What kind of problem stays visible for years and still has no name? The sorting machinery of merit accounts for part of it, and the refusals that machinery provokes account for more. Something still lingers in a room after both have finished explaining themselves. This chapter looks at the roots of the missing vocabulary, the background issues beneath the disconnect. Faculty notice it first as an odd kind of restlessness. Students seem distracted, but not in typical ways. They’re present in the room but emotionally absent. There’s an undercurrent in the group dynamic, which lingers despite best efforts. When asked about their feelings, students report being stressed or preoccupied, but nothing quite describes what’s going on.
At issue is something more fundamental in the culture of higher education. On one level, it comes from a mismatch between who students are and the character of the institutions they inhabit. Gone are days of carefree learners confident that college was a ticket to a better life. Today’s student population finds itself on contested terrain, while often juggling a myriad of responsibilities in addition to studies, facing a future in which technological change and attitudes towards higher education itself present novel uncertainties.[i] The National Institutes of Health has further documented how intersecting factors of financial insecurity, political turbulence, and doubts about college are wreaking havoc on student mental health [ii]
Shifting demographics tell much of the story. Nearly half of all learners now work full or part-time while at college, often caring for family members or dependents, while struggling to finance tuition and fees. Besides these responsibilities, this new population is older, more diverse, and predominantly female. Yet for its part, the university has remained relatively unchanged, it’s teaching practices, student expectations, and administrative policies mired in habit and institutional inertia. This dynamic creates forms of emotional dissonance in the learner experience of higher education. Feelings of inadequacy and disconnection grow more common among individuals, while also fostering a culture of collective exhaustion and alienation. Because the structural effects of the resulting “affective economies” don’t easily translate into conventional metrics, they are often misinterpreted as performance deficits or resistance, as discussed in the last chapter.[iii]
None of this is accidental. Campuses are functioning much as they were designed, many clinging to the status quo in the name of standards and tradition. Meanwhile, schools are sustaining an emotional/affective atmosphere that today’s learners find increasingly hard to tolerate.[iv] Colleges founded to educate young men from privileged backgrounds were built on traditional pedagogies and power structures. As student populations diversified, these feeling-structures were slow to change (if they changed at all), resulting in forms of exclusion and discomfort for anyone not fitting in. The psychological toll now seen in campus counseling centers is but one indication of the growing numbers of students who feel like outsiders on their own campus.[v] Recognizing this disconnect means taking a closer look at what happens in classrooms, as well as perceptions of how a putatively “normal” student experience is depleting an entire generation of learners.
Whether higher education holds its legitimacy through the coming decade may depend on how seriously it treats the psychic emptiness spreading through today’s student population. The attitudes of today’s learners are more varied and pragmatic than their predecessors, while often mindful of the significant costs of the degrees they pursue. Demographic shifts have exposed long-standing inequities in the system, from admissions to graduation rates. Growing skepticism about the value of a college degree compounds these issues, often amplified by external political pressures. As tuition costs soar and student debt balloons, many question the worth of a traditional four-year degree. This doubt is fueled by a widening gap between academic curricula and workforce needs. The end result is a loss of hope, a negation of possibility, and an atrophy in the very capacity to imagine a better future.
Added together, its clear that something has happened to young adults that the language of academic performance cannot describe. In 2017 Gallup began tracking adult depression under 30, with an initial finding of 13 percent.[vi] By 2025 the number of those reporting depression had doubled to 26.7 percent. A similar trend exists for loneliness. Nearly one-third of Americans between eighteen and twenty-nine now say they feel lonely for most of the day, a larger share than any other age group. These are the students that today fill university lecture halls and online courses. The numbers are showing something that grades and graduation rates don’t reveal. Gallop attributes the rise to intersecting effects of financial strain, emotional distress, and diminished stigma in disclosing difficulty. But what polling can’t provide is an adequate language for how struggles are felt and collectively distributed. The search for that vocabulary is taken up in this chapter.
Using aggregated polling about employment and financial wellbeing, Gallup asserts a lingering COVID effect that began with social isolation and later continued with rising joblessness. Tendencies of younger people to defer medical or mental health care hadn’t helped matters either. These factors contributed to a 14 percent increase of those Gallup categorized as financially “cost desperate,” explaining that “among young adults and lower-income adults alike, financial struggles beyond healthcare can serve as a trigger for the development of depression. Food insecurity, student debt, and housing insecurity (including rent burden, eviction risk, or unstable housing amid a housing market prohibitively expensive to enter) can all be contributing factors.”[vii] Unsurprisingly, the recent rises in desperation were three times as high in households making under $24,000 then they were in those making above $120,000.
These struggling young adults are the human face of higher education’s current dilemma. Collective despair lies behind the reshaping of American universities in market driven shift toward vocationalism. Growing demands for job preparation are resulting in decreased instruction fostering independent thinking, social responsibility, and a sense of possibility.[viii] While financially understandable in the short term, this utilitarian shift also raises worrisome concerns for purportedly impractical fields like anthropology, ethnic studies, history, literature, philosophy, religion, and sociology. As these areas quietly disappear from university course listings, along with them go capacities for ethical reasoning and human understanding essential in a complex world. Eliminating these disciplines may may well produce a generation of technically competent workers who lack the competencies to think about others or participate in civic life.
Philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis blamed such conditions for a crisis of social imagination, wherein societies lose the capacity to envision collective needs and formulate alternatives when confronted with problems. He explained that “The crisis of modern society consists in the fact that it can no longer even conceive of its own transformation. It has become a society that has lost the power to create new forms of life and thought and has instead become trapped in the ‘instituted’ repetition of a pseudo-rationality. In this state, we produce individuals who are technically specialized but politically and humanly impoverished, unable to imagine a world different from the one they have inherited, and thus incapable of the autonomous action required to sustain a truly civic life.”[ix] Besides this, abandoning a broadly defined liberal arts education will likely worsen inequality. As elite institutions manage to sustain well-rounded education for the privileged few, schools with fewer resources will constrict into vocational training centers. This will create a tiered system that reinforcing class distinctions in the name of practicality.
As institutions ponder changing or suffering the consequences, new kinds of mission-based thinking become increasingly important in a future where trade schools stand on equal footing with ivy-covered universities. Success may come less from institutional prestige that the practical impact of what programs deliver. This makes it all the more important for colleges and universities to think carefully about the values they seek to preserve and what changes they can accommodate. Longstanding disciplines may need to accommodate social entrepreneurship and purpose-driven businesses, where profit and social impact coexist. External entities may be asked to assume more “educational” roles as guides and facilitators. This likely will mean fostering ethically configured partnerships between higher education and community interests to ensure that learning comports with real-world needs.[x]
Fixing intersectional problems is never easy. This is especially true in higher education because the strands of student life never run parallel. They cross and tighten under pressure that no single policy was designed to hold. What looks like a discrete challenge from one angle reveals itself as a knot from another, and reforms that loosen one thread often draw another tight. The exhaustion this produces is not the failure of any one initiative but the cumulative weight of trying to live inside structures built for students who no longer represent the majority. That weight does not stay confined to the personal. It shapes how students see the institution itself, and how the institution is seen by a wider public increasingly willing to question whether higher education deserves their trust at all.
[i] National Center for Education Statistics, “Characteristics of Postsecondary Students: 2023 Report,” NCES 2023-144 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2023).
[ii] National Institute of Mental Health, “College Student Mental Health: Intersecting Factors and Institutional Response,” NIMH Publication No. 23-4567 (Bethesda, MD: NIMH, 2023).
[iii] Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
[iv] Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
[v] American College Health Association, “National College Health Assessment: Spring 2023 Reference Group Executive Summary” (Silver Spring, MD: ACHA, 2023).
[vi] Dan Witters, “U.S. Depression Rates Remain Historically High,” Gallup News (Sep. 9, 2025) https://news.gallup.com/poll/694199/u.s.-depression-rate-remains-historically-high.aspx
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987) pp. 132-133.
[x] Thomas Hehir, New Directions in Special Education: Eliminating Ableism in Policy and Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2015).