By Jonathan Malesic

Mr. Malesic is the author of �The End of Burnout.� He teaches first-year
writing at Southern Methodist University and lives in Dallas.

In my classes last fall, a third of the students were missing nearly every
time, and usually not the same third. Students buried their faces in their
laptop screens and let my questions hang in the air unanswered. My classes
were small, with nowhere to hide, yet some students openly slept through
them.

I was teaching writing at two very different universities: one private and
wealthy, its lush lawns surrounded by towering fraternity and sorority
houses; the other public, with a diverse array of strivers milling about
its largely brutalist campus. The problems in my classrooms, though, were
the same. Students just weren�t doing what it takes to learn.

By several measures � attendance, late assignments, quality of in-class
discussion � they performed worse than any students I had encountered in
two decades of teaching. They didn�t even seem to be trying. At the
private school, I required individual meetings to discuss their research
paper drafts; only six of 14 showed up. Usually, they all do.

I wondered if it was me, if I was washed up. But when I posted about this
on Facebook, more than a dozen friends teaching at institutions across the
country gave similar reports. Last month, The Chronicle of Higher
Education received comments from more than 100 college instructors about
their classes. They, too, reported poor attendance, little discussion,
missing homework and failed exams.

The pandemic certainly made college more challenging for students, and
over the past two years, compassionate faculty members have loosened
course structures in response: They have introduced recorded lectures,
flexible attendance and deadline policies, and lenient grading. In light
of the widely reported mental health crisis on campuses, some students and
faculty members are calling for those looser standards and remote options
to persist indefinitely, even as vaccines and Covid therapies have made it
relatively safe to return to prepandemic norms.

I also feel compassion for my students, but the learning breakdown has
convinced me that continuing to relax standards would be a mistake. Looser
standards are contributing to the problem, because they make it too easy
for students to disengage from classes.

Student disengagement is a problem for everyone, because everyone depends
on well-educated people. College prepares students for socially essential
careers � including as engineers and nurses � and to be citizens who bring
high-level intellectual habits to bear on big societal problems, from
climate change to the next political crisis. On a more fundamental level
it also prepares many students to be responsible adults: to set goals and
figure out what help they need to attain them.

Higher education is now at a turning point. The accommodations for the
pandemic can either end or be made permanent. The task won�t be easy, but
universities need to help students rebuild their ability to learn. And to
do that, everyone involved � students, faculties, administrators and the
public at large � must insist on in-person classes and high expectations
for fall 2022 and beyond.

In March 2020, essentially all of U.S. higher education went remote
overnight. Faculties, course designers and educational technology staffs
scrambled to move classes online, developing new techniques on the fly.
The changes often entailed a loosening of requirements. A study by
Canadian researchers found that nearly half of U.S. faculty members
reduced their expectations for the quantity of work in their classes in
spring 2020, and nearly a third lowered quality expectations. That made
sense in those emergency conditions; it seemed to me that students and
faculties just needed to make it through.

That fall, most students were learning at least partly online.
Simultaneously, colleges gave undergraduate students more autonomy and
flexibility over how they learned, with options to go remote or
asynchronous.

Faculty members and students across the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where I
live, described a widespread breakdown in learning that year. Matthew
Fujita, a biology professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, said
the results of the first exam in his fall 2020 genetics class, a large
lecture course, reflected �the worst performance I�d ever seen on a test.�

Amy Austin, who teaches Spanish at U.T.A., began calling her students her
�divine little silent circles� � a reference to Dante Alighieri�s �Divine
Comedy� � because she would typically see only their initials in a circle
on her computer screen, none of them speaking.

Students� self-reports track with these observations. A June 2021 survey
by Inside Higher Ed found that more than half of students said they
learned less that academic year than they did before the pandemic.

There is much evidence that students learn less online than they do in
person, in part because online courses demand considerable self-discipline
and motivation. And some lessons just don�t translate to a remote format.
�You can�t learn how to use a microscope online,� said Melissa Walsh, who
teaches biology and environmental science at U.T.A. �You just can�t.�

It�s no surprise, then, that in one of the first studies to examine broad-
scale learning outcomes during the pandemic, researchers found that the
switch to online learning resulted in more course failures and withdrawals
in the Virginia community-college system, even despite more lenient
grading. Students nationwide reported a greater willingness to cheat, too.

It�s bad enough that so many students had to take classes through a medium
where they don�t do their best. More disconcerting is that when classes
returned to mainly in-person in fall 2021, student performance did not
bounce back. The problem isn�t only that students learn poorly online.
It�s also that when they go through a year or more of remote classes, they
develop habits that harm their ability to learn offline, too.

Image

Credit...Derek Brahney

Dr. Austin said the quality of her students� work had not recovered after
the return to campus. On grammar tests, students continued to score lower
than they did before the pandemic. Now, she told me, the students in her
classroom often met her questions with blank stares. �This is like being
online!� she said. That was my experience, too. In my classes, it often
seemed as if my students thought they were still on Zoom with their
cameras off, as if they had muted themselves.

OPINION CONVERSATION
What will work and life look like after the pandemic?
Is the answer to a fuller life working less?
Jonathan Malesic argues that your job, or lack of one, doesn�t define your
human worth.
What do we lose when we lose the office?
William D. Cohan, a former investment banker, wonders how the next
generation will learn and grow professionally.
How can we reduce unnecessary meetings?
Priya Parker explores why structuring our time is more complicated than
ever.
You�ll probably have fewer friends after the pandemic. Is that normal?
Kate Murphy, the author of �You�re Not Listening,� asks whether your kid�s
soccer teammate�s parents were really the friends you needed.
Many students got out of the habit of coming to class at all. Dr. Walsh
estimated that in her biology course for non-majors this spring, just 30
percent to 40 percent of students attended class, and only a handful
watched her recorded lectures. The students who don�t attend class are
missing out on the best of Dr. Walsh, who recently won a campuswide
teaching award.

�What makes me an effective instructor,� she said, �has a lot to do with
my personality, how I engage in the classroom, using humor. I�m very
animated. I like to walk around the classroom and talk with students.�
Doing so is a way not just to get them engaged but also to test their
learning and adjust her teaching on the fly. �I�m not able to do that with
students who don�t come to the classroom,� she said.

Dr. Walsh added that if students aren�t in the classroom, she can�t
recruit them to collaborate with her on research, an invaluable learning
experience. She also has little to go on when writing recommendations for
medical school.

The problem is bigger than any one professor�s class. It�s hard to insist
on in-person attendance when colleagues are demanding flexibility or, as
Dr. Walsh noted, when non-tenure-track faculty members like her are
evaluated for contract renewal and promotion based on student evaluations.
If students expect recorded lectures � even ones they won�t watch � then
instructors will feel pressure to provide them.

It�s true that some students thrive with the flexibility and freedom
afforded by Covid-era policies. Jeffrey Vancil, a sophomore at the
University of Texas at Dallas (where my wife teaches and where I taught
last year), said that in his first year, he could study more efficiently
by watching lecture recordings on his own schedule and at faster speeds.
He didn�t have to waste time moving from building to building. And with
the extra time, he could work for political groups and as a volunteer
firefighter.