From the enclosure movement in 18th century England, the owning class has been tasked with answering how to maximize the productivity of their peons. As the modern American university becomes increasingly corporate and a profit-seeking endeavor, similar questions are now being asked by university administrators. Many things have been tried in the past- lashings, paternalistic brainwashing, foremen - which are certainly things university administrators should try, but may not be the most effective. This project found that the answer lies in the Yerkes-Dodson law, not external disincentives. The Yerkes Dodson law is a psychological theory stating that humans are most productive at their given “optimal arousal state” - i.e. a mental state somewhere between underwhelmed and overwhelmed. By shifting this state rightwards, students will be able to undertake more stress and therefore be more productive than they currently are under present CMU workloads. While this study did not manage to discover a method for causing this rightward shift, we identify the need for such by comparing the effectiveness of other productivity-increasing methods in past literature.
