Friendships have zero to do with educational attainment. They have everything to do with putting yourself out there and connecting. With others. With groups, clubs, organizations, houses of worship etc. I recommend the authors read Bowling Alone which readily identifies causes and solutions.
I think this is not especially just a problem for men who didn't go to college. I'm not sure why the focus here is on those men in particular. As men get older, it becomes harder in many cases to form new close friendships, for all the reasons stated in this article. But camaraderie takes place (or doesn't) regardless of educational level. Steve Shannon makes the point well. In my own case, the local American Legion post has brought me plenty of friendships. I have friends there who range from truck drivers to lawyers to veterinarians, and there are no class distinctions. If you're a veteran or the son of a veteran, check it out.
"This project emerged from a close friendship. Soren served for nine years in human intelligence collection roles for U.S. Special Operations. Sam founded and led the Armed Services Arts Partnership, where he spent seven years helping veterans and their families reconnect with a sense of camaraderie and purpose in civilian life. We met during a period of transition for us both, connecting around a shared commitment to making inappropriate jokes, and a shared disillusionment with the shallow public discourse around class, gender, and community. In the years since, Soren began building new strategies for large-scale digital strategic communications, and Sam began researching and writing on the intersection of civic life, social connection, and class.
In 2024, Sam teamed up with the Survey Center on American Life to design and publish the “Disconnected” survey report, which showed the extent to which the college degree has become the dividing line in American civic life. We found that, compared to college grads, Americans without degrees are significantly less likely to participate in religious and community groups, and they have far fewer close friends and people to turn to for social support. What we didn’t find was evidence of the so-called “male loneliness” crisis; education was the dividing line in Americans’ relational lives, not gender.
But there was still an education and gender story hidden in the data. For the past several decades, even as overall college completion rates have increased for women and men, women have been enrolling in and completing college at significantly higher rates than men. Men today make up just over 40 percent of those who enroll in and complete four-year colleges, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1970. More Americans, especially more women, are graduating from four-year colleges, but a growing proportion of the Americans who aren’t graduating are men. So as the college degree has increasingly become the great sorting function in American life, men without degrees have increasingly found themselves sorted out.
This education and gender story did show up in the qualitative interviews we conducted as part of that same “Disconnected” project. Of the 20 survey respondents we spoke to — women and men, with degrees and without degrees — it was the three men without degrees we interviewed who stood out for being completely untethered. The experiences of isolation these men shared were vulnerable, raw, and, at times, heartbreaking. But their textured, human stories were hidden behind sterile data points that ultimately became fodder for op-eds in major outlets and hot takes on Twitter.
Sam and Soren shared their disillusionment over months of group texts. As we saw it, there was no “male loneliness” crisis, but a crisis of men without degrees being “left alone” by society. The struggles of these men were being instrumentalized for clicks and engagement, and the richness and particularity of their stories were being flattened into lifeless and abstract data points. People were misunderstanding the data, and the data was leading to misunderstanding.
The nature of disconnection is that your life — with all its messy experiences and stories, all its emotions and feelings, all its struggles and aspirations — is mostly invisible to the outside world. We decided to embark on this research project, Nobody to Call, to make the invisible visible: to humanize and provide texture to the lives of a group of people who are often talked about but are rarely heard from directly."
I am struggling with the premise of this article. It seems to me that that it is conflating two things that, although might connect for some people, are really separate.
Yes, we have screwed working class males with the Wall Street led changes to our economy to go global and open the border for cheaper labor. And yes, maybe their lower economic circumstances have led to more loneliness for some. But the increase in loneliness transcends most economic classes. It is a bit of a crisis with a lot of people these days. Smaller families or no marriage and kids. Social media. Less socialization. Working from home. Workforce automation. There are a lot of sources of cause for the increase in loneliness. Economic class should have little to do with it.
It is somewhat mind-bending for me given social media. Prior to Facebook I had drifted away from a lot of old school mates and coworker friends that the platform helped me reconnect with. I have over 500 REAL friends on the platform and have connected with many of them in person over the years.
I tend to agree that a lot of men are responsible for their own situation not getting their ass off the couch playing video games all day. I also agree that lower economic circumstances have some impact, but it starts to sound like a manufactured victim mindset excuse.
Friendships have zero to do with educational attainment. They have everything to do with putting yourself out there and connecting. With others. With groups, clubs, organizations, houses of worship etc. I recommend the authors read Bowling Alone which readily identifies causes and solutions.
Bob's work informed this research. He also wrote about the same topic in the NYT last year. I recommend reading it: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/opinion/men-boys-crisis-progressive-era.html
I think this is not especially just a problem for men who didn't go to college. I'm not sure why the focus here is on those men in particular. As men get older, it becomes harder in many cases to form new close friendships, for all the reasons stated in this article. But camaraderie takes place (or doesn't) regardless of educational level. Steve Shannon makes the point well. In my own case, the local American Legion post has brought me plenty of friendships. I have friends there who range from truck drivers to lawyers to veterinarians, and there are no class distinctions. If you're a veteran or the son of a veteran, check it out.
I suggest reading our intro piece for this project, which sets the context: https://connectivetissue.substack.com/p/nobody-to-call
"This project emerged from a close friendship. Soren served for nine years in human intelligence collection roles for U.S. Special Operations. Sam founded and led the Armed Services Arts Partnership, where he spent seven years helping veterans and their families reconnect with a sense of camaraderie and purpose in civilian life. We met during a period of transition for us both, connecting around a shared commitment to making inappropriate jokes, and a shared disillusionment with the shallow public discourse around class, gender, and community. In the years since, Soren began building new strategies for large-scale digital strategic communications, and Sam began researching and writing on the intersection of civic life, social connection, and class.
In 2024, Sam teamed up with the Survey Center on American Life to design and publish the “Disconnected” survey report, which showed the extent to which the college degree has become the dividing line in American civic life. We found that, compared to college grads, Americans without degrees are significantly less likely to participate in religious and community groups, and they have far fewer close friends and people to turn to for social support. What we didn’t find was evidence of the so-called “male loneliness” crisis; education was the dividing line in Americans’ relational lives, not gender.
But there was still an education and gender story hidden in the data. For the past several decades, even as overall college completion rates have increased for women and men, women have been enrolling in and completing college at significantly higher rates than men. Men today make up just over 40 percent of those who enroll in and complete four-year colleges, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1970. More Americans, especially more women, are graduating from four-year colleges, but a growing proportion of the Americans who aren’t graduating are men. So as the college degree has increasingly become the great sorting function in American life, men without degrees have increasingly found themselves sorted out.
This education and gender story did show up in the qualitative interviews we conducted as part of that same “Disconnected” project. Of the 20 survey respondents we spoke to — women and men, with degrees and without degrees — it was the three men without degrees we interviewed who stood out for being completely untethered. The experiences of isolation these men shared were vulnerable, raw, and, at times, heartbreaking. But their textured, human stories were hidden behind sterile data points that ultimately became fodder for op-eds in major outlets and hot takes on Twitter.
Sam and Soren shared their disillusionment over months of group texts. As we saw it, there was no “male loneliness” crisis, but a crisis of men without degrees being “left alone” by society. The struggles of these men were being instrumentalized for clicks and engagement, and the richness and particularity of their stories were being flattened into lifeless and abstract data points. People were misunderstanding the data, and the data was leading to misunderstanding.
The nature of disconnection is that your life — with all its messy experiences and stories, all its emotions and feelings, all its struggles and aspirations — is mostly invisible to the outside world. We decided to embark on this research project, Nobody to Call, to make the invisible visible: to humanize and provide texture to the lives of a group of people who are often talked about but are rarely heard from directly."
I am struggling with the premise of this article. It seems to me that that it is conflating two things that, although might connect for some people, are really separate.
Yes, we have screwed working class males with the Wall Street led changes to our economy to go global and open the border for cheaper labor. And yes, maybe their lower economic circumstances have led to more loneliness for some. But the increase in loneliness transcends most economic classes. It is a bit of a crisis with a lot of people these days. Smaller families or no marriage and kids. Social media. Less socialization. Working from home. Workforce automation. There are a lot of sources of cause for the increase in loneliness. Economic class should have little to do with it.
It is somewhat mind-bending for me given social media. Prior to Facebook I had drifted away from a lot of old school mates and coworker friends that the platform helped me reconnect with. I have over 500 REAL friends on the platform and have connected with many of them in person over the years.
I tend to agree that a lot of men are responsible for their own situation not getting their ass off the couch playing video games all day. I also agree that lower economic circumstances have some impact, but it starts to sound like a manufactured victim mindset excuse.
I recommend checking out the research that we published in 2024, which shows a significant class divide in everything from access to third places, to participation and membership in community, to friendships: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/disconnected-places-and-spaces/