Thanks to Jawbone, writers at the Jawbone Blog looked at data on sleep patterns for tens of thousands of students at over 100 universities across the United States (for a total of 1.4 million nights). One of the findings of from the data is show below. It is important to note that:

The relationship between these rankings and amount of sleep, however, was weak (r² < 0.1)

So basically what’s might be happening here is that night owls at highly ranked schools have huge chunks of quality time late in the night when they are not being distracted by everyday life

(Caution: these data show interesting patterns but cannot be used to make strong causal claims without further research).

It was interesting to learn that my students go to bed at 1:10 AM and sleep for 7 hours on average.

HT Ryan Briggs.