Is Loneliness as Bad for Students as Smoking?

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In This Episode

Cap down. Earbuds in. Eyes on phones. Despite what you may see in college viewbooks, many students say they feel lonely on campus — isolated in dorm rooms or walled off in tech bubbles. But talking about student loneliness is a tricky issue for colleges.

Related Reading

• Overcoming Student Loneliness: Strategies for Connection (Full Report)
• Fighting the Mental-Health Crisis Narrative: Do young people misunderstand everyday stress?

Guest: Alexander C. Kafka, senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle.

Alex Kafka In other words, loneliness isn’t just sort of a damper on your day. In the long run, it can make you ill, and it can kill you.

Overcoming Student Loneliness

Students are especially vulnerable to loneliness, and unlike academic struggles or basic needs, it can be tough to spot and fiendishly hard to combat.

For this report, The Chronicle spoke to more than 50 students, clinicians, academic administrators, scholars, and other experts. They offer insight on both the scope and nature of student loneliness, but also on the opportunities colleges can take to forge connections.

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Jack Stripling On paper, the residential college experience looks like a laboratory custom built to facilitate human connection. Students bunking together in dorms, eating together in dining halls, throwing Frisbees on the quad. So it might sound baffling that so many college students today say they feel isolated on their campuses. In response to a 2023 Gallup poll, nearly 40 percent of college students reported that they had experienced loneliness the previous day. Public health officials are sounding an alarm about this problem, and colleges are responding with a flurry of programs and interventions. But here’s the thing: Loneliness is part of the human condition. It’s something everyone can expect to feel in life. How much, then, should colleges be talking about it? Is there a risk of telling students that loneliness is a problem that needs to be solved?

Today on the show, we’ll talk with Alexander Kafka, a senior editor at The Chronicle, about what’s driving feelings of loneliness among college students and how much or little colleges should do about it. Alex, thanks for coming on the show.

Alex Kafka Thanks for having me, Jack.

Jack Stripling Well, look, you’ve done a lot of reporting on student loneliness, this phenomenon that a lot of people across higher education are talking about. But haven’t we always been lonely? What’s the problem college students are having, and what’s new about it?

Alex Kafka We have always been lonely, but the loneliness percentages have been going up for the population at large and for the demographic of 18 to 28 years old. It’s been going up particularly high for young people, so much so that that group is lonelier now even than senior citizens. And historically senior citizens tended to be the loneliest group. And colleges, as you might expect, are seeing this problem among their students.

As a reporter, I had a lot of questions about this: What is loneliness? Why is it affecting college students? What’s causing it? And what are colleges doing about it? So I spent a couple of months talking with people about this phenomenon, and what I found is that student loneliness is a complex problem that is top of mind in higher ed right now. And those conversations helped me to write a special report that we recently released on student loneliness.

Jack Stripling You know, I feel like we should even pause for a minute and talk about that distinction between 18 to 28 year olds, you said, and seniors, because I think that in your mind, you would think somebody in the prime of life would have the most human connection and somebody who’s a senior citizen might struggle more, might have lost friends and family might be in a retirement situation. Is that striking to you?

Alex Kafka It’s very striking and it’s striking to the people I’ve spoken to who study these things. And, you know, to be clear, there are plenty of lonely seniors, too. The whole population is struggling with this. But there’s something about this particular segment of Gen Z — 18 to 28 — and a lot of contributing factors to it. Still a little bit of a mystery.

Unaddressed loneliness can cause issues with cardiovascular system, all kinds of things. The surgeon general memorably compared it, in physical terms, to the impact of smoking I think it was 15 cigarettes a day. Social isolation and loneliness are increasingly recognized as contributing to depression, suicide, substance abuse. And prolonged loneliness can contribute to cancer, dementia, diabetes, and diseases of the coronary neurologic and gastrointestinal systems. So, in other words, loneliness isn’t just sort of a damper on your day. In the long run, it can make you ill and it can kill you. You know, the good news is that colleges are in a position to do something about it.

Jack Stripling Well, I want to get to that, but we should probably define terms a little bit here. So what do we mean when we talk about loneliness?

Alex Kafka Yeah. So it’s one of those things that until you’re writing a report about it, you don’t necessarily dissect the idea that much because you think it’s like hunger or any other basic need. You feel like everybody’s experienced loneliness, so in some sense we must all know what it is. But actually it’s complicated and it’s confusing. And so here I fall back on Jeremy Nobel’s book Project UnLonely and some other literature that I read for the report. And he does a really good job of categorizing loneliness and three overall ways: societal, psychological and existential. Societal loneliness is when you feel either rejected or not part of a group, an outsider in some way. Psychological loneliness is, as he puts it, that fundamental need for warm and fuzzy companionship; just another person who you trust and like and possibly love. And then probably the trickiest to define is that existential loneliness, which is when you think about the big questions: Why are we all here? What is life? What is the world? You know, things like that. And it sounds a little ridiculous when you put it into words that way. And yet it’s something everybody thinks about. As he puts it, harken back to the Carl Sagan, you know, we’re one star among billions of stars in that super big picture view, can lend itself to a kind of loneliness as well.

Jack Stripling So you’ve helped define loneliness for me, Alex, which I appreciate, but if I’m a student on a campus today, what might be contributing to my loneliness? What are the factors that are making this true?

Alex Kafka So there are a number of them, and it’s really hard to get at clean answers. It’s, in fact, Sarah Rose Cavanaugh, in her book Mind Over Monsters, said that, you know, in her many years of research looking into this kind of thing, she came to realize that there isn’t going to be sort of a tidy, silver bullet answer to this stuff. That said, there are some very suspicious looking factors involved. One of them, of course, is the pandemic, which, you know, messed with all of our lives. But when you think about people who are college age now or just recently graduated, it messed with a larger percentage of their lives so far and really affected their development in profound ways. Then there is social media and smartphones. And there’s been so much said and written about that, but clearly, there are some disturbing trend lines that started around 2011-2012 that researchers like Jean Twenge correlated and found some quite probable causation involving smartphones and social media. And then there are some other squishier factors. For example, parental over involvement, over protection in students’ lives, you know, we’ve all heard about the helicopter parents, sometimes called the snowplow parents or the lawnmower parents, who just don’t want to let go. And students sometimes don’t want to let go of them. And that’s been hindering perhaps some students’ connections with their own peers and professors and staff.

Jack Stripling Wow, so like so many things we’ve already talked about on the show, it sounds like there’s a confluence of factors that are hard to separate. You’ve got things about anxiety. You’ve got social media. You’ve got the pandemic. At the same time, if I wanted to look for a place to solve these things, a college campus might be where I would look. It seems like an environment that’s built for connection. And yet it’s a place where students are experiencing profound disconnection. Why do you think that might be?

Alex Kafka So I think they’re coming onto campuses with this real problem. And colleges, at least if they have the resources, are really making a good faith effort to do something about it. But it’s hard. Problem number one is getting students out of their rooms. The way one college leader put it to me is, that’s a very dangerous place for a lonely student to be is stuck in their room. So just getting them out and interacting in real time and off their phones and off their laptop screens is really important and harder than you might think. But the other thing that comes to mind is this metaphor that came up actually with two of the dozens of people that I interviewed for this report, and it’s the notion of activation energy. And both of these folks had lots of knowledge and experience with STEM subjects. And so they were talking about, you know, if you have a chemical reaction, you need a catalyst and that beginning activation energy to get the whole experience happening. And they were using that as a metaphor for, hey, it takes some work to actually socially engage with another person. It doesn’t happen for the most part passively, and it can be awkward, it can take energy, it can take vulnerability, all of those things. And I think a lot of students, especially who were, you know, stuck in their rooms for a year and a half or something during the pandemic just haven’t learned some of those social skills. And some people are more naturally sociable than others. But on top of that, there really are just some basic skills and practice to get those things to a fluid point.

Jack Stripling You know, I hadn’t thought about it this way until you mentioned that metaphor, but when you’re in a residential college experience — and we should clarify that that’s really a lot of what we’re talking about here — you’re having to constantly ignite that activation energy, right? You’re constantly moving in and out of situations, group situations, social situations, as you. As you get older, you may have the luxury of deciding whether you want to go to that dinner party or not. But there’s not as much choice within the college realm. Is that your sense?

Alex Kafka There is not. And yet people manage to stay surprisingly isolated, even on a traditional campus. I had some college administrators and counseling directors describe for me Gen Z students who would come onto campus with their baseball caps on, their earbuds in, staring at their phones, even as they were walking across campus and then coming to their counseling center and saying, hey, I’m having a hard time making friends, and not sort of realizing that, gosh, they are putting themselves into this sort of tech isolation bubble themselves. So all that’s to say, yes, it’s a very social place in theory on a campus. But, you know, if you walk into the dining hall and don’t know how to introduce yourself and sit with someone else, and if you’re walking around campus with your earbuds, then maybe it’s not such a social place. And the fact that you see at least some presumably happy, smiling social people around you, in contrast, might make you feel even worse. Because you’re thinking, gosh, they can do this, why can’t I?

Jack Stripling So Alex, how are colleges talking about this problem?

Alex Kafka Colleges are talking about the problem as a real acute priority. If they don’t address it, they’re going to have students stopping out, dropping out. They’re going to have students who are just miserable, even short of that. And so they have to do something. And yet the problem, Jack, is that they don’t want the problem to be dumped on the counseling centers and they don’t want it to be cast in such a crisis kind of conversation that it alarms students further. You don’t want all of your first year students coming in sort of expecting, oh no, I’m going to freak out my first year.

Jack Stripling Or oh my God, I’m lonely, I’m going to die.

Alex Kafka Right. Right. So they’re trying to cast it as a norm and set the expectation for especially first year students, because that’s really when a lot of the problems occur that, hey, if you come to college and you are suddenly in this group of relative strangers and you are facing a new level of academic expectations: You’re learning to live on your own. You’re learning to figure out your own meals and diet, do your own laundry, all those basic life skills that maybe, you know, your parents or caregivers have been taking care of, that it’s going to be disorienting. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be laughably humiliating sometimes. And guess what? That’s what college is all about. And if you feel that way, that just means, you know, you’re in the right place and you’re figuring stuff out. As opposed to, oh no, hit the panic button.

Jack Stripling Right. So colleges that you’re talking to sound like they’re conscious of not creating panic around what might be, in some cases, a natural human experience.

Alex Kafka Sure. And so you will hear a number of clinicians talk about how it’s great that mental health issues have been destigmatized. But the flipside of that is that young people and college students among them often medicalize what are really sort of daily stresses and part of life as something that they need to come up with a formal self-diagnosis for and run off to the counseling center and make an appointment about. Whereas a lot of the things that stress everybody out about the world — gosh, you know, war in the Middle East, Ukraine, climate change, political polarity, on and on — aren’t things that you are necessarily going to be able to get yourself out of through therapy. There are things that you might need to think about, hey, changing your major or volunteering for some sort of advocacy or community service group or something else which would be a more constructive way to address your own anxieties. And so, you know, that medicalization can go too far. Now, I really want to add the strong caveat there that clinicians say that’s a good problem to have. They would far rather have students over medicalizing these things than ignoring them.

Jack Stripling I think what you just described makes student loneliness such a thorny problem. How do we separate the very common experience of sometimes feeling left out or isolated from a more serious problem that demands attention?

Alex Kafka Sure. And there is no one right answer, which is where I think that peer education and faculty involvement become really crucial. And so there are all kinds of resources. There’s something called the Mental Health First Aid program. A lot of colleges have something called a Red Folder program, which is basically a quick, accessible list of mental health resources that faculty have that they can open up and study. And it helps them identify when a student is in trouble and it helps them get the resources they need. So, you know, just a very partial list, kind of a common sense partial list is, hey, if the student isn’t showing up to class. If the student isn’t doing the work. If the student looks exhausted and they’re falling asleep. If the student is losing weight all of a sudden. If the student looks stoned all the time. You know, not all of this is rocket science to figure out. The hard part to figure out is what to do about it and how to have sort of a tactful conversation. The other thing that colleges increasingly have at hand is good communication networks between, say, a faculty member, a academic adviser, a counselor, an R.A. in the residence. And they can talk to each other and say, yeah, hey, I’m worried about so-and-so, too. It’s interesting to hear about what’s happening to them in class because they’ve been totally isolated in their room the last couple of weeks too.

Jack Stripling So colleges are on the lookout for these particularly problematic cases. At the same time, I think there are probably good reasons that we all experience loneliness at one time or another. I’m thinking of the movie Inside Out, where the young person has all these different emotions. And I think the message there is that we need all of them.

Alex Kafka: Sure.

Jack Stripling: What does the research tell us about this? Do we need loneliness?

Alex Kafka We absolutely need loneliness, just like we need hunger and thirst to tell us when to eat and drink. We need loneliness as that little tap on our shoulder to say, yo, you’ve been in your room too long. You’ve had your head stuck in this book, in this problem set or whatever, too long, and you need to go out and have some sunshine and interaction and that’s really important. And there are loneliness scholars who make a big point of saying loneliness is, in a sense, a gift because it is there to remind you that this is a basic human need — social connection — and you need to go out and do something about it. The problem isn’t loneliness. The problem is unaddressed loneliness. And colleges are also trying to educate students through formal wellness courses or informal wellness courses, some actually for credit, others not for credit. And really, interestingly, they are increasingly situating things like counseling services near other wellness facilities. The gym, the yoga studio, things like that, so that people think of their mental health as just one more aspect of their overall health that they need to learn about and take seriously from their youth on to their advanced years.

Jack Stripling You know, you mentioned mental health. And I know this is something that we’re seeing mental health issues on the rise among college students, for sure. Do we need in this conversation to create a separation between somebody who’s got a diagnosed mental health issue and someone experiencing loneliness?

Alex Kafka I don’t know if separation is the right word. But you’re definitely getting at something that a lot of the folks I’ve spoken to have pointed out, which is that colleges increasingly over the years have taken more students who have clinical psychiatric histories, you know, acute serious problems. Many of them having taken psychotropic medications for those issues. So colleges for a long time have been struggling to adequately staff counseling centers to help students that have clearly delineated psychological psychiatric issues and treatment plans. And they’ve known for a long time that they can’t hire themselves out of that problem because it’s bigger than any counseling center. And then like a Jenga tower, added on top of that problem is sort of a more general question of students’ social isolation, loneliness and overlapping issues with just disengagement with school, and some of the pedagogical stuff that you’ve talked to my colleague Beth McMurtrie about. And so the loneliness problem is one more Jenga piece on the tower complicating colleges’ responsibilities further. It’s no doubt a real strain on them. Now, having said that, they also really emphasize that you don’t need some sort of diagnosable acute problem to feel miserable and lonely in college and that it’s something that could happen to any or every student, you know, whether it’s an academic challenge, a social challenge, a disappointment — hey, I didn’t get on this or that team — an injury; hey, I did get on that team and then I blew my knee out and I can’t play this year. You know, some romantic issue like a bad breakup. It’s, you know, a really delicate, tricky time of life under the best of circumstances. And loneliness is often part and parcel of that. So the answer is both and. There are students with some severe clinical problems and they need access to stepped care. But there are also students overall going through this tricky time of life.

Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.

[BREAK]

Jack Stripling So Alex, we’ve been talking about how to define loneliness and what may be driving it among college students. But when I think about who college students often respect and interact with the most, it’s the faculty. What’s the role of professors when it comes to student loneliness?

Alex Kafka Faculty are a big part of the equation, and that’s because, Jack, over the last, you know, ten-fifteen years especially, it’s become so clear that counseling centers can’t take the brunt of these issues. That it really needs to be a wrap-around campuswide solution. And so just as students need to look after their peers, faculty and staff need to look after students, too. So what that means in practical terms is a little more education and awareness around some of the signs of despair and loneliness and depression and anxiety. What faculty are not being asked to do is turn themselves into therapists. Nobody wants that either from a medical or a liability standpoint. But what they are being asked to do is, you know, if they see a student in trouble, know the campus resources well enough that they can refer the students to the help they need through what’s often referred to as a warm handoff. You know, let me walk you over to the counseling center. You look like you’re really suffering. And I want to make sure you have someone to talk to. That sort of thing.

Jack Stripling What about people in college leadership? Are presidents thinking about this?

Alex Kafka Presidents are absolutely thinking about this. So during the pandemic, when they were listing their top three things that they were worried about, student mental health, for most of them — I forget the exact number, but I think it was in the 80% somewhere — that was at the top of their list because of all the things that presidents worry about. And I’ve talked to a lot of presidents for different projects. I think their number one nightmare is a student suicide or, you know, a student hurting others. The old danger to self and others — however that might happen — those are the things the presidents’ nightmares are made of. So they are still prioritizing that. Lord knows presidents have other things to think about, like enrollment challenges, revenue challenges, political challenges this year. But I’d say student mental health is still way up there, if not at the top of the list, toward the top of the list.

Jack Stripling In your reporting, has anybody raised questions about whether colleges are responding to the loneliness problem effectively?

Alex Kafka You know, ‘effectively’ is a relative term. It’s a societal problem. And I think maybe the more germane question is whether anyone in society is responding to this problem effectively. I’d say colleges, at least a lot of them, are responding in a more intentional, effective way than other parts of society, partly because they can. So, you know, can they do it better? Can they pour more resources into it? Can they do more planning around it? Sure. There’s always more to be done. But I think they’re taking it seriously and making good faith efforts to do something about it.

Jack Stripling So do people in college leadership have concerns about this beyond the students themselves? I mean, what does this mean for the college to be effective in responding to this?

Alex Kafka They’re worried about the students themselves because by and large they’re good humans and they have empathy and they worry about the young people that they’re supposed to be helping. But they’re worried about it beyond that, reputationally, in terms of their own management and financial stability because if students are lonely or otherwise mentally afflicted, they’re not going to perform well academically. They’re not going to be happy, they’re not going to be happy students, and they’re not going to be happy alumni, and they’re not going to be successful. So it’s part of what colleges need to do for their students in all kinds of ways. And I always think about, even if you had the most sociopathic, cold blooded administrator in the world — like I think of Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life — and even if all you were worried about was your bottom line and your endowment, things like that, you would still want to worry about loneliness and students’ mental health, because if they don’t succeed, you don’t succeed. And reputationally, if you become known as a college that’s mishandling your students’ overall wellness, including their mental health, that reputational damage spreads like wildfire. And without citing examples, I can think of, you know, just conversations I’ve had with parents of college students who say, you know, geez, I had to yank so-and-so out of there and they transferred to another school because they were mentally a wreck and nobody was doing anything about it. And you get enough of those stories circulating at your college fair in a high school gym and wow that’s a real problem for colleges. So I’d say that even if they don’t want to help students for the right reasons, the wrong reasons, the more material reasons, are compelling in themselves.

Jack Stripling I keep coming back to this number that 40% of students report feeling lonely on campuses in this country. What should we take from that?

Alex Kafka Yeah, so there was this Gallup poll showing something like 40% of college students experiencing loneliness the previous day, which by itself sounds like a really alarming number, and maybe it is. But if you look at the poll results overall, they also have substantial percentages of anger, of sadness, of worry, but also of joy. I think the enjoyment number was something like in the 70s. So in other words, they are 100% human and that 40% of loneliness is part of that. And I think that’s really important to keep in mind, that this isn’t just a gloomy, cloudy scenario. That it’s a partly sunny scenario, and that there are a lot of good things and good energy and good vibes for colleges to work with.

Jack Retrack: So, like all of us, college students contain multitudes. For those who are lonely, though, I wonder how much colleges are thinking about when to intervene and when to step back. I think we want young people to develop resilience. We want them to learn to solve problems. Is there a danger that, by diagnosing loneliness like a disease, colleges are getting in the way of students solving some very common human dilemmas?

Alex Kafka I think resilience is certainly part of the conversation. But like so many things in this arena, it’s a balancing act, because you don’t want to say, you’re having a hard time, guess what, everybody has a hard time. Suck it up. That is definitely the wrong message. You also don’t want to say, tell me all your problems so that you know, the administration, the faculty in concert with your parents can fix them for you. That’s also the wrong message. And so you want to enable problem solving. And then the other thing I’d point out that I heard a lot from from the experts is loneliness is only something that the lonely person ultimately can do something about. You can create opportunities to do something about it. You can create incentives. You can educate them as to why it’s important to take the problem seriously, but you can’t do it for them. And so I think colleges can throw all these resources and programs out there, but ultimately they have to convey to students, hey, this is your life. And the ultimate energy to solving this problem has to come from you.

Jack Stripling So, Alex, are there colleges that you found were doing anything particularly innovative to respond to this or just particularly notable?

Alex Kafka Gosh, there’s so many examples and I hope people will, you know, look at my report and elsewhere to get some good ideas. But, you know, some that spring to mind are ‘speed friending.’ For example, Wesleyan started online speed friending program during the pandemic. And then of course…

Jack Stripling Like speed dating for finding friends?

Alex Kafka Yeah. And then when they went back to campus, students were saying, hey, that was fun. Let’s keep doing it in real time now. And with pizza, that seems to be like a common theme is that everything works better with pizza. And then there’s Bryant University, which just gave students lawn chairs to get out during that first week and enjoy opening week kind of a block party on campus with a lot of activities mixed in with educational stuff. The Colorado School of Mines has something they call engineering days where they go out and do things like the cardboard boat race. They also have something called ‘Hell of a Welcome,’ which is like an orientation on steroids. It’s nine days jam packed with activities mixed again with educational things about the resources on campus. But, you know, if nothing else, it gets students out of their rooms to say, ‘hey, guess what? We’re in the beautiful Rocky Mountains. We’re in a really beautiful place here, so we should take advantage of that.’

Jack Stripling I will say, like the cynic in me says, haven’t colleges always done that? Like creating student programs? Part of the difficulty of this whole story is that colleges have done a lot to create an environment in which students will interface with each other. They seem to be up against something different now.

Alex Kafka They are. So to answer your question, sure, colleges have always had programs like this. Getting students to leave their rooms and go to them is harder. And every college leader I talked to cites Gen Z — not to pick on Gen Z; I’ve got 26 year old twins myself — but cites Gen Z as, especially the pandemic part of Gen Z, as just trickier to draw out of their rooms and get to these things and engage. So they just have to be super intentional and energetic about it.

Jack Stripling What do students themselves tell you about this?

Alex Kafka Well, over the last five years or so, Jack, I’ve spoken to dozens of students about their mental health. One student I spoke to last spring about loneliness and wellness was Daesia Johnson. She was in the Dougherty Family College, a two year program at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. Daesia had had a really rough childhood including a period of homelessness and her family splitting up. And college was an academic but also a social refuge for her – not right away, though. What brought her out of her shell the summer before her sophomore year was becoming a summer enrichment-program leader showing new students around. So, when I spoke to her last spring, Daesia was getting ready for a spring-break career-exploration trip to Chicago with other St. Thomas students. She was nervous about that but also ready to make that leap, and she subsequently sent The Chronicle a nice smiling group snapshot from the trip. Now, she’s a junior at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. That’s just one example. The beautiful thing I’m really struck with, though, is how in tune with themselves students are. And what they tell me, especially the students who graduated in spring 2024, is that they recognize that they really took a hit with the pandemic, and that in their own words, ‘it messed them up’ in some ways. They talk about how hard it’s been to get social activities going, and they also talk about what they’re going to do about it. That’s the other great thing is that they’re taking these experiences, they’re processing them, and a lot of them are volunteers working with newer students. They don’t want the students coming up behind them to go through the things they went through. They’re solution oriented. And the thing that I’m most gratified to see just as a reporter looking in on this stuff, is how much the stigma has fallen away with regard to mental health and wellness. I’m 60 years old, so I remember the bad old days when a student who was suffering in despair or suicidal; that was a hushed, shamed conversation in the hallway. That was something people, not always, but often, kind of looked away from: ‘I don’t want to see that. That’s not part of my happy college narrative.’ ‘Somebody else take care of it.’ And students now are so different and I think that’s really healthy. It’s a real generational change.

Jack Stripling Yeah. Well, we’ll continue to see where this conversation goes. I know that this is a problem that probably won’t go away, but that colleges are paying attention to. I really appreciate you coming here to talk about it, Alex.

Alex Kafka Oh, it’s been my pleasure. I was inspired and moved by the people I talked to reporting this. I just think it’s such a crucial part of what colleges do now, and fingers crossed that they can do it effectively.

Jack Stripling All right. Thanks for coming on the show, Alex.

Alex Kafka Thank you.

Jack Stripling Alex’s full report, Overcoming Student Loneliness, is available at The Chronicle’s online store. You can find a link to it in the notes for this show.

College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.