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Social capital is the "The ability of an organization or individual to benefit from their social connections". Social distancing, masks, quarantine, closure, isolation, loneliness, and fear are but a few of the negative thoughts that arise in conversations about going back to school. These are primarily social concerns.

Universities rely on engagement to generate positive social capital for their stakeholders. Social is not just about keg parties, it is hallway conversations, a hello as you walk into class, late night dorm room chat, stopping by an instructor's office to ask a question and then striking up a longer deliberation, arguing who makes the best pizza, struggling to make sense of an assignment at the library, talking to the receptionist, the emotion and spectacle of a home game, resolving a team conflict while having a beer or hearing the latest gossip, having the courage to ask an executive speaker a question, sweating at the gym with a friend, attending a LAN party, going to a career fair, or just walking around campus people watching. All of us could add to this list. Students know this list.

The above involves many stakeholders such as students, faculty, staff, alums, local community, vendors, and industry.

Even though most of us can intuit the above, most universities (still) hold on to the belief that one-way transmission of knowledge, i.e., the stereotypical lecture by the instructor is the key to the kingdom of recruitment, retention, and placement. In other words, most efforts to go online center on recording and transmitting lectures. Lectures are but a small part of the active, independent, and cross-boundary engagement of students. The competitive advantage of the quintessential 4-year US education is the use and generation of social capital through engagement.

Students belong to colleges, majors, and classes but they are not static entities; they are active agents that seek out knowledge and frequently change affiliations based on convenience, friends and family, constraints, evolving preferences, job market, and so on. They are also independent agents with significant agency that navigate, conform, bend, and adapt to the rules and behaviors of others to perform relevant actions. Through the above actions, students generate and seek economic, human, organizational, and symbolic capital, but they do this by using and generating social capital.  We know this; we study social influence, social exchange, network effects and other forms of social engagement.

So if we know this, then how can we believe that "coming back to college" is only about the transmission of knowledge through Zoom lectures? Why should students go back to that kind of school?

Instead, we – the design scientists, analytics modelers, technology adoption and use experts, and others - should help universities consider creative solutions to enable its stakeholders to use and generate social capital. For example, one of the side benefits of going online is the generation of digital trace data. Consider making it public and clickable, analogous to the Facebook news feed. Activities such as who just joined the current session, the start of a different session (using a heat map to show activity), intense activity going on in student club chat room, due date for an assignment, lunch special, advisor just changed status to now being available, and a friend just hit 10 miles on their bike. If we can work through the obvious privacy issues, then the digital trace data can be instrumental in generating social capital by leveraging curiosity and interest in others. (in full disclosure, I and some colleagues are experimenting with activity feeds at Temple).

The above follows from considering universities as social capital engines. As enterprises of stakeholders that mutually influence and engage, not just as a knowledge transmission engine. The knowledge transmission engine can quickly become a low cost easily substitutable commodity. The IS community has a rare opportunity to help universities build social capital with other more novel solutions. Students will go back to such schools to form lasting relationships with professors and other stakeholders.