Even though I’d still love to make more friends, I’m lucky to already be embedded in a tight-knit group dating back to college. And these for-profit solutions all seem pitched at those who need them the least — socializing positioned as a luxury good. If isolation really is a societywide crisis, we need societywide solutions — and an understanding of who has been left out most acutely from what friendship promises.
In pursuit of that aim, the researchers Sam Pressler, a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, and Soren Duggan, a communications strategist and Army veteran with a background in human intelligence collection, produced a report this spring titled “Nobody to Call,” based on a series of 30 in-depth, qualitative interviews with men ranging from their mid-20s to their mid-40s without college degrees. They hoped to add texture to the conversation on loneliness by seeking out those who they believe are struggling the most. We’ve all experienced social atrophy, Mr. Pressler told me, but for men without degrees, the bottom has fallen out.
College completion rates have risen over the decades for both men and women, but a growing proportion of those who aren’t graduating are men. As of 2021, men made up around 43 percent of four-year-college enrollees, down from approximately 57 percent in 1970. “As the college degree has increasingly become the great sorting function in American life,” Pressler and Duggan wrote, “men without degrees have increasingly found themselves sorted out.” We tend to talk about the loneliness crisis in terms of gender, but class, as derived from educational status, is the factor too touchy — or too invisible — to acknowledge.
Less than half of Americans hold bachelor’s degrees, but those without are less likely to have places to gather (parks, libraries, even coffee shops), are less likely to join civic groups or social clubs and report having far fewer close friends or people to turn to for social support. The four-year degree isn’t just an economic signal; it’s become a lifestyle determinant.
In the “Nobody to Call” case studies and interview transcripts, men without college degrees described social drift that turns into a social cliff: Graduating from high school meant the loss of an accessible infrastructure for connection and, with it, a whittling down of peer groups and no new structure — college, the military, a union, churches or civic groups — to take its place.
