“Some of them didn’t even seem to know they had a college e-mail account,” Dr. May said. Nor were these wide-eyed freshmen. “This is considered a junior-level class, so they’d been around,” he said.
That is when he added to his course syllabuses: “Students must check e-mail daily.” Dr. May said the university now recommends similar wording.
So students prefer social media. So far, so 2005. But some professors do not want to “friend” students on Facebook (“I don’t want to learn things about them I can’t unlearn,” said Thomas Tierney, an associate professor of sociology at the College of Wooster in Ohio) or do not think it is their job to explore every possible medium a student might prefer to use at 2 a.m. to find out about a test later that day.
How to get students, some of whom consider their school e-mail accounts so irrelevant that they give their parents the passwords, to take a look?
At the University of Southern California, Nina Eliasoph’s Sociology 250 syllabus reads: “You must check e-mail DAILY every weekday,” with boldface for emphasis.
In an e-mail, Dr. Eliasoph wrote: “Earlier it was because some students weren’t plugged in enough into any virtual communication.” Seven years later, she said she cannot remove the instruction because now students avoid e-mail because it is “too slow compared to texting.”
Morgan Judge, a sophomore at Fordham University in New York, said she thought it was “cool” last semester when a professor announced that students could text him. Then she received one from him: “Check your e-mail for an update on the assignment.”
“E-mail has never really been a fun thing to use,” said Ms. Judge, 19. “It’s always like, ‘This is something you have to do.’ School is a boring thing. E-mail is a boring thing. It goes together.”
The University of Alabama’s cooperative education office tries a pileup of retro-style reminders. Engineering students, some of whom recently lined up at 2 a.m. to sign up for job-recruiting interviews, are told, individually and in person, to check e-mail at a particular day and time to confirm their spot.
Even after all that, and the threat of their spot being given away, staff members still resort to texting some students. They respond immediately, said Amy Ratliff, senior coordinator for cooperative education.
When job offers arrive, Ms. Ratliff often has excited students turn up in her office only to realize they have forgotten a form they need to send to the company. Using e-mail to get the form or to send it apparently does not cross their minds.“I say: ‘Do you have your phone with you? O.K., can you get e-mail on it?’ ” she said.
Ms. Ratliff added: “It’s like an out-of-body experience. These are incredibly bright kids.”
Eric Stoller, who consults with universities on social media and communication, said schools often have outsize expectations for students when it comes to all things tech.
“We have this perception that because students are fluent with things like smartphones and downloading music that they are born with chips embedded in them that make them technology wizards,” he said. “They are no better at managing e-mail than anyone else.”
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