Harvard University is one of the most difficult schools to gain admission to, with the school turning away some 97 percent of applicants every year.

But once they get in, many of its students skip class and fail to do the reading, according to the Classroom Social Compact Committee, a group of seven faculty members that produced a report on Harvard’s classroom culture that has been fueling debate since it was released in January.

When they do show up for class, they are focused on their devices, and are reluctant to speak out. Sometimes it is because they are afraid of sharing ideas that others will disagree with. But often, they have not read enough of the homework to make a meaningful contribution, the report continued.

Rampant grade inflation allows them to coast through anyway, it concluded.

That means many students graduate without having benefited from talking very much with their teachers and peers, and they stay stuck in ideological bubbles, unwilling or unable to engage with challenging ideas.

Conservative critics have long argued that Harvard and other elite institutions have allowed liberal bias to dominate their campuses, effectively censoring free expression. Those concerns have fueled a Republican effort to remake college campuses in recent months. But even before Mr. Trump took office, the Harvard group’s report seemed to acknowledged that the critique had merit.

“At Harvard, as nationwide, the question of whether people can express their political opinions without fear of social or institutional sanction has attracted particular attention,” the report said.

It added that, by not attending class, “students are missing opportunities to hear the perspectives of other students with different viewpoints.”

Omosefe Noruwa, a junior in pre-med classes at Harvard, thinks the faculty committee has a point. Recorded lectures make it easier to skip going to class in person, she noted. “If they can get good grades without attending class, they stop,” she said.

She found the discussions in a course that examined whether the civil war was still being fought today “insightful.” But outside of class was a different story. “My first two years were very politically charged,” she said. Liberal views dominate at Harvard, and it could be uncomfortable for someone who has a mix of liberal and conservative views, as she does.

Still, she added, this year is “a little more chill.”

Molding a new campus mind-set

Harvard’s Economics 10, Principles of Economics class is one of its most popular. The students — there are 761 enrolled this term — pack into a historic wood-paneled theater, where the professor paces back and forth onstage like a Shakespearean actor in a baseball cap.

When you enter the theater, the first thing you see are the rows of orchestra seats labeled “DEVICE FREE SECTION,” in block letters. Most of them are empty.

David Laibson, the economics professor in the baseball cap, was a co-chairman of Harvard’s committee. He said that some of the problems have existed at least since he was a student in the 1980s. Procrastination and over-scheduling “have characterized learning at Harvard, and I think at most schools, for living memory.”

He said it was time for a change. “You should know when you’re looking at your phone you’re not really hearing what I’m thinking,” he said.

The committee’s report told “some hard truths about our learning culture,” Harvard’s dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Hopi Hoekstra, has said.

In response, Harvard and its professors have been trying to shift the undergraduate experience this fall, to turn its students into more open-minded and academically engaged people.

Some instructors now take attendance. Students are being encouraged to take notes by hand, rather than on their phones or laptops, to avoid digital distractions. And to help students overcome fears about speaking up, professors are adopting rules that bar students from sharing what people say inside.

Harvard is even quizzing students on their open-mindedness before they arrive. It added a new essay question to its application in 2024. It asks prospective students to write 150 words about a time when they strongly disagreed with someone.

The classroom compact committee began its work in February 2024, when Harvard and other universities across the country were consumed by divisive, sometimes physically combative protests over the war in Gaza. It was charged with finding ways to promote more dialogue and with answering the question: “What’s the purpose of a Harvard education?”

By skipping class, students are missing the chance to learn how to engage with challenging ideas, Dr. Laibson said. Even when students are present, “too often they’re pretending to have done the reading, and consequently the conversation in class is much less productive than it should be,” he said. “It’s a poor use of everyone’s time, and often there’s one student who basically carries the day.”

Classrooms are supposed to be places were there can be a free exchange of ideas, the committee observed in its report. Yet in the spring of 2024, only a third of Harvard seniors said they felt completely free to “express personal feelings and beliefs about controversial topics,” down from 46 percent the year before.

Students were afraid, the report said, of being socially ostracized. They were embarrassed about possibly sounding stupid. They felt that they had to align their viewpoints with their professor’s in order to get a good grade. And they chose their classes based on the likelihood of getting a good grade, rather than out of intellectual curiosity.

Perhaps they did not need to bother. Grade inflation, already a serious problem before the pandemic, has soared, according to Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education. In 2015, about 40 percent of grades awarded at the university were A’s; now the figure is about 60 percent, she said. Half of that increase happened during remote instruction.

“Students are very worried about their future, and the faculty sympathize with that,” and try to make courses less stressful, Dr. Claybaugh said. Faculty members also worry about getting negative student evaluations if they are too tough in grading, the report says.

Students are left having to find other ways to distinguish themselves, like joining more clubs, taking more courses or having two fields of concentration instead of just one, she said.

“Some view extensive extracurricular commitments as a more fulfilling, meaningful and useful allocation of their time,” the professors wrote.

Are students the real problem?

Student absenteeism, hardened partisan views and lagging achievement are a national problem that educators in all types of schools worry about.

Chronic absenteeism among public school students soared during the pandemic. Professors worry that students everywhere are losing the stamina needed to read a book all the way through. And academic achievement, measured by a national test, has fallen to among the lowest levels in decades.

These trends play out differently from school to school, however.

At public universities like the University of Kansas, students are more likely to skip classes because they are working, said Lisa Wolf-Wendel, a professor of higher education at the University of Kansas.

“You’ve got to make it worthwhile for people to show up,” she said. “It has to be something you couldn’t just do in your dorm room by yourself.”

College lectures may not always be engaging, but in the past, students still had to go (or borrow notes from a classmate). Now that many lectures are available to view remotely, Dr. Wolf-Wendel added, professors have to try harder to draw students into the classroom.

“What’s the value-added of coming to class?” she said. “It’s a joint reciprocal relationship.”

At Harvard, some students are pushing back against the notion that they are the problem.

The competition for internships and, eventually, jobs in fields like law and finance can be ferocious, they say. So they have no choice but to invest significant amounts of time in clubs that will show off their interests and skills, and differentiate them from all the other Harvard students who are getting A’s.

And they had to master the art of doing it all long before they were accepted to Harvard, they say: It’s what got them in.

“We’ve been raised on balancing extracurriculars and academics,” said Joshua Schultzer, a Harvard sophomore who was his class valedictorian at William Floyd High School, a public school on Long Island. “When you have been trying to get into a school like this — any school, not just Harvard — students generally do a lot of extracurriculars their entire life. It only makes sense that they’ll continue doing that.”

When Nora Koutoupes Guessous was a first-year student, she recalls, she was on a treadmill she could not get off. She would stay up late to keep commitments for a club where she was on the board, then skip her first morning class to do homework for the next class. Then she would watch the video of the class she had skipped.

This year, as a sophomore, she said she is trying to do fewer things better. “The top priority is obviously always grades,” she said.

Harvard may be partly to blame for encouraging student absences, with a policy that allows students to enroll in two classes that meet at the same time.

Dr. Laibson tells his students that in-person learning is better than learning by video. But he also defends the double-scheduling practice because so many classes at Harvard meet at overlapping times.

“If we didn’t allow simultaneous enrollment, we’d be giving a lot of students heartburn,” he said.

For the students who do come to his lectures, Dr. Laibson tries to make classroom discussions more open by including a caution in the syllabus that other students may hold different beliefs, and warning about sharing in-class comments outside the lecture hall in a way that could identify the speaker.

Mr. Schultzer, the sophomore, said that the push to get students to be more open-minded may be noble, but he argued that the environment at Harvard was only part of the issue.

So, too, is the “extremely polarized social and political climate right now,” he said. “It’s the state of the world.”