Nor could the trends be explained by larger numbers of students going to school part-time or taking longer to finish.

According to sociologists Jonathan and Stephen Cole, almost all of the scientific papers that are cited most frequently and considered most significant are written by members of a handful of leading departments, while the vast accumulation of other published articles have little or no influence on the progress of the field.

Writings in scientific journals fare better; only 25 percent are reportedly never cited.

Thirty-two percent claimed that they had not taken any courses that demanded more than forty pages of reading per week.

In the most rigorous evaluation yet conducted of an online course, William Bowen and his colleagues found that students in dozens of courses who were taught statistics in the blended, Carnegie Mellon manner learned as much as those taught in the conventional lecture course format.

A staggering 98 percent of all published articles in the arts and humanities are never cited, and the corresponding figure for articles in the social sciences is 75 percent, a figure only slightly less dismaying.

lower. One study issued by the US Department of Education found that among the high school graduates of 1992 who were college-qualified, only 52 percent of low-income students and 62 percent of middle-income students had entered a four-year college by 1994.

In a national survey from 2009, half of the seniors reported that they had not written a single paper over

In another effort to use technology effectively, Carol Twigg has been working with colleges to reconfigure the way their professors teach large introductory courses in a variety of subjects ranging from chemistry and biology to English, fine arts, and sociology.