A law school graduate who didn’t pass the California bar was bemoaning her circumstance and condemning the 33% pass rate. Among the things noted was that this was one of the first generations of primarily zoom-educated law students to take the bar exam. The graduate asserted that remote education had nothing to do with the massive failure rate. Whether this is right or wrong, I dunno, but it’s not so easily dismissed.
The experience of learning in a classroom was denied these students, with good reason, but still lost to them. Harvard released a study showing remote learning was significantly worse than in-person education, which should surprise no one who didn’t indulge their litany of excuses about why something that sucked wasn’t as bad as everybody knew it was.
But now that the zoom kids are graduating and entering the workforce, do they buy big boy pants and go to work in an office or stay home in sweat pants and play with the cat? Megan McArdle notes that the remote experience imposed by Covid isn’t going away easily.
Many had to go through a full year of pandemic schooling, which denied them a lot of my fondest memories of the place — the fun of being thrown together with hundreds of really smart young people from all over the world. And now they, like millions of other students, are heading into workplaces that may or may not even be places. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, some 33 percent of employers expanded remote work during the pandemic, and 60 percent of them intend to keep some or all of those remote options in the future. Kastle, which provides security badge systems to companies, says that as of the last week of April, occupancy in the offices they service was about 45 percent of its pre-pandemic level.
Will this be the “new normal”? If so, or if it’s at least an option, should new grads seized the opportunity to stay home and work? Working from home has its obvious benefits, but what other considerations are there?
But there are dangers, too. And those dangers are apt to be most dangerous for young people, who need to be building up their human capital right now: acquiring skills, learning about their industries, making professional contacts who can help them find their next job, or the job after that. All of that stuff is harder to do over email or Zoom.
Humans are a social species, evolved for face-to-face interaction. Anyone who worked or schooled remotely during the pandemic knows the drawbacks of moving to videoconference. The jerky, unnatural pace of conversation stifles spontaneity, and the distractions of home make it easy for people to check out, even when they want to pay attention. You never bump into someone before the meeting and remember a quick question you wanted to ask, nor catch up afterward on kids and pets and recent vacations.
Then there are the benefits of being a person to your co-workers rather than a box on a screen, and them being people to you. Making friends. Talking in person. Building goodwill with your boss and establishing a sense of camaraderie with a creature other than your cat.
The reactions to the notion that going into the office has significant benefits for new employees are fairly harsh. The lifestyle negatives, combined with young people’s disdain for employers, was manifest. Going to the office was certainly less convenient than staying home, and the idea of sacrificing personal convenience is foreign to many young people. And then there was the belief that they have nothing to learn from anyone in the office anyway since they already know everything they need to know.
Many, though not all, of these reasons to stay home are fairly compelling, but so too are McArdle’s reasons to go to the office and engage in human contact. Should remote work become the norm, or at least an option, going forward, or is it creating a host of isolationist problems for business and, more particularly, for young employees who have yet to establish their worth in “the real world”?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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