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Harvard faculty — and College Dean Rakesh Khurana — are increasingly concerned about students failing to take their coursework seriously.

As far as I can tell, no one has quantified this trend, so I did: Students spend, on average, 6.5 hours per course on work outside the classroom each week, or a total of 36 hours weekly on academics, assuming a standard four-course load with two one-hour and fifteen minute weekly meetings. That leaves 132 hours each week for eating, sleeping, socializing, exercising, networking, campaigning, partying, influencing, protesting — and, well, writing columns in The Crimson.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these activities — in fact, some of my most formative and educational activities at Harvard have been my extracurricular research and work at The Crimson and Harvard Hillel. It is also true that the time Harvard students spend on coursework significantly exceeds the national average of college students as estimated in a 2018 study.

But insofar as faculty are worried about students’ scholastic commitment — an understandable concern if students currently spend less than a full work-week on academics — they must acknowledge that levels of curricular engagement vary vastly by department. The crisis of academic rigor is not a school-wide epidemic: It is concentrated in a select set of concentrations, and any solutions to it must be differentiated by department.

To understand the current landscape of Harvard’s academics, I downloaded five semesters of Q guide data scraped from the Internet by my peer Jay Chooi ’26. I then filtered the data, which spanned Spring 2022 to Spring 2024, and removed entries with course codes indicating they were graduate courses; 5,651 courses remained with an aggregate response rate of 83 percent. To compute departments’ mean workloads, I calculated a weighted average of students’ self-reported workload, weighing courses proportional to their number of Q Guide respondents.

The resulting graph is striking. The most time-consuming subjects — computer science, math, and statistics — all demand an average of over nine hours per week for each course. The least time-consuming — music and theatre, dance, and media courses — require nearly a third as much time.

Overall, the divide between hard sciences and language courses on one side and humanities and social sciences on the other is quite notable.

To be fair, my analysis is not comprehensive. Though the response rate is high, the sample is still incomplete. The data is also all self-reported and therefore error-prone. Moreover, reports on weekly work are capped at 30 hours, and so some of the course workloads might be underestimated. Finally, some graduate courses with unconventional course numberings may have been inadvertently left in the sample (and, conversely, some undergraduate courses may have been unduly excluded). Nevertheless, the magnitude of variance in time commitments is unlikely explained by these factors alone.

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Also, since students frequently take classes outside their concentration, their actual workload can easily differ from their department’s average. Regardless, these numbers paint a picture of vast divides in curricular commitment across fields.

As faculty and administrators seek to return rigor to the classroom, this breakdown of coursework by department raises a number of questions. Will all courses be expected to increase rigor, or will Harvard mandate that music classes assign double-digit workloads while leaving math courses untouched? Will the University permit certain courses and departments to assign less work? In essence, what requirements of students are fair, and to what degree are they permitted to fluctuate by subject and class?

A one-size-fits-all strategy is the wrong approach. Learning in an English seminar is best served by reading a book while learning in a statistics class is achieved by laboring over problem sets; there’s no reason to expect that the hours required to do these activities arbitrarily match.

However, the current status quo is far too extreme. Just as it would be absurd to insist on uniform workloads across departments, it is absurd to tell students that an average of only four hours per course is necessary to master psychology concepts while the requisite workload in physics is twice that. Self-respecting disciplines should demand more of their students.

If administrators like Dean Khurana are serious about academic laxity at Harvard, they must be prepared to have frank conversations about the source of this problem and recognize its disparate incidence in humanities and social science courses.

Perhaps the administration is unsatisfied with the level of effort supplied by hard science concentrators too. Regardless, more significant reforms are necessary in the soft sciences and humanities compared to STEM fields. Furthermore, because the types of work in these departments are different — social sciences and humanities generally assign more readings while the hard sciences assign more problem sets — a division-by-division approach is warranted.

How exactly to implement solutions is complicated. There are important debates about what quantity of homework is reasonable, what grading guidelines are fair, and how uniformly these expectations should apply to different departments and classes. It is also worth considering faculty independence and the consequences of both top-down and bottom-up approaches.

The one thing that is clear is that solutions must be guided by data. And here the data is unambiguous: Some departments require merely a push — others need a wake-up call.

Jacob M. Miller ’25, a former Crimson Editorial chair, is a double concentrator in Mathematics and Economics in Lowell House.