Except... being a human? Having a family? Decompressing from the stress of studying? Earning a living? (I worked 35 hours a week in school so I could eat...)

And his cousin, the apprentice electrician has been working 40 hours/week, with two weeks vacation, studying to become a journeyman and doing all those other things.

Why are college students given such a light schedule?

(I also worked my way through college, but that seems to be less practical now, since the price of college has risen much faster that wages for jobs that students can get. Although I think it is a good idea for students to have jobs off campus to get an introduction to real work.)

Wasn't my experience at any of the major or minor tech companies I've worked at. I've never been expected to study outside of work hours, and most places pretty quickly gave more than two weeks vacation.

> Why are college students given such a light schedule?

Presumably because they have hours of coursework every day, they should be socializing and networking, they have to work to feed themselves and pay tuition, they have a family to see to, and practicing/exploring their domain on their own?

I was enrolled in 20 credit hours/semester and worked 35 hours a week. Nothing about my schedule was 'light'. I think it's wrong to assume that college students necessarily have it 'easy'.

Except universities aren't something like an evening school that is explicitly designed around this idea. University lectures do not follow a nice time table that allows that. Lectures start at different times depending on the day of the week. Therefore your workday will start at a different hour every day, except all your colleagues still work their 9 to 5 schedule which will make you significantly less productive than them because you don't get to meet them every day. There can be gaps between lectures but you can't just go back and forth between university and work. It takes time to travel and even if you can do it in a reasonable amount of time you will end up doing multiple context switches per day. This makes working significantly more than 20 hours per week extremely hard.

I read the article you linked and was hoping it contained new research to clarify or refute the work done by Ericsson, but it didn't. The linked article regurgitates two of the key points in The Road To Excellence by Ericsson:

* You need to be engaged in deliberate practice (e.g pushing yourself outside of your current area of expertise). Not mindless work. I'm not an expert driver from my 10,000+ hours of commuting. * 10,000 hours isn't a set figure. It's an average at best. The premise is claiming that people in the top-tier (2%-5%) spent a lot of time consistently practicing their area before reaching the top-tier.

The "10,000 hour rule" hasn't been debunked. It just doesn't mean what some people assume it means when first hearing it refereed to as the "10,000 hour rule".