Does high school behavior affect college study habits?

A recent University of California - Los Angeles survey showed that this year’ freshman class took more challenging courses and studied more in high school than previous classes have. But will these facts necessarily translate into success in college?

It's logical to assume that students who spent more time doing homework and reviewing course material during their senior year of high school would be better prepared for college workloads, but college can be overwhelming due to many other factors — even for students who achieved above-average high school grades.

Spending six or more hours a week doing homework and studying for tests sounds like a recipe for college success, but this isn’t always the case.

For students without access to opportunities in high school — perhaps because they didn’t have a driver’s license, or their school didn’t offer extracurricular activities — it can be difficult to balance time in college where hundreds of clubs and groups are available for students to get involved in.

Susan Scott, a junior at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, attended a small high school with a rigorous academic program. The 14 students in her graduating class each did at least two hours of homework every day, and all were required to write a research thesis during their senior year.

All that work seems like it would produce great collegiate scholars, but the graduating class had mixed results during their first year of college. The transition from a small school to a large university was difficult for many students, including Scott, despite their academic training.

“As a college student, you have to live by new standards,” Scott says. “There’s so much going on that prioritizing your classes can be a challenge.”

While time management is something that all college students have to learn — unless you went to a boarding school for high school — it can be more difficult depending on one’s high school environment.

Balancing work and outside activities may actually be more difficult for those who worked harder in high school. Students who spent more time studying in high school were also the ones who participated in more extracurricular activities.

While high school schedules can often accommodate a sport or other organization, it’s easy for first-year students to become too involved in college. With volunteering, internships and sports all vying for students’ attention, many freshmen become overwhelmed by taking on too many activities.

But other students like Sarah Miller, a freshman at the Fashion Institute of Technology, believe that if you’ve developed a stable work ethic in high school, you’ll be able to manage your time in college.

While in high school, Miller took as many AP courses as her schedule would allow.

“They pushed me to study harder than any regular or honors courses taught at my school,” Miller said. “I was able to understand what it takes to keep up in college.”

Despite her rigorous course load -- Miller is majoring in fashion merchandising management -- she also interns at CocoKouture Magazine, where she became the group blog’s youngest editor after two months of interning.

If you’re devoted to what you do, you’ll be able to balance extracurricular activities and classes no matter what your high school experience was, Miller said.

Meghan DeMaria is a Spring 2012 Paste BN Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.

This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.