Gen Z is living through a profound social crisis. Nearly three-quarters of 16- to 24-year-olds report feeling lonely, and young adults now spend 70% less time in person with friends compared with just two decades ago. The share of U.S. adults with no close friends has quadrupled since 1990. And a growing majority of Gen Z college graduates say their degree was a “waste of money.”...Universities still offer the rarest commodity in modern life: sustained, face-to-face contact with a diverse group of peers at a critical period of development. Yet most campuses remain organized around the assumption that instruction is the primary product students are buying.
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I say this as a tenured professor at USC: My doctoral training included zero coursework in how to teach. That’s typical. Like most of my colleagues, I learned to teach through trial and error, borrowing techniques from mentors and hoping for the best. Academic hiring, pay and prestige hinge overwhelmingly on research output, not pedagogy. Even professors who care deeply about teaching must navigate a system that rewards something else. When those incentives clash, teaching loses. Yet students still collect diplomas, universities still preserve their brands and everyone pretends the emperor is fully clothed.

How? By funding student life with the same seriousness universities devote to research labs and medical centers. By hiring professional experience designers — people trained to trace how students actually move through an institution and pinpoint where systems create friction, confusion or isolation. By building multiyear collaborative projects where students pursue real problems together. By creating rituals, traditions and shared experiences that anchor students’ identities and foster a sense of continuity and belonging. These are not “amenities.” They are the new core curriculum.