Even College Students Have Stopped Hanging Out - The Atlantic

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This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.<br>If anyone were to be immune to America’s loneliness epidemic, it would be college students. For years, Americans have been going to fewer parties and spending more time alone. But college has historically been about socializing—or, let’s just say it, partying—as much as it has been about education. It’s where young people escape parental supervision, move in with roommates, and encounter thousands of potential new friends.<br>But the antisocial century has arrived on campus. Today’s students spend much less time socializing than past generations did. In 1994, 32 percent of college seniors spent more than six hours a week partying. By 2026, that was 21 percent, according to an analysis of survey data by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. The percentage who spend more than six hours a week socializing face-to-face with friends fell from 74 to 65 percent over the same period. Meanwhile, the share of first-year students who reported feeling frequently isolated from campus life has more than doubled in the past two decades. (These surveys are not nationally representative, but they line up with what professors, administrators, and students told me they have observed anecdotally.)<br>Nationally, college students report higher rates of loneliness than adults do. On the National Survey of Student Engagement, run out of Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research, more students report having positive interactions with professors than with peers. A rising senior at MIT told me that, despite being involved in Greek life and athletics, he eats alone most days. “I feel like I’m somebody who seeks social interactions,” he said, yet “I would say I am alone at least four or five days a week.” (He spoke anonymously because he didn’t want to be perceived as criticizing MIT when he still needs letters of recommendation from the faculty.) University leaders now find themselves in the odd position of encouraging students to spend more time goofing off with friends.<br>Faith Hill: 20-somethings are in trouble<br>Researchers who track social interactions have several theories as to what’s going on. The first is that smartphones and social media are to blame. Much of the increase in loneliness occurred during the 2010s, at the same time that the iPhone was becoming ubiquitous, Daniel Eisenberg, a professor of health policy and management at UCLA, told me. Hours spent on social media crowded out time that people might previously have devoted to social interactions. And it’s easy for students to feel that their social life pales in comparison with what they see in highlight reels on Instagram and TikTok.<br>Meanwhile, extracurricular activities, once a mainstay of campus social life, have mutated into a way to stand out to employers in an era of grade inflation. Especially at elite universities, clubs now more closely resemble jobs than socializing opportunities. Finance and consulting clubs require students to submit résumés, sit for interviews, and prepare mock cases or deliverables. Improv, a cappella, and even some volunteering clubs accept only a distinguished few. Cat Moore, who spent six years as the University of Southern California’s director of belonging, told me that students were busier than ever with extracurriculars, jobs, and internship applications. Even when they tried to build in time for socializing, it frequently tipped into networking. “USC had over 1,000 student clubs, yet their loneliness is out of control,” Moore said. “So the answer is not more clubs. The answer is not more programming.”<br>The coronavirus pandemic seems to have had a lasting effect on in-person interaction on campus. This is partly a matter of psychology. Many current college students were in middle school when classes and activities went remote. They missed out on a crucial period of learning to interact with other people, Ryan Patel, an assistant director of psychiatry at Ohio State University, told me. “When you lose practice doing those things, it can affect your ability to do them now,” Patel said. College administrators have started to pick up on students’ stunted social development. Justin Schwartz, the chancellor of University of Colorado Boulder, told me that he and his colleagues now have to support students through challenges that many would previously have faced in adolescence, such as trying alcohol for the first time and having their first romantic relationships—and accompanying heartbreaks. From 2019 to 2024, the share of college students who said they’d never had sex rose by 10 percentage points, according to the National College Health Assessment.<br>The pandemic also led to changes in how universities operate. Universities now routinely offer remote courses, and professors are under pressure to record and post videos of their lectures. Before the...