Study: College students who use Facebook earn lower GPAs

Last month, Facebook announced it had signed up its 200 millionth user. Among the core users of the social networking site—and the group for whom it all began—are college students. Questions have recently arisen, however, regarding the impact of using such websites on academic performance.

A study from Ohio State University, which was discussed in this College News article by Ivana Cheong, has found that college students who use Facebook generally spend less time studying for classes, potentially leading to lower grades for those students.

In the OSU study, Ms. Cheong states that:

The data shows that college-aged Facebook users spend an average of one to five hours a week studying, whereas nonusers studied for 11 to 15 hours per week. This discrepancy between the hours spent studying may explain why the users generally have GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, whereas nonusers have GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0.

Aryn Karpinski, co-author of the study and a doctoral candidate at OSU, said in a statement that “we can’t say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying, but we did find a relationship there.”

My question is, Are these findings really surprising? Of course students who spend more time socializing outside of class will tend to get lower grades. That is something that held true long before Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter came along. The only difference now is that the socializing can be done through a website rather than by telephone or face-to-face.

What the study failed to analyze is how the amount of time students spent on the site affected their academic performance. Of course, the obvious conclusion would be that the more time a student spends on Facebook, the lower her/his grades will be.

Facebook, like sports or movies or video games or any other non-academic activity, is perfectly fine to partake in. It’s healthy and beneficial to live a balanced life in college and to keep in contact with friends and family. The problem arises, in my opinion, when students spend an excessive amount of time on Facebook—or doing any other extracurricular activity for that matter. Only then do they cut into the student’s performance in school.

So should students avoid Facebook? Of course not. Should they avoid spending 3 hours a day on Facebook? Absolutely.

This isn’t news. It’s common sense.

Follow me on this and other topics on Twitter: twitter.com/henricksen.

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