According to a new study, nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates show almost no increase in learning in their first two years of college.

The study shows that two years in college, 45 percent of students showed no significant gains in learning and after four years, while 36 percent showed little change. The study found that students also spend 50 percent less time studying compared with students a few decades ago.

The book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska, released these findings based off of transcripts and surveys of more than 3,000 full-time traditional-age students on 29 campuses nationwide, along with their results on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test that gauges students’ critical thinking, analytic reasoning and writing skills.

These studies are an insult to every university in the United States.

Is the book trying to infer our parents are wasting their money on our education? What about Ivy League colleges? Are those students wasting their time too, just going to the university merely for its name?

With the economy being the way it is, students have to work especially hard to compete in today’s workforce. So many people are being laid off and looking for jobs, making it even more difficult for us to compete with those who have more work experience.

Graduate colleges are becoming more difficult to enroll in by increasing their admission criteria and this study’s results makes it seem as though college is a waste of time and that we are not learning anything useful. But we beg to differ.

College teaches us how to develop our time-management skills, enhance our ability to interact with different types of individuals, facilitate the acquisition of knowledge and perhaps most importantly, discover who we are. Earning a college diploma may not seem like much of an achievement to some individuals, but it’s a feat many individuals are proud to say they’ve accomplished.