College kids struggling to make friends are turning to a pre-millennium trick to get better at socializing: They’re putting away their cellphones.
In an age where students spend most of their waking hours staring at screens — whether it be their laptops or phones — colleges are looking for ways to help students ease their isolation and form meaningful social connections.
Leaders at New York University started NYU IRL, or NYU “in real life,” in hopes of encouraging a culture change that would see students spending more time in the real world than online.
More than 200 NYU students recently gathered for the “Around the Longest Table” dinner. The dinner, which spanned nearly an entire city block, allowed students and even some staff to converse with strangers, The Washington Post reported.
“If you’re someone who went to college 20 years ago, I don’t think you understand how different the experience is now, how much harder it is to interact with people,” NYU junior Grant Callahan told the Post.
Growing up immersed in the current technology — and hitting key milestones during the coronavirus pandemic — has left many young people “socially illiterate,” Callahan explained.
The offline initiative has been implemented at NYU’s campuses in New York, Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, and the university plans to include the idea of using devices more sparingly in its student orientations, according to the report. Students have taken to the idea, with many flocking to phone-free parties and other IRL events.
“The best connections I’ve made with people have been face-to-face,” senior Berivan Ibrahim told the Post, noting she made her best friend at the university when the WiFi went down freshman year.
NYU’s president, Linda G. Mills, whose background is in social work and mental health, told the newspaper she believes students are missing “spontaneity, and the opportunity of the collisions that happen in college that are so fundamental, whether you’re going to meet your life partner or you’re going to change your mind about something.”
The university has also created an area called the Nest, where students dock their phones in a charging tower and participate in analog hobbies, like crafts or reading. Meanwhile, at the “Around the Longest Table” dinner event, the only time guests took out their phones was to make plans and trade contact information with their new friends.
NYU isn’t the only university to implement IRL programs. At Yale, there is an “Offline Oasis,” or a room full of sunlight and plants, where students can socialize without screens. The University of Alabama offers “Tech Free Thursdays” at its student center. The University of California at Berkeley has a class on limiting technology use and a Project Reboot club that hosts phone-free events, per the report.
The reinvigorated focus on in-person socialization at colleges and universities comes as a 2024 report from the National Center for Health Statistics shows that half of teenagers spend four hours or more a night looking at screens for things other than their homework.
Teenagers seem to be becoming more aware of the negative impacts of spending too much time online. Nearly half of teens surveyed by the Pew Research Center last year said social media platforms have a mostly negative impact on people their age.
For younger students outside of college, there has been an increase in banning cellphone use in recent years.
New research looking at over 40,000 U.S. schools from 2019 to 2026 found that the bans do have benefits — but not as much as school officials had hoped.
While locking phones in pouches throughout the day helped kids cut back on phone time, test scores did not rise and there was “little evidence” that it helped with online bullying, attendance or attention in class, the study found.
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