College campuses have (largely) gone silent. Can practicing small talk and phone-free spaces change that?

Charlie Harker had high hopes for college.

Before starting her freshman year in 2023, the Lebanon, Ohio, resident had planned to meet people through clubs or at the dorms. She'd expected there would be an open, vibrant atmosphere ripe for making friends. She'd quickly find her people.

"And then I got to school," says the 21-year-old senior at the University of Cincinnati. "I didn't know anyone on my floor. No one had their door open. No one would really talk to you." That fun and peer-filled campus life she'd been promised by both family and pop culture turned out to be, at least to some extent, a relic of the past.

Harker's college experience is fairly common these days. From 2003 to 2025, 20-to 24-year-olds' socializing and communicating in the U.S dropped 52%, from an average of 64 minutes per day in their leisure time to an average of just over 30 minutes per day. Over the same period, 15-to 19-year-olds' leisure time socializing dropped 32% to 38 minutes, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Students these days view school as more "transactional" than in the past, says Steven Rogelberg, Chancellor's professor of organizational science, management and psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "You go there, you take your classes, and then you leave."

That's a problem for a variety of reasons. If they're not meeting in class or stopping each other in the hallways, young people may be missing out on developing both friendships and social skills, which are critical for long-term life and career success. Making small talk, for instance, can help forge both personal and professional relationships down the line, says Kristie Patten, dean of NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Also essential: building confidence, which can come both from successfully navigating social situations and making painful mistakes. Without that practice, both campus and life can become more insular and sterile.

"Parents and school systems, and maybe even legislators, are going to have to deal with this if we want a future where we have kids and adults who understand how to be social with one another," says Lance Garrison, dean of the College of Professional Psychology at The Chicago School.

"The trajectory we are on right now is one toward increasing isolation, increasing loneliness, increasing anxiety." 

Some students and schools are tackling their campus antisocial problems head-on. CNBC Make It spoke with 15 students, educators and mental health experts to see how we got here — and where we might be going.

Today's college students were already at a disadvantage, socially speaking, well before stepping foot on campus.

Not only were they forced to isolate during middle school or high school because of the pandemic, many are also finding fewer spaces to meet in real life, as malls and movie theaters — traditional meeting grounds for young people — have shuttered in recent years. "A lot of them never had to build those muscles of how do you socialize in person," says Chicago-based therapist Andrew Fishman.

Charlie Harker.

Courtesy Charlie Harker

For some teenagers, that inability to connect meant new norms. "I think a lot of people just got used to not hanging out with people after school," says Harker about high school.

For others, it's made approaching people that much scarier. The less you have a chance to talk to someone new, says Garrison, "the more anxious you are going to be about engaging in those types of activities."

On campus, that could also mean high rates of loneliness. When asked how often they feel or felt lonely in college in a CNBC and SurveyMonkey poll conducted in August 2026, a quarter of 18-to 34-year-olds said "always" or "often," versus just 14% of 35-to 64-year-olds. The modeled error estimate for this survey was plus or minus 3.0 percentage points.

When they finally reach the hallowed halls of their universities, many students are constantly connected to a device. Often, they are heads down in screens or engrossed in whatever's happening in their headphones.

Before class, 19-year-old Karla Berrueto, a junior in standing at the University of Houston, reports: "No one really talks to each other." Twenty-one-year-old Jean Antoine, a senior at Loyola Marymount University, offers a similar appraisal. At the dining hall, it's "more of people with AirPods and watching YouTube sitting alone" than talking, he says.

Even when people go out of their way to connect offline, they're frequently stymied. Franco Geldart, a 20-year-old sophomore at Northeastern University, joined a cooking club his freshman year. He found striking up conversations with people a bit awkward. Often, "I was sitting [there] for an hour and I didn't speak with a single person," he says.

Most of the students CNBC Make It spoke with attended up to a handful of parties per year. Some described them as events you attend with friends and leave, rather than fluid opportunities to engage with new people.

Asked how often they initiate or initiated conversations with people at school they didn't know, 31% of Gen Z said "rarely" or "never," according to the CNBC and SurveyMonkey poll, versus 26% of Millennials and 22% of Gen X.

Another new element of today's campus is the plethora of online platforms on which one can be called out for doing … anything, really, making even the most mundane decisions terrifying.

Yik Yak and Fizz are anonymous digital message boards. Fizz alone is live at more than 800 U.S. college campuses, according to its website. Many schools also have dedicated Barstool Sports Instagram pages, often affiliated with the popular sports blog but unaffiliated with the schools. All three may contain posts making fun of individual students' behavior.

Harker remembers going to a football game her freshman year and losing the friend she came with. She felt paralyzed, scared of trying to befriend people who'd reject her and even more terrified of getting photographed sitting at the game by herself. 

"If I just sat there alone," she says she thought, "would I get on the Barstool page?" What would the social repercussions of that be?

Yik Yak, Fizz and Barstool Sports did not respond to CNBC Make It's request for comment.

To be clear, young people are still forging connections on campus. They are figuring it out. Some are even experiencing similar levels of social fluidity as prior generations.

And some see what's been happening on campus and taking action. 

Geldart is working on an application for a new club at Northeastern this year called Wildcard. It would partner with existing clubs and do one-off drop-ins in which members from each club would be randomly paired up for a project.

"It's just to get people talking," he says.

At New York University, students have spearheaded a campus-wide initiative called NYU IRL, centered on connecting in the age of technology. With the help of a coalition of deans, faculty, staff and grad students, NYU IRL projects include phone-free spaces, a phone breakup challenge with Catherine Price, author of "How to Break Up With Your Phone," and a video series about how to make small talk. More than 1,000 students have signed up for the phone breakup challenge alone.

For her part, Harker found someone she knew at the football game where she'd lost her friend and the two became each other's go-to game date. She joined a sorority and now lives in a house with a number of her friends.

Harker's working on creating more opportunities for people to meet. She remembers attending one house party her freshman year, for example. "It was the best experience I ever had," she says. It was an easy, casual way to get to know people. Harker and her roommates are now trying to replicate that experience.

"We have this thing," she says, "we're going to bring back house parties."