The summer before your first year of college produces myriad feelings. On one hand, you’re focused on cherishing the last moments of your pre-college years, trying to enjoy the rest of your time in a hometown that might seem a little bit less like home when you come back to it. On the other hand, excitement and expectations run rampant. Arguably, you’ve missed out on a crucial part of the freshman experience if you come to campus with anything short of a mind brimming with possibilities for the future.
Even when this season of mixed feelings ends, expectations about the future keep you on your toes, forcing you to constantly reassess what you think the “college experience” is. Whether it’s a narrative driven by social media, friends or even The Michigan Daily articles, every student has some sort of expectation about how college will treat them.
You might find most of these expectations somewhat satisfied. Your dorm might not be the best, but you and your roommate are twin flames. You might get rejected from some clubs, but also have the opportunity to join a few that make those rejections meaningful. Maybe you’ll even find that the Mary Markley dining hall is the only one with good food, and is worth braving the wind tunnel for. But the most prevalent expectations are social ones in which students are fundamentally set up for failure due to the unrealistic narrative about social life described by other people and organizations.
Through multiple sources, students are sold a misleading idea of what college life is. The idea is that, because there are just so many people, you’ll quickly find yourself surrounded by people with whom you connect. However, the reality of the situation is a bit more nuanced than its narrative counterpart conveys, with many students not making strong social bonds until much later in their college career. This disparity between the social expectations a student has going into college and the reality that many students often face is dangerous and is a root cause of the enduring loneliness prevalent on college campuses.
In a 2020 study done by researchers at the University of Michigan, about 66% of students surveyed from around the country have felt lonely either “often” or “some of the time.” A study done by the American College Health Association found similar results: 63% of respondents felt very lonely within the past year.
I’m not the first person to write about college loneliness — there’s been a plethora of op-eds and articles from veteran New York Times columnists and concerned parents alike. However, conversations surrounding loneliness on campus, told by students themselves, are few and far between. By this, I don’t mean conversations ambiguously surrounding mental health awareness, but rather real public conversations that have to deal with the admission that we feel alone. The lack of discussion and conversation in student circles surrounding this extremely common part of the college experience is a huge contributing factor to loneliness on campus.
When there is a disconnect between how we feel and how we think we should feel, our gut instinct is to think we’re in the wrong. Many people feel that because their experiences with college differ from what friends, family members or social media are telling them, they are inherently different and their circumstances have a direct correlation with their skills to socialize. In order to combat this self-stigmatization and to work toward solving loneliness on campus, it is imperative that we expand the existing narrative around college, for both freshmen and others, to include loneliness.
We value conversation around certain problems, not only to solve the problem, but also to elevate its perception in order for the resources already available to students to be more effective. At the University, a multitude of different resources exist to help students better navigate the transition into college life. These resources, like Wolverine Wellness, Counseling and Psychological Services and Mentorship programs, provide an excellent first step into attaining the skills needed in order to overcome a variety of challenges, but are rendered useless if students don’t feel inclined towards using them.
Bridging the gap between the resources available to students and student inclination to access these resources would be a huge step in the right direction toward improving the overall mental health and well-being of our campus.
One way we could start to expand the narrative is by changing what and how the University communicates to incoming students. It’s understandable that any peer institution would want to avoid showing or telling students about more mundane or even rough aspects of college life. However, these inclusions don’t have to be overt.
Small inclusions of these “less-exciting” moments of college through all of the University’s social media and orientation programs would give students a more realistic picture of what college life might entail. In order to have a tangible effect, this inclusion would have to be multi-faceted and intentional. It could take many forms, from intentionally including specific “realistic” content as a whole to baking this realism into already produced videos and content. We should be confident enough as a university to commit ourselves to showing incoming students the whole picture of student life, not just the parts that would make them want to enroll.
Outside of the University’s social media, orientation tour guides play a major role in giving prospective students an idea of what life at the University holds. Understandably, the University portrays itself as the best it can be for these tours. But, if we focus on a more candid dialogue between potential students and the University — through its tour guides — and break down the formality of pure support most are forced to portray, we can create a stronger and more resilient student base.
A less subversive and more intentional approach would be to include a training module about common challenges new students face, including resources and other information that challenges what students might think about coming into college. This wouldn’t just expose students to the idea of loneliness, but also establish the University as a resource early on.
Right now, the University includes a training module that covers alcohol and drug abuse and ways to confront related issues. I would posit, though, that many more students have experience dealing with substance related issues than they do with the challenges of being a college student. While the current module is great, it misses the opportunity to help students with something that is much more likely to be novel.
However, the responsibility of expanding the narrative isn’t just in the University’s hands.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, CAPS Director Dr. Todd Sevig detailed how important elevating these conversations on a student to student level is. Sevig said that, over the past decade, the majority of students come to CAPS because their friends said they should. He went on to say that the basis of support starts with “friends helping friends,” and that conversation is not only important for different resources to reach different students, but also to create the basis for the support systems that many students might find themselves building from the ground up.
We can simultaneously push for institutions to expand their narratives and take individual action by speaking on our sentiment, with this article being a direct example of the latter. It takes a degree of change at both higher and lower levels to elevate conversations and enact change, which is not unique to the topic of campus loneliness. Only in doing both of these things can we move forward in solving the issues that are pressing to us as a community.
Hailing from the great city of Northville, Mich., Zhane Yamin is a Senior Opinion Editor writing mainly about campus culture and student sentiment for The Daily. He can be reached by carrier pigeon or, more easily, at zhane@umich.edu.