Why Half of College Students Feel Alone and How to Fix It

College is often described as the best time of your life. But for many students, it’s also a time marked by loneliness, uncertainty, and self-doubt.

“It is almost inevitable in the process of going to college that you are going to feel moments of loneliness,” says Lecturer Alexis Redding. “What’s been very interesting in my research interviewing college students from around the country is how much they don’t know to expect that.”

While student mental health data has shown some positive movement, Redding cautions against early celebration. “We don’t actually want to celebrate that one out of every two college students are struggling with loneliness,” she says. “The challenge is understanding what is happening for young people and how we can meet them where they are to offer support.”

Drawing on decades of research and her work with colleges and universities, Redding explains why many of the challenges students face may not signal a mental health crisis but can reflect expected features of development. She argues for helping students and the institutions that serve them better understand this stage of life and distinguish between normal developmental experiences and clinical concerns. As the editor of the new Harvard Education Press title, Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students, she offers practical strategies institutions can take to build communities that thrive.

Among them, she stresses understanding transition stress, including the “W-curve,” to building systems of micro-mentorship that support belonging and resilience.

Support, she adds, also extends beyond institutions to families. Small shifts in how parents communicate with students can make a meaningful difference.

“When we interview students, they often report how much their parents are invested in a particular outcome of college,” she says. “And over time, many come to realize that what felt like instruction was really an attempt to be helpful. Recognizing that, given where young people are developmentally, gives us an opportunity to pause and reframe those conversations in ways that open up exploration.”

In this episode, the Harvard EdCast explores the tension faced by higher education institutions as they strive to support students and why reframing how we talk about college life is long overdue.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast.

We often hear that college is supposed to be the best years of your life, but for many students, the reality looks different. Feelings like loneliness, uncertainty, and self-doubt are incredibly common, and yet they're often treated as signs that something is wrong. Alexis Redding says those struggles may not be a crisis, but a normal part of growing up. She's a developmental psychologist at Harvard who works with colleges to better understand what students are actually experiencing during this transition to adulthood.

At a time when concern about student mental health remains high, her work is focused on helping institutions respond in more thoughtful, effective ways. Despite some recent improvements in student mental health data, I asked what is going on for college students that's causing many of these feelings?

ALEXIS REDDING: First of all, it is heartening to see a decline in some of these rates. That said, the rates of loneliness we're seeing are around 50% of college students. And so we want to celebrate that the numbers are going down, but we don't actually want to celebrate that one out of every two college students is struggling with loneliness. And so the challenge becomes for us trying to understand what is happening for young people and how we can meet them where they are to offer support. And what I do in my work is I try to decouple two things that are happening simultaneously.

One is that there are very real clinical challenges happening for some students, but the broader population of students, both on college campuses, commuting to college campuses, and attending school online, are struggling with what are typical developmental challenges. And these are expected, things like loneliness. We, as human beings, in moments of transition when we are moving from one environment where we are seen, and known, and have connection into another, are prone to feel inevitably off balance to experience what the literature calls disequilibrium. And in those moments, we feel like we matter less, we are seen less, we are off our game in some ways because we are disconnected from the people who we love.

And it is almost inevitable in the process of going to college that you are going to feel moments of loneliness. But what's been very interesting, especially in my research interviewing college students from around the country, is how much they don't know to expect that. How little is part of our conversation in level setting. Instead, we tell them, "College will be the best four years of your life." That does not prepare them for the ordinary Tuesday when they still haven't met their friends, when they're not trying to eat within the dining hall, they're feeling disconnected from their roommate.

And so what I'm trying to do in the broader conversations that I'm having is to help us understand what is expected, typical about what is hard, and then what is going to require a clinical diagnosis and a different kind of intervention. And what I'm seeing is that we're so concerned, obviously, and importantly, about students who need clinical care, that we're overreacting to the students who don't meet that benchmark because we don't want to miss anything, because this is too important. And so I'm really trying to create a different kind of conversation for us to understand what should we expect around those challenges? What meets the benchmark and what doesn't?

JILL ANDERSON: Something that I actually saw, and just looking around and researching was this tension between, well, if this is a normal part of development, why are the numbers so high? Is it because we're more willing to admit mental health challenges today or is something else going on there?

ALEXIS REDDING: It is one of the greatest puzzles of the data. And I think something interesting that is going on is young people are more empowered to use clinical language today and to meet the challenges that they're experiencing, which is a good thing. It gives us more of an opportunity and an opening to have conversations and to figure out what is typical and expected, and what is a crisis.

The challenge for us is they're using clinical language, saying they're depressed, they're anxious, using it in a way that for us triggers a sense of, "Oh, no, this needs clinical intervention," when what they might be referring to is that they've had a rough 24 hours, and that this isn't something that's going to meet a clinical benchmark. And so these are the opportunities for us to be grateful that they're using the language to name it because it's opening a conversation and then we have to hold space in that conversation to tease out, "Okay, so you said that you're feeling depressed. What does that mean to you? What does that look like so that we can figure that out?"

There is a win in this moment that young people do not feel a sense of shame around naming very real challenges that they might be having, but again, it makes it hard for us to understand exactly how to react and how to thread that needle.

JILL ANDERSON: So then supporting that becomes a big challenge for institutions.

ALEXIS REDDING: Exactly. We do not want to miss something. We don't want to miss a student who has a profound struggle and needs to be with the incredible caring practitioners of the campus mental health center. We want to make sure that we're creating that pathway. But if every student who says they're lonely gets an immediate referral, what we've done is we've further overwhelmed the campus mental health center, which is already struggling to meet demand, but we've also potentially silenced that student because we know that not all students who get a referral are going to go for all sorts of reasons.

And so now we've shut down that conversation with them, and we've even put up a big red flag that this is a clinical issue. And so we need to really meet them where they are in the moment, open the space for those conversations so that we can figure out, do they need our help, the help we can provide as student affairs practitioners, as the caring adults in their lives, or do they need trained clinicians?

JILL ANDERSON: As a higher ed professional, how do you even begin to navigate something like that?

ALEXIS REDDING: I mean, there are a couple of things. The first one is to really begin to understand what the developmental literature says. And this is so much of my mission in sharing my work of helping practitioners to know that loneliness is typical and expected. So the work that I do with Dr. Nancy Hill as part of the transition to adulthood lab, looking at interviews from students in the class of 1975, the work that I do listening to students who are in the classes of the 1940s and '50s tell us that loneliness has always been part of college.

And so what I want to do is to help us understand that that is the level we're at, that a student who walks into our office and says that they are lonely, that might not be a crisis, but that is the opportunity to have a conversation to figure out if it is or if it isn't. The other thing that I do is I share models from my work, like the W-curve. So the W-curve is in the student affairs literature. And it's one of my favorite theories because it is so simple. It is the letter W and it tells us about the very real rollercoaster feeling of being in transition to a new place, starting from the honeymoon phase, having a dip as culture shock sets in, having a rebound, a second dip, and ultimately coming back to where you were.

When I use this to teach my graduate students at the Graduate School of Education, it's fascinating because they immediately adapt the language of the W-curve, which I was teaching them to talk about undergraduates and to help undergraduates when they leave us, but they immediately adapted it and recognized, "Oh, no, this describes my lived experience as well." And what that did for them and for me was open up conversations where suddenly they were coming into my office and saying, "I am totally in culture shock," or, "I've had my rebound from culture shock, but I'm struggling because of X." And that meant that I had normalized for them that this up and down pattern happened. There was no shame in talking about it.

And so every single parent group, every student affairs audience that I talk to, I introduce them to the W-curve if they don't know it already. And I invite them to share it with their students. And so now we're seeing it around the country with people using this model because it de-intensifies the conversation, both for students to be able to talk about it, but for us to level set, be like, "Oh, even if they're not naming it, I know that midway through the semester in October, I expected this big dip." And so, number one, open up more office hours. Number two, create more programming for people to be connected. And number three, know that that's the expectation going into the conversation.

JILL ANDERSON: Just to understand the W-curve, is that something that primarily just happens during your first year when you get into college?

ALEXIS REDDING: The W-curve is interesting because I think it maps onto almost any transition we have throughout our lives. It is just a very real pattern of having high expectations about how something is going to be, having the reality, the good and the bad, set in, and then regrouping, recalibrating, finding a way to be. We see it happen in the transition from college to the workforce. We see it happen throughout college, from the first year to the second, second to the third, third to the fourth, and beyond. And you see it in any number of places.

It's interesting to me, students will sometimes text me as they're settling in or email me when they're settling into their work, and they'll tell me where they are in the W-curve. It is just a clear, concise way of operationalizing what it means to be in a moment of change, to be in this space where you are closing one door and opening another, where in this transition, you are figuring out, what is it going to be like here? Who am I in this new space? Who are my people in this new space? How do I build community? And we ask that again and again throughout our lives.

JILL ANDERSON: So it sounds like it's a case of not just educating those folks who are working in higher education, but also educating the young people.

ALEXIS REDDING: Absolutely.

JILL ANDERSON: I recognize it from my own experience going to college, but it can be applied in a lot of different ways.

ALEXIS REDDING: Yes. It's beautiful research that comes from Gulhan and Gulcan originally. And what was interesting about the W-curve as well is that it was originally discovered for students who were doing study abroad.

JILL ANDERSON: Right.

ALEXIS REDDING: And the researchers then realized, "Wait a second, this is actually happening on our campus as well." And the more I've been able to talk about the W-curve and to give people this very simple tool to talk about this very real experience, everyone's reaction is exactly the way yours was, Jill. Everyone is like, "I recognize that as well." It's a nice thing for us to hang these ideas on so that we can level set. And I agree that the key is talking about it with young people.

And we have to stop with this narrative that college is going to be the best four years of your life. This is the cultural story that we tell about college, and that is not setting up students for success. In fact, the opposite, right? It makes it harder for them to name when they're struggling. And I see colleges and universities sometimes struggling, especially at the beginning of the year, to name all the mental health supports they have, to name that loneliness might be typical on campus, because they're scared of putting that into the minds of students, is what they say, or they're scared of creating an environment where that's the leading narrative.

And I think just the opposite is true. By not talking about it, it creates more of a sense of isolation. In our research interviewing college students from the classes of 2025 and 2026, we hear student after student talking about how lonely they feel. And because we know who's in the data, we know sometimes we're interviewing their roommate, the person who lives next door, and that person is also talking about how lonely they feel. And each of those students comes to the conclusion that they alone are struggling, that they alone are doing something wrong, that the loneliness is unique to them. And we know that's not true.

And so it's really important to create the space where they know that as well, because if they're all struggling with loneliness, they can come through that together. But if it's a self-blame that I am failing at doing this thing, I am not living up to the expectation, I am not having the best four years of my life, then we're not equipping them to do exactly what they need to do.

JILL ANDERSON: I think you just mentioned what I guess we could call a gap that might exist in colleges where they don't want to really normalize this as part of the experience. What other gaps do you see opportunities to create more practice around this idea of these transitional moments and the W-curve?

ALEXIS REDDING: I think there are plenty of opportunities to just name and normalize what is typical. For me, the broad conversation is just about shifting how we talk about college. Even the narrative of the best four years has the assumption that college is four years, and it is not for a lot of people. It is longer or shorter, depending on all sorts of conditions. I think we also need to change our conversation of what college is so that it is more reflective of the typical modern learner. I mean, when we talk about college in the media, when we're having conversations, the assumption is often that we're talking about 18 to 23-year-olds who are living in residence on a college campus who are not focused on anything else but their studies.

And that is 13% to 18% of the college-going population at any given time. Far more students are commuting to campus, attending community colleges, or attending school online. And so we also have to think about how do we leverage the support structures of institutions of higher education to support students who are not in residents, who don't have an RA or a proctor living in a dormitory with them. And so we've seen some interesting ways that some colleges and universities are thinking very creatively about making sure that advising offices are open after 6:00 p.m. as opposed to closing at 5:00 p.m. for the students who are coming later in the day. Things like that are really, really important for thinking about who learners are today.

JILL ANDERSON: And, of course, we see a lot of learning happening online. Has that shifted how these things play out for universities?

ALEXIS REDDING: I think universities are still trying to figure out exactly how online education has changed. There's some interesting work that's been happening out of Southern New Hampshire University that's really been thinking in a meaningful and robust way about the role of mentorship and relationship building, especially for online learners. We've seen here at HGSE with our online education leadership program the importance of doing things like the campus institute.

So when students join our online program, which is two years part-time, the first thing they do is actually come to campus, and they are all in residence together, and they physically get an ID card, and they take a class together, they meet the faculty who will be on screen with them for the duration of two years. And they even do a tour of Harvard that I lead so that they have a connection to place and to each other. And we're seeing that that's really, really important in building community for our OEL students. And I think more online institutions are recognizing the importance of that, of creating those moments of opportunity and connection.

JILL ANDERSON: You've been doing a lot of work on developing a theory to practice approach to help colleges actually begin to do this work at their institutions. Can you tell me a little bit about what that is and what it looks like?

ALEXIS REDDING: I spend a lot of time either teaching in my campus or my online courses, student affairs, either current or future practitioners. And I run a professional development program here at the Graduate School of Education for people who are embedded in colleges and universities around the country. And what we try to do in all of those spaces is to take this really robust literature that has been developed since the 1950s and to take the highlights, the actionable pieces that are most meaningful for our thinking about students, and both interrogate those ideas and figure out how do they map onto who our students are today, are they inclusive enough for who our students are and their lived experiences, and then how do we begin to take these ideas and integrate them into our campuses?

And so I have this privilege of having 14 scholars and practitioners from around the country who teach with me in this professional development program, and they all take each of these ideas, these theoretical ideas that can be vague and abstract, and they ask the question, how do I use this? What do I do in practice? How does this change what I do in my office tomorrow? And how does this change the policy as I'm creating it at my institution?

One of those scholars is Amanda Latz from Ball State University, and she talks in particular about community college and what faculty members can do. So, for example, she explores the literature on what's going on for students, what's unique about the community college experience, taking an asset-based lens around community college learners, and then she takes students themselves and asks what is working and what isn't working, and presents a model for thinking about how do we even create a syllabus that is responsive and reflective to the complex lives that students are living? And she makes this beautiful distinction between warm policies and cold policies.

So, for example, a cold policy would be the classroom door is locked at 5:00 p.m. If you're not in your seat by 5:00 p.m., you don't get to attend class. A warm policy is we lock our classroom door at 5:00 p.m. if that's a thing that's happening for security purposes after hours, but if there is a challenge with public transportation that gets you to campus and you are going to be X number of minutes late, contact the professor so that we can work out how to make sure you can get into the building, really just recognizing all of the obstacles that a student might be surmounting to get to the class and not literally or figuratively closing the door on them in the process.

So one of the things that came out of the research that I did with Dr. Nancy Hill, as we were studying the students in the class of 1975 that continues to permeate my work today, is our development of what we call the mentorship model. And what that is was the opportunity to hear from young people in their lived experiences, they were navigating college in the '70s, the moments that were transformative to them on their journey of choosing a pathway to a major, to a career, and navigating obstacles along the way.

What has been really cool about that work is we were then given the opportunity to find those people, now 50 years later, and to interview them about their lives. And we didn't ask them, "What was mentorship like for you in college? Tell us about your mentors." Instead, we asked them a general question, "What stood out to you from college?" And many of them surfaced the mentorship moments that they had talked about five decades previously. And what was really telling for us is that most of the mentorship that was meaningful for them, that literally transformed their trajectory, were not the kinds of mentorship relationships that we tend to think about. It was not the head of the department, the head or boss at an organization that they were working at or interning at. It was their roommate, it was a parent, it was their partner.

And this idea that there are people in our lives who we call mirror mentors, hold up a mirror to you to reflect back how they see you light up, where they see you get excited, where they see you experience moments of flow, and the opposite is actually a really profound mentorship. The mentorship model, in general, is one of those things that we share a lot with people at colleges and universities, because it reminds all of us that in a 15-minute office hours conversation with a student, we actually have an opportunity to have a transformative conversation. And it also empowers the student to know that they can find mentorship everywhere. It's not about just building a two or three-year-long relationship with somebody who maybe doesn't even know them all that well.

And we have three forms of mentorship that we share. An idea that I've taken from there a little bit further, and I've written about with Dorie Clark, is the idea about a micro mentoring experience, that it really can be a 10 or 15-minute moment where you are genuinely seen and somebody interacts with you in a very meaningful way that is the thing that helps put you on the path that is most meaningful for you. Also important for us as we think about moments of mentorship, this goes back to your question about an opportunity gap and where we can change the conversation, is that we see so many of our students, especially when graduating college, panic about the first job out because the story that they have is that they are choosing their career for life.

And the conversation that we need to have with them in these mentorship conversations, in these conversations in our offices and in our classrooms and in career services offices, is that they are picking their first career. And they're likely, more likely than not, to pivot along the way. And immediately, that reframe takes some of the panic away from that particular moment of transition. And so those are opportunities for us. And these are not years-long programs that we spend millions of dollars on. These are moments where we subtly shift how we have conversations with young adults as they are navigating these moments and recognize the uncertainty of where they are, the excitement of the moment, but how daunting that can feel, especially when you're making big decisions for the first time.

JILL ANDERSON: You were talking about mentors and this idea of we're coming up to a time when students may be graduating college and heading out into the "real world". But as you were speaking, I just kept thinking about the role of parents in this, in helping their young adults get through this transition and what you can maybe offer them as a way that they can be supportive and helpful because I know we're talking a lot about what can happen on campuses, but we've got a lot of college students about to go home.

ALEXIS REDDING: We do. We do. And I love this question because a lot of my current work is really focusing on how we empower parents to support their children. And so the idea that I like to share with parents is another theory-to-practice thing. So the theory tells us that if we're talking about young people 18 to 25, they're in a moment of becoming self-authoring, which is literally my favorite term from the literature. It's you become the author of your own life. You are asking and answering the big questions. Who am I? What do I want out of the world? Who do I want with me on the journey?

While we are becoming self-authoring, the voices of authority figures, anyone outside of ourselves, and this includes parents, professors, society as a whole. Those voices have an outsized importance. We don't filter them through at the beginning before we are self-authoring. We just hear them as a prescription. So if we are a parent and we are coming from a place of love and support and we want our student to thrive, we might say, "You've always really liked the sciences. Have you thought about majoring in STEM or becoming a doctor?" Nothing wrong with that comment on its surface, but for a student who is not yet self-authoring, they didn't hear a suggestion, they heard a prescription.

And so the simple tweak we can make as parents and family members, anyone who cares about young people, is never give them one suggestion, always give them two. And so to meet our student where they are in that moment, we say, "You've always been interested in STEM. Maybe you want to consider pursuing something in the sciences and becoming a doctor, but I also see that you're interested in the arts, and there are ways to combine those two things. Have you explored that?" And instantly, that's not a prescription because we've just given them an invitation to explore, and it is such a simple tweak.

On the other side, when we interview students, they often report how much their parents are invested in a particular outcome of college. And for students who we get to interview many times over the course of four years, it's interesting to see them come to terms with the fact that the thing they thought was an instruction from their parents was really just an attempt to be helpful. And so by recognizing that because of where the brain development is, because of where that young person is, our attempt to help might land differently, gives us just this opportunity to frame that conversation with 30 seconds of additional thought as something broader that sparks exploration. And then that student leaves thinking, "My parent trusts me to do exploration, they've seen me, they see where I shine, and now let me think about that as opposed to let me follow a path that was prescribed for me."

JILL ANDERSON: Well, that sounds like good advice, especially as a lot of folks end up having their kids move back home with them for the summer.

ALEXIS REDDING: There's another piece of advice that I love, and I don't know who originates it, but it's the idea of also recognizing how high are the stakes of the thing that you are talking about. And the trio of things that is offered is, is it a hat, is it a haircut, or is it a tattoo? So is it something that is easily removable, not necessarily big and defining? Is it something that will take a little while to grow out of or is it permanent? And I think for parents, if they're able to use that frame as well of letting young people explore and sometimes get bruised in the process by taking risks, we want them to learn to be able to take risks as they're figuring out who they are when it is safe and appropriate to do so.

So thinking about hat, haircut, tattoo, I think, can be useful for a parent of, how much do you need to step in and intervene here? Or is this just an opportunity to scaffold the development of skills that are going to serve them across the arc of their lives?

JILL ANDERSON: What is it going to take for us to develop some system where colleges can really provide this kind of support consistently? How far are we away from that?

ALEXIS REDDING: I know exceptional practitioners embedded in colleges and universities around this country and around the globe who are doing this now, who are doing this and showing up for students in profound ways every single day. And what I think we need to do is just empower more people to do that, to be the person who can serve as a mirror mentor, who can validate the student's experience, who can tell them about simple tools like the W-curve. And the more people are doing that, the institutions as a whole are going to shift.

What I know from now, 25 years working in and around higher ed, is that people who are working at colleges and universities care deeply and profoundly for the students on their campuses, and the data that are alarming are profoundly alarming, but the opportunity to hope and to better is always part of the conversation. And I have tremendous hope about the care and compassion that people have for students. And I like to center on that, even and especially on a bad day.

JILL ANDERSON: Well, thank you so much.

ALEXIS REDDING: Of course. My pleasure.

JILL ANDERSON: Alexis Redding is a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the editor of Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.