Zoom classes are a disaster for colleges. It's time to bring all students back into the classroom.

When the Covid-19 pandemic first hit, in March of 2020, colleges everywhere (including Johns Hopkins University, where I teach and conduct research) shut down and sent everyone home. Within two weeks, we switched all of our classes to Zoom.

It was a remarkable pivot, and necessary at the time. But we’re now more than two years into the pandemic, and many colleges and universities are still holding classes on Zoom, or offering a Zoom option for students who want it.

This has become, to put it bluntly, a disaster for students.

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a lengthy article in April that surveyed faculty all over the country. It paints a grim picture: students are reporting mental health problems in record numbers, grades are low, and attendance is even lower. Depression is widespread. College life, it seems, is not good.

Most universities returned to in-person classes this past fall, and some returned in person as early as the fall of 2020. All of them instituted systems to prevent Covid-19 outbreaks, including regular PCR testing, required quarantines for anyone who was positive, and (most important of all) required vaccinations.

These precautions generally worked: we saw very few serious outbreaks of Covid-19 on college campuses, and even fewer serious illnesses. College students, I should note, are at very low risk for serious illness, based on their age.

Unfortunately, all of these precautions sent a loud message to students: you’re in danger! Quarantine, hibernate, stay away from other people!

And now some of them don’t want to come back.

At many universities, the strategy for returning to campus has included a combination of hybrid and in-person classes. Some schools had students return and held all classes over Zoom, at least for the first semester or two. Others held smaller classes in person, and large lectures were delivered by Zoom. Many colleges (mine included) required professors to record all lectures, even if students were there in person.

These strategies continued right through the current semester. Zoom recordings were available to anyone, in part to ensure that students who caught the virus would still be able to keep up with classes.

That sounded fair enough, but it hasn’t worked out well at all. It turns out that – surprise! – 19-year-olds don’t always make the wisest decisions about how to manage their time.

For example, if you give them the choice between (A) get dressed, walk across campus, and sit in a classroom for an hour to listen to a professor’s lecture, or (B) stay in your dorm room and veg out, and (maybe) watch the Zoom recording of the lecture later–they usually choose B!

Attendance at in-person classes is shocking low, across the country. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, in one large biology class of 120 students, only 20-30 showed up in person, and only one or two watched the video. According to the Chronicle’s survey, “far fewer students show up to class. Those who do avoid speaking when possible. Many skip the readings or the homework. They struggle on tests.”

Not only that, but students almost never watch those Zoom recordings. They think they will go back and watch the video, but the little data that we have shows that they don’t. Remember, these are 19- and 20-year olds.

Fortunately, there’s a way to fix this. Universities need to remember that we’re in the business of educating students, and we can’t just ask the students what they want and then give it to them. They need guidance on how to get educated.

We need to tell our students what to do. That means we need to stop offering them recordings that they can “catch up on later,” because they just won’t do that. Sure, they will grumble if they have to get out of bed and go to class, but what teenager doesn’t?

And here’s one of the things we need to tell them: if you’re a student, you are required to attend class, in person. But what if they are sick? Well, we’ve had ways to deal with that forever, and we simply need to return to those ways. Students can miss a class, maybe two, and get notes from others or meet one-on-one with the professor to find out what they missed. This happens occasionally, and we can manage it.

One thing I’ve realized during these pandemic classes is that no combination of homework and tests will ensure that a student has learned everything in the classes and in the readings for a course. So to those students who say “look, I did well on all the assignments and passed the final, so isn’t that enough?” I answer no, it’s not.

A college class is more than just the sum of the grades on the assignments. Being in class with other students is a critical part of the educational experience: it enables countless unplanned interactions, both social and intellectual, that make college much, much more than just watching a bunch of lectures on Zoom and doing the assignments.

And, as many of my fellow professors have pointed out, it affects us too: lecturing to a room full of young people is a far different experience from lecturing to screen, no matter how many people are on the other side of that screen. “Teaching to me is like a live performance,” one of my colleagues told me, “and the audience interaction (even non-verbal feedback) affects that.”

Of course traditional lectures aren’t the perfect way to deliver an education. I know that college classes could benefit from all sorts of innovations, such as “flipped” classrooms and more hands-on experiences. But classes as we’ve been teaching them are pretty darned good, and they’re a heckuva lot better than staring at a screen in the loneliness of a dorm room. For their own good, and for ours, we need to bring all our students back to class.