Complaints about students’ declining work ethic are nothing new, extending back to an 1894 Harvard commission claiming students had begun to hand in mediocre work. So, are today’s students really lazier than their predecessors, or am I pining for a mythical academic golden age?

Thanks to new data, we know the answer.

It’s true that students in the wake of World War II worked a lot harder than all who came after them. In the early 1960s, the average student put in about 25 hours per week. By 2000, that number had fallen to about 14 hours, a 44 percent decline, and it has stayed around that level ever since. In other words, baby boomers experienced the most rapid fall in academic standards, but today’s students work about as hard on academics as millennials and Gen X did.

The easiest explanation for this slide is technology. I can type essays and analyze data in ways my grandparents could not — much faster ways. I can also be (and often am) distracted more easily by technology. Yet the technology excuse doesn’t stand up to reason, because the greatest drop in academic effort happened from about 1960 to 1980, well before the widespread use of personal computers, according to economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy Marks, who have studied the available data.

Marks considers the Vietnam War a more plausible explanation for the steep drop in rigor. During the war and military draft, professors gave students higher marks to help ensure they weren’t kicked out and subsequently sent overseas. The Vietnam era had steeper grade inflation than any time since. Once standards fell, picking them back up was difficult.

More recent data from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) suggest that the effort students put into academic work has remained stable since 2000. Students today are working about as hard as, or even a bit harder than, those 20 years prior, a result corroborated by other data sources.

Another relevant shift, in the early 1980s, was a rise in college tuition — large enough to outpace growth in median income. This forced more students to work part-time to pay for school, a change that left less time for studying. Also, the higher tuition rose, the more families viewed it as an “investment” in a future high-paying job. The share of freshmen who considered “Being Well-Off Financially” to be an “essential” or “very important” objective rose from around 40 percent in 1966 to a bit over 80 percent by 2016. As a result, students now spend more time than ever in preprofessional extracurricular activities such as internships and networking clubs, further reducing study time.

A tacit contract has formed over the past several decades in which students exchange less studying for high marks. Professors grade easier because they recognize, consciously or not, that lower classroom effort doesn’t necessarily mean less hard work overall.

The real question, then, isn’t whether today’s students are lazy. They have not only upheld the study habits of their parents but also maintained the work ethic of their grandparents: the total time spent on extracurriculars and part-time jobs more than makes up for the decline in schoolwork since the 1960s.

Nor should we be asking whether to scrap outside-of-class activities and return to the academic focus of the mid-20th century. So long as tuition remains sky-high, students will continue to view a college degree as a financial asset and devote ample time to professional preparation.

The focus should instead be on how students spend their free time outside of work, whether academic or extracurricular.

It turns out that there has been a steady decline in college partying since the Great Recession as well as a precipitous drop in general socializing among young adults. This is probably due to the advent of ubiquitous smartphones and social media. Students now spend almost nine hours a week on social media. Add five hours of streaming television plus five hours surfing the internet weekly. (These latter estimates, from older surveys, are probably underestimates.)

No wonder undergraduates, who are spending less time with one another and more glued to their devices, also exhibit record levels of anxiety and depression. To be sure, there is still much we don’t know about the relationship between technology and mental health, but it’s fair to assume that trading face-to-face time for scrolling isn’t a recipe for a meaningful or enjoyable college experience.

There’s no need to turn back the clock to the days of typewriters and slide rules, but our universities could benefit from prioritizing good old-fashioned interaction. Quality time with friends is an antidote to the high-stakes extracurricular and pre-professional juggling act that defines modern college life.

It’s been six weeks since I graduated, but it hasn’t taken long to discover that I was a misled curmudgeon, focusing too much on my generation’s dedication to academics. Our work ethic is fine; it’s our social habits that need work.