Why would two years of Harvard improve your understanding of primary school topics such as why it's hotter in summer?

Hmm, while I don't doubt the veracity of your results (everyone data dumps to some extent after finals) - your interpretation of them seems to have been influenced by a preexisting anti-Higher Ed. perspective.

Would someone truly interested in a subject keep Google searching it again and again? That's a pretty big assumption to make.

An interesting extension of this would be to look at Google Scholar/Amazon searches for the same topic before, during and after the mid-terms and final dates...

I think that there are other ways to interpret the Google Trends data. If during one school term there are thousands of students writing a paper about "Slavery", you would of course expect the term to peak. However it would be wrong to expect that interest to remain once the term is over because not all students would remain interested in that topic. Further even if a small percentage retains sustained interest in the topic - after a single detailed read on the topic (lets say on Wikipedia) they will probably be directed to more detailed (and trustworthy) references available in the local library.

I don't disagree with the fact that most people forget most of their school ed - only that there might be other things that explain the Trends data.

If a student reads the Iliad in class and develops a lifelong interest in the Iliad-- he reads the book over the course of the year each year, learns Homeric Greek, and generally becomes a fan of the Iliad -- then his interest curve will look just like this!

Even this super-student shows a spike of interest during the semester, when he has to write a paper, as compared to the long term!

I would exempt the core knowledge curriculum from your criticism, since it is intended that this be studied during the early years of education - mainly between about 6 and 14 years.

The idea is that stuff you learn at that age sticks with you for the rest of your life - so you wouldn't _need_ to Google it...

thats a lot of conclusions to draw from what people are actively searching for on google.

Amen, brother.

the modern university system is a racket whose purpose is to (a) employ superannuated boomers and (b) produce presentable dilletantes who can make good SWPL party chatter.

Can we afford to keep doing this?

Using Google Trends to track retention seems weird to me. My experience is that I google for stuff i don't remember, not the stuff that I do. But beyond that...

You may be right about the value of undergrad non-pre-professional study; I go back and forth in my own mind on the topic. But to the extent that part of the curriculum is valuable (and today I'm a believer), its value outside the academy is not in its immediate applicability to one's everyday life (which you might be able to see in Google Trends). I took a history course in Thomas Jefferson as a soph, for example. I have never since needed to know anything about Jefferson beyond what I knew coming into that class (that he was accomplished and interesting in a wide variety of fields, not merely as a Founding Father). But by following the range of Jefferson's interests, I gained some understanding of concepts new to me at the time ("romantic" as opposed to "classical", for instance), and that understanding lets me observe and participate in everyday life with a perspective I'd lack otherwise. I think that perspective is important and improves both my quality of life and the quality of my participation. That's not something you can measure with Google Trends, but it's not "flusssshhh" either.

bioI is right. If alumni are ignorant of the Earth's axial tilt and its effects, they need to repeat the third grade and never mind college.

I'm not sure how accurately Google tracks interest. These factors must be taken into account:

1. Interest in anything is going to flag during summer in most of North America; because it's HOT here, and heat is enervating.

2. The "term paper and finals" effect you point to is also a misleading marker of interest. It is a marker of life and death. I might be genuinely interested in Roman history (as can be attested through my posts here). But I did a lot more research per day when I had a paper due.

sorry google data does not show lifetime interest in a topic or the retention of knowledge. I don't search google everytime I use pythagorean theorem, I recall it from memory.

I will give it to you that it's interesting to see how school and new technology integrates but you made way to many assumptions.

College and university are not about higher-learning for the average student (if they've ever been). What there are places were young people can enjoy themselves while making social contacts and figuring out what they want to do in life. It's more about life experiences than education.

It may irritate those of us who truly want to learn at a higher level, but college for most students is more about thriving in the social group than learning esoteric facts. That's human nature. We're not designed to want to spend hours memorizing information while sitting in a desk, but to get out in the social jungle and advance the fitness of our genes.

The pure pursuit of knowledge is for the very few; I'm not saying such individuals don't exist, they're just rare compared to the overall college population.

Not all people retain everything from their courses, but everyone retains a small amount, probably in their specialization. That explains your trends.

This is highly entertaining, but I think you are overly confident about your interpretation of the data. Assuming that the peaks in the data are related to studying for course requirements (coursework, exams), it's only natural that there will be a decline afterwards. That's because students who've completed one requirement will then be expected (holidays aside) to work for a new requirement, which may be on a different topic entirely. Thus, for any given individual, I'd expect that as a trough appears for one topic, the curve starts to incline for some other topic. Students may just be responding to the demands of their ecology.
None of this is to deny that students may often quickly forget what they've learned, nor that some students may not be particularly interested in the things they study, but I just don't think you can draw hard conclusions from the trends you point to.

You all are thinking of yourselves -- i.e., smart and highly curious people. Sure, you used the web to learn about Roman history more during exam week than during your summer -- but you still used it a lot during summer!

But what about the typical student -- what is the baseline level that this student's interest returns to outside of exam time?

The average student -- not the average biology major at Stanford -- couldn't care less. That's why you have to force them to take the courses in the first place.

More, their interest is pretty low even during exams and writing papers -- they want to grok just enough to get them a decent grade, and no more. Even most smart students have a "will this be on the test?" level of interest at best. Given its highest level is pretty low absolutely, when it plummets, it means a plummet to near zero.

The average student is not researching squat during the summer, other than what the best sunscreen is and which affordable Latin American country has the loosest women.

As for not searching for a topic after initial exposure -- that assumes you've retained the knowledge, which, again, most people don't. Students below roughly 115 IQ won't remember it just due to that. But even Harvard students won't remember it because they didn't care to tuck it away -- "Hey, I aced the test, so why bother remembering what causes the seasons?"

Imagine asking the typical high school or college graduate how you determine the nature of the roots of a quadratic function. They learned that in high school algebra, and touched on it again in just about any college-level math course they took.

This is typical -- the need to Google something does not decline with time after exposure, except in the case of smart nerds. For the average student, even for non-nerdy Harvard students, the need is fairly constant because they don't remember much.

"Hey, I aced the test, so why bother remembering what causes the seasons?"
"Remember"?????? You internalise such a thing when you are just a wee mite. "Remember" is hardly the apposite verb.

True curiosity is not a very common trait. Thus most college students are more interested in a degree than they are in an education.

Overconfidence is one of Agnostic's vices. Just look at his blog's posts on low-carb diets, or the merits of underage girls. I suppose that his lack of self-reflection makes him a more entertaining read though.

How about tracking someone's continued interest in a topic by the fact if he/she keeps the books from the respective (college) class?

Begging the question much, Agnostic? You're using your data support your assertion that most college kids don't care. Then, when your inference is questioned, you respond by saying most college kids don't care.

Circular reasoning if I've ever heard it ;-)

I tend to agree with the commenters here--agnostic's bias against the higher-ed-for-all mentality strikes me as sound in a lot of ways, and it is amusing that these academic 101-type terms get searched a great deal during exam and paper periods. But in themselves these Google trends don't carry the weight agnostic wishes to assign them.

The stickiness of intellectual training is an interesting issue in context. Lately I seem to have been meeting people who have retained all of the bias and none of the hard learning and data from the courses in history and social science they took in college. A girl, for example, who can't recall any significant early American dates or the names of more than three or four "Founders," but who knows categorically that all of the Founders were left-wing atheists who were eager to establish a mass democratic multicultural welfare state. Higher ed might not be educating in the sense that honest, well-intended people employ the term, but clearly it's doing something!

"Students below roughly 115 IQ won't remember it just due to that."

Does anyone have a good link that discusses the relationship between IQ and episodic or semantic memory. My recollection is that intelligence does not correlate strongly with long term memory. (Intelligence does correlate with working memory.)

When I understand a subject well then I see patterns between the facts. I also see mappings between what I already know and what I am learning. I can then remember specific facts by recalling the pattern or the mapping. So intelligence helps me remember structured information. However, I don't think intelligence helps me remember a phone number. (Intelligence would help me learn a method for memorizing phone numbers.)