What happened to studying?

From the Boston Globe:

They come with polished resumes and perfect SAT scores. Their grades are often impeccable. Some elite universities will deny thousands of high school seniors with 4.0 grade point averages in search of an elusive quality that one provost called “intellectual vitality.” The perception is that today’s over-achieving, college-driven kids have it — whatever it is. They’re not just groomed; they’re ready. There’s just one problem.

Once on campus, the students aren’t studying.

It is a fundamental part of college education: the idea that young people don’t just learn from lectures, but on their own, holed up in the library with books and, perhaps, a trusty yellow highlighter. But new research, conducted by two California economics professors, shows that over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping. According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours....

The article goes on to state that the specific numbers (which I would like to see) show a decline across fields, college types, and various other demographics.

I'd say, though, that in my case, the issue is the accessibility of distractions or other ways to spend my time. I know, cognitively, that I should spend 3 hours reading a book passage, but those 3 hours get filled with a phone call, an e-mail, and other distractions such that my time (and more importantly, comprehension) is more limited. For the most part, I still learn what I need to learn, and oftentimes, more of the "aha" moments occur outside of the classroom. Yet I don't study as much as I should - I feel a lesser need to memorize who said what when it is so easily Googleable.

I don't have a solution, but I have been working for the past few months on building a personal set of memorized information, like the various philosophers whose ideas supported the American government construction of rights, and placing that where no power outage can threaten it.