Why Students Do and Do Not Attend Classes

Class attendance is a puzzle. Most undergraduate degree programs require students to take forty to forty-five appropriately distributed cours es. Colleges and universities take consid erable effort to ensure that a qualified teacher meets with enrolled students for a particular number of hours during a semester for each academic credit awarded. Buildings are built, rooms are reserved, teaching schedules are set, and students enroll with the assumption that faculty-student encounters will occur. Yet, quite often many students do not show up. Sometimes illness or another calamity makes an absence unavoidable. But we know that more students choose not to