This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The first skill I learned when I became a political science professor nearly 20 years ago was how to quiet a room full of chatty undergraduates. These days, I often walk into a silent room, with students staring at their phones and barely acknowledging the classmates beside them.
As I read more about the United States' loneliness crisis, I began noticing a version of it among my students. In a 2026 national survey of more than 40,000 college students, nearly 6 in 10 said they felt lonely sometimes or always. At the same time, federal time-use data show that the share of Americans who socialized in person with family, friends or others on an average day fell from 38% in 2015 to 30% in 2025.
Those and other studies capture a familiar contradiction seen on college campuses like my own: Many new students want close relationships but feel anxious about initiating them and have had little practice sustaining them. I realized that my students rarely spoke to one another and went entire semesters without learning their classmates' names. Many students seemed unsure how to cross the few feet between them and their peers and make the social connection they craved.
I designed a freshman honors seminar, "Friendship & Society," around this uncertainty, combining the academic study of friendship with practical exercises in forming and sustaining it. In this course, students examine how an initial exchange can develop into friendship through repeated contact and shared time, and why many potential connections never progress into a lasting friendship. They consider how friends help shape identity and memory, whether old friends are owed continued loyalty after their lives diverge and whether a friendship can remain meaningful after it ends.
Students also look at how friendship can have strong effects on physical and mental health, making it what I believe is an overlooked public health issue. Friendships can also help shape people's broader sense of belonging in a community, building the social trust that civic life depends on. Students test those questions through 10 "Friendship Practices," a series of experiential activities I designed.
Students are asked to share a meal with classmates or visit a public gathering place like a café or lounge to see how these settings can encourage conversation. During a "friendship safari," small groups walk across campus, noting where conversations begin and where students pass one another without speaking. In private journal entries and submitted reflections, students record what they expected from each situation and what happened when they tried to form connections.
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