It’s arrived.  

You’ve made the poor choice to stay up far too late on a school night and now you’re paying the price. You grasp your head in a fit of grogginess, roll yourself over to stare at the harsh light of your phone and gaze at the ceiling contemplating your life choices. 

The 8 a.m. 

It’s the bane of every college student’s existence. Whether it comes for you or your roommate, no matter if you’re a senior or a freshman, the 8 a.m. class remains an undeniable fact of collegiate life. It raises an interesting question: why do we have 8 a.m. classes? 
Surely someone in the long line of the chain of command must have suffered the disgrace of trudging to an 8 a.m. class. Why hasn’t someone thrown their hands into the air and said, “enough is enough?” Where is the outcry against what must be the highest cause of last-minute schedule changes? We ask ourselves these questions in vain. All the same, the dreaded morning rolls around after a poor night’s sleep, and we find ourselves just as starved for caffeine as we were yesterday. 

What if I told you it didn’t have to be this way? What if I told you that despite the research, colleges around the U.S. refuse to acknowledge the downsides of 8 a.m. classes? A 2017 research study by NPR concluded that 8 a.m. classes “start too early in the morning for students’ brains.” NPR goes on to list the ideal starting time for college students as 10:00 or 11:00 a.m. And NPR’s study and conclusion are hardly unique; as time goes on, greater amounts of evidence against the 8 a.m. get discovered.  

In the interest of fairness, we must consider which parties these classes do work best for. The obvious candidate is the professor. The professor of an 8 a.m. is a fully developed adult who has attained a normalized sleep schedule. For them, 8 a.m.’s are simply the reality of their chosen careers. The start time of the 8 a.m. may benefit the parents, older students or even commuters that make up every university student body. For them, it’s extremely helpful to schedule classes at a time where they can still juggle kids, a career or commute time. While 8 a.m. classes work well for some students, most students who make up those classes are younger and live on campus. And, as we’ve discussed, 8 a.m.’s were not even remotely designed with these students in mind. 

So why then do they persist? Who is the sadist that sits in an office every year and perpetuates this cycle? The truth, somewhat less dramatically, is that when it comes to higher education, tradition is paramount. People enjoy the predictable; and when there has been and always will be the reliable evil of the 8 a.m. course, everyone gains a common enemy and shared triumph. It persists, in part, from a disconnect between professors’ and students’ interests. Professors see the 8 a.m. as a mild inconvenience and downplay the negative effects. Students suffer the consequences. For students, 8 a.m. can be the difference in a test grade, a GPA point or even a grad school admission; and no one wants those things to hinge on something as preventable as early mornings.  

So, I ask: do we march on? Blindly following an outdated, harmful tradition? Or are we in for a rude awakening?