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."
True enough Glenn. A few years ago I moved to a new town. Didn’t know anyone. Asked on the community Facebook group if there was a friendly poker game - boom, I was in one. Joined Rotary, boom, met more people, got in another poker game from that. Joined a small golf club - boom, I’m in a league with 80 golfers. Joined a church - boom, in the men’s group, invited to golf with some of the guys. It’s not hard, just get out there and talk to some fellows is what I’ve leaned. Boom!
I think the problem is identifying groups where there are young men, or even men under 50. I wish my husband would make more friends but, honestly, I don’t know where he would go. Everyone in KoC at our church is over 70. Rotary the youngest person is probably 60. I go to local Republican party events, but I’m the youngest one there by 20 years. I’m fine with spending time with people who are older than me, but it would be nice to see a few people in the same life stage.
True enough Dana. I encountered that as well but decided it was better having older friends than no friends at all. Sub-60 I found connections through hobbies: neighborhood poker games, motorcycle riding club, hockey. I wasn’t necessarily close with any of the guys but it would get me out amongst men my age. All were busy but made time for their hobby.
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.
Putnam’s piece (which I read when it was published) and my comment say the same thing: groups are where male friendships can be formed. Joining a group and making friends is not dependent on educational level. This is finding friends 101 kind of stuff.
I was going through my family’s heirlooms and came across my non college graduate grandfather’s 32 level Scottish Rite ring. My wife’s family is from one of the Gulf Coast cities that celebrate Mardi Gras and so her non college graduates belong to a Mardi Gras organization…but they also follow a college football team even though the grandparents didn’t attend college.
This is a wonderfully chaotic comments section. I'm not going to be able to reply to all of your comments, but I do highly recommend checking out the full research project. We put a bunch of time and energy listening to the stories these men shared, and, hopefully, sharing them in a humanizing, nuanced light. It's understandable that you would have unanswered questions from a 2,000 word essay. So please do consider checking out the interactive (https://nobodytocall.org/) and reading the report in full (https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1S1u5ad1De9ZaDMmjF46qs-5kkJJgCo3o).
If anything, the physical mobility that a professional career requires would tend to atomize graduates further.
A plumber or a roofer or a piano teacher can find work almost anywhere. A physicist or a material engineer or a diversity consultant has to travel (often multiple times) to where a small number of jobs are located.
I liked your article, but I pretty much agree with Lee, Bogart & Shannon. You start with what I think is a false assumption, and leave out / barely touch on the nuanced relationships most men have with women, especially their role in driving socialization. There’s no mention of sports, or divorce, or the social / economic forces that separate men (& women). I used to joke that if a stranger sat on the same park bench as my mother, for a half hour, she would know all about them when they got up and left, probably feeling good about themselves.
Also, different people need / want different things from life and have different opportunities. And then there’s the Chinese version of “luck”.
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.
Interesting. Not my observation. I have family from a small midwestern town with mostly working class that the locals have claimed "is dying" over the last 40 years after the last factories left. When I visit my family there, I can never get much done because everywhere I go people want to chat and making friends is just natural. I live in a liberal college town with mostly upper class in California and after 36 years in the same house, I don't know most of the neighbors in my neighborhood.
But Murray documented some of this crash in civic institutions in lower income communities. I think there must be a difference between urban low income and rural low income.
Yep, Ohioans put Bush in the White House and he repaid them by sacrificing them to slaughter Muslims while shipping their jobs to China…a real “win, win”. But after reading Hillbilly Elegy I can understand why factory owners now have to import Haitians to work in factories in Ohio because according to Vance most of the whites are not only skanky and violent but also drug addicts…and that’s his description of his own mother!!! WTF??
This essay fails to connect the facts of how these interviewed people feel, with their educational level. No evidence is presented that persons who went to college are any different. What about all these college educated people that received degrees in gender studies and various political "science" and psychology subjects . Are they happier or more "connected"? I doubt it. But this author doesn't even try to do the job. He just assumes having a college degree makes all this different. It's a nonsense argument. Go interview college educated ladies with cats living alone in studio apartments in NYC. I'm sure they aren't depressed.
These men are looking for a thick community, a group of people with broadly shared values that they can rely on long term. The place to find that is a church. I'm amazed that none of these men seem to have considered it. (And for the unmarried ones, most denominations are about 60% women.)
Well, I'm sure many men do consider churches. However, if you don't believe in God you end up living a lie to fit in and eventually that becomes obvious to all. If you're an honest man (or woman for that matter) lying to yourself and others about something so important to your life and the lives of others is unhealthy for all involved.
I can’t see how the level of education has an impact on friendships on activities and on enemy in our society. What’s better, being a construction worker making a good wage, having a few drinks with friends in a bar after work or snowmobiling or golfing together with his peers or being a work at home college graduate, totally isolated for me both the workplace and social life, unless finding at his college education has turned him into a barista,
May not be a majority, but I have seen a lot of women, when confronted with this say “tough shit or goodbye patriarchy” or similar. That fails to address the issue and paraphrasing Prof G, the most dangerous person in society is a jobless, lonely young man. We can solve this while celebrating women’s continued sucess in college and business.👍
Women with half a brain ought to know that a large group of angry, isolated, friendless men is not going to be good for them. As I tell my civics students: "ladies, throw out Natural Law at your peril since Jungle Law is a really bad place for you."
Smart women go out of their way to keep the mass of men happy, if only for self-preservation. The reverse is true too, but for different reasons.
Thanks for this fascinating survey and report! Yes, I'm sure that this is class-based to the degree that working-class jobs are so much more precarious and transient at this time. There is not time to build up friendships over years or to lean into networking and loose affiliations, which white-collar men may use to stay connected even to those from past employments.
And what about the concept of the play date - is that mainly a middle-class phenomenon? To my thinking, once you have kids, you have a huge motivation to socialize with other parents of six-year-old boys, or what have you, so that your kid(s) can have friends. If in certain communities, it's mainly the mothers who facilitate that kind of thing, that certainly leaves out men. Thank you again!
All men, regardless of their education level, run into the same problem as they age, as they lose the friends from high school, then if they go to college, they lose those friends, then it's the friends of your wife, then friends of your kids, and then they are alone. I work out and do things with other men early in the morning, which is focused on rebuilding male relationships whose mission is to "The Mission of F3 is to plant, grow and serve small workout groups for men for the invigoration of male community leadership." Come checkout a workout, its free, it's made a difference in my life and other men I know. www.f3nation.com
Well written. I would note that huge variation exists among men without college degrees. If you go to the Census' CPS ASEC data you can see enormous heterogeneity in earnings and other characteristics, and many are doing well, some quite well.
And personally, the YMCA comparison, like other ones made by people re a proposal for today with a similar element from the past, well, we are discontinuous with the past in some ways that can ruin the comparison. The YMCA that emerged in the nineteenth century did not exist within today's institutional landscape; it was one institution embedded in a far more decentralized, deliberately economically and governmentally redundant, and decision-making-diffused ecology of locally anchored financial system, and economy that was structurally biased to be one dominated by geographically diffused and diversified mid sized firms, a rich array civic associations that were deliberately structurally generated, local fiscal primacy, and genuinely mass-membership political parties. Your proposal assumes today's far more consolidated and centralized public and private structures remain intact and then seeks to layer community organizations onto them. But those are fundamentally different institutional topologies
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."
True enough Glenn. A few years ago I moved to a new town. Didn’t know anyone. Asked on the community Facebook group if there was a friendly poker game - boom, I was in one. Joined Rotary, boom, met more people, got in another poker game from that. Joined a small golf club - boom, I’m in a league with 80 golfers. Joined a church - boom, in the men’s group, invited to golf with some of the guys. It’s not hard, just get out there and talk to some fellows is what I’ve leaned. Boom!
I think the problem is identifying groups where there are young men, or even men under 50. I wish my husband would make more friends but, honestly, I don’t know where he would go. Everyone in KoC at our church is over 70. Rotary the youngest person is probably 60. I go to local Republican party events, but I’m the youngest one there by 20 years. I’m fine with spending time with people who are older than me, but it would be nice to see a few people in the same life stage.
True enough Dana. I encountered that as well but decided it was better having older friends than no friends at all. Sub-60 I found connections through hobbies: neighborhood poker games, motorcycle riding club, hockey. I wasn’t necessarily close with any of the guys but it would get me out amongst men my age. All were busy but made time for their hobby.
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
Putnam’s piece (which I read when it was published) and my comment say the same thing: groups are where male friendships can be formed. Joining a group and making friends is not dependent on educational level. This is finding friends 101 kind of stuff.
I was going through my family’s heirlooms and came across my non college graduate grandfather’s 32 level Scottish Rite ring. My wife’s family is from one of the Gulf Coast cities that celebrate Mardi Gras and so her non college graduates belong to a Mardi Gras organization…but they also follow a college football team even though the grandparents didn’t attend college.
This is a wonderfully chaotic comments section. I'm not going to be able to reply to all of your comments, but I do highly recommend checking out the full research project. We put a bunch of time and energy listening to the stories these men shared, and, hopefully, sharing them in a humanizing, nuanced light. It's understandable that you would have unanswered questions from a 2,000 word essay. So please do consider checking out the interactive (https://nobodytocall.org/) and reading the report in full (https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1S1u5ad1De9ZaDMmjF46qs-5kkJJgCo3o).
Thanks again for sharing, and God bless.
I did not see the unique asoect of college/non-college. People go separate ways after colege, too.
If anything, the physical mobility that a professional career requires would tend to atomize graduates further.
A plumber or a roofer or a piano teacher can find work almost anywhere. A physicist or a material engineer or a diversity consultant has to travel (often multiple times) to where a small number of jobs are located.
I liked your article, but I pretty much agree with Lee, Bogart & Shannon. You start with what I think is a false assumption, and leave out / barely touch on the nuanced relationships most men have with women, especially their role in driving socialization. There’s no mention of sports, or divorce, or the social / economic forces that separate men (& women). I used to joke that if a stranger sat on the same park bench as my mother, for a half hour, she would know all about them when they got up and left, probably feeling good about themselves.
Also, different people need / want different things from life and have different opportunities. And then there’s the Chinese version of “luck”.
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/
Interesting. Not my observation. I have family from a small midwestern town with mostly working class that the locals have claimed "is dying" over the last 40 years after the last factories left. When I visit my family there, I can never get much done because everywhere I go people want to chat and making friends is just natural. I live in a liberal college town with mostly upper class in California and after 36 years in the same house, I don't know most of the neighbors in my neighborhood.
But Murray documented some of this crash in civic institutions in lower income communities. I think there must be a difference between urban low income and rural low income.
Yep, Ohioans put Bush in the White House and he repaid them by sacrificing them to slaughter Muslims while shipping their jobs to China…a real “win, win”. But after reading Hillbilly Elegy I can understand why factory owners now have to import Haitians to work in factories in Ohio because according to Vance most of the whites are not only skanky and violent but also drug addicts…and that’s his description of his own mother!!! WTF??
Read up on Cobalt boats fir example.
This essay fails to connect the facts of how these interviewed people feel, with their educational level. No evidence is presented that persons who went to college are any different. What about all these college educated people that received degrees in gender studies and various political "science" and psychology subjects . Are they happier or more "connected"? I doubt it. But this author doesn't even try to do the job. He just assumes having a college degree makes all this different. It's a nonsense argument. Go interview college educated ladies with cats living alone in studio apartments in NYC. I'm sure they aren't depressed.
These men are looking for a thick community, a group of people with broadly shared values that they can rely on long term. The place to find that is a church. I'm amazed that none of these men seem to have considered it. (And for the unmarried ones, most denominations are about 60% women.)
Well, I'm sure many men do consider churches. However, if you don't believe in God you end up living a lie to fit in and eventually that becomes obvious to all. If you're an honest man (or woman for that matter) lying to yourself and others about something so important to your life and the lives of others is unhealthy for all involved.
I can’t see how the level of education has an impact on friendships on activities and on enemy in our society. What’s better, being a construction worker making a good wage, having a few drinks with friends in a bar after work or snowmobiling or golfing together with his peers or being a work at home college graduate, totally isolated for me both the workplace and social life, unless finding at his college education has turned him into a barista,
May not be a majority, but I have seen a lot of women, when confronted with this say “tough shit or goodbye patriarchy” or similar. That fails to address the issue and paraphrasing Prof G, the most dangerous person in society is a jobless, lonely young man. We can solve this while celebrating women’s continued sucess in college and business.👍
Women with half a brain ought to know that a large group of angry, isolated, friendless men is not going to be good for them. As I tell my civics students: "ladies, throw out Natural Law at your peril since Jungle Law is a really bad place for you."
Smart women go out of their way to keep the mass of men happy, if only for self-preservation. The reverse is true too, but for different reasons.
Thank you. You said it better than I did and your experience should be a wake-up call to those who take issue.👍
Thanks for this fascinating survey and report! Yes, I'm sure that this is class-based to the degree that working-class jobs are so much more precarious and transient at this time. There is not time to build up friendships over years or to lean into networking and loose affiliations, which white-collar men may use to stay connected even to those from past employments.
And what about the concept of the play date - is that mainly a middle-class phenomenon? To my thinking, once you have kids, you have a huge motivation to socialize with other parents of six-year-old boys, or what have you, so that your kid(s) can have friends. If in certain communities, it's mainly the mothers who facilitate that kind of thing, that certainly leaves out men. Thank you again!
All men, regardless of their education level, run into the same problem as they age, as they lose the friends from high school, then if they go to college, they lose those friends, then it's the friends of your wife, then friends of your kids, and then they are alone. I work out and do things with other men early in the morning, which is focused on rebuilding male relationships whose mission is to "The Mission of F3 is to plant, grow and serve small workout groups for men for the invigoration of male community leadership." Come checkout a workout, its free, it's made a difference in my life and other men I know. www.f3nation.com
Well written. I would note that huge variation exists among men without college degrees. If you go to the Census' CPS ASEC data you can see enormous heterogeneity in earnings and other characteristics, and many are doing well, some quite well.
And personally, the YMCA comparison, like other ones made by people re a proposal for today with a similar element from the past, well, we are discontinuous with the past in some ways that can ruin the comparison. The YMCA that emerged in the nineteenth century did not exist within today's institutional landscape; it was one institution embedded in a far more decentralized, deliberately economically and governmentally redundant, and decision-making-diffused ecology of locally anchored financial system, and economy that was structurally biased to be one dominated by geographically diffused and diversified mid sized firms, a rich array civic associations that were deliberately structurally generated, local fiscal primacy, and genuinely mass-membership political parties. Your proposal assumes today's far more consolidated and centralized public and private structures remain intact and then seeks to layer community organizations onto them. But those are fundamentally different institutional topologies