Diana Senechal — April 14, 2009 @ 6:22 pm
Since when is 219 a valid sample of 200 million users?
Comment by Shelly — April 14, 2009 @ 6:34 pm
Shelly is correct. 219 is an insufficient sample. Even 2,019 would be subject to questioning. After all, how many college students are there?
Comment by Paul Hoss — April 14, 2009 @ 7:57 pm