Lonely on campus: Students are partying less, networking more

Photo: Pexels

College is supposed to be about meeting new people, writes Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic. It's supposed to be fun. But today's college students aren't socializing like earlier generations, reports UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. "The share of first-year students who reported feeling frequently isolated from campus life has more than doubled in the past two decades."

Some say blame social media: Students spend their time scrolling, feeling jealous of other people's highlight reels, instead of going out for pizza with actual humans.

"Especially at elite universities, clubs now more closely resemble jobs than socializing opportunities," Horowitch writes. It's all about networking. “USC had over 1,000 student clubs, yet their loneliness is out of control,” says Cat Moore, who was "director of belonging." She developed a course on how to make friends, which MIT now uses.

Some blame pandemic isolation for students' undeveloped social skills. They went remote in middle school, and never quite broke the habit.

It's more common for students to skip the usual adolescent experiences, such as "trying alcohol for the first time and having their first romantic relationships — and accompanying heartbreaks," writes Horowitch.

In addition, many more classes are taught remotely -- or posted online for students who prefer not to show up in person. It's harder to meet people in class when most of the seats are empty, and everyone's on their phone.

Brian Casey, the president of Colgate University, "had new footpaths built across lawns on campus to increase the odds of students physically encountering one another," writes Horowitch. New buildings will be designed with more common areas to encourage students to interact.

Young Brits are embracing "soft hermitting," writes Helen Coffey in The Independent. "In the past year, a third of young adults reported going days – while nearly one in 10 said they had gone several months – without any human interaction, according to a survey of 2,000 Gen Z and Millennials conducted by RiseGuide, a self-improvement app."

“Hermit mode” is supposed to “protect your peace” or further your spiritual journey, writes Coffey.

"Since the 1980s, the amount of in-person social time we have with others has decreased in the Western world," while "loneliness has gone up dramatically," she writes. "It is young people who are hardest hit – the highest rates of loneliness between 2014 and 2023 were found among adolescents aged 13-17 (20.9 per cent) and young adults aged 18-29 (17.4 per cent).