BY HARVEY J. GRAFF

Growing up was always hard to do. It’s getting harder, and universities now are doing little to help the new “lost generation.” Experts on children, youth, and college students never tire of superficial generalizations about the ease or difficulty of growing up over time. They seldom define terms, specify ages, present data, or pay attention to historical context or patterns of difference.

This issue is central to understanding higher education and its challenges. Too often, statements declare that it is either easier or harder to grow up than at various times in our past. Such questions are poorly framed and ahistorical. How could “childhood” or “children”—which are not the same—not change over more than a century? We cannot generalize about “childhood” or “children” as a whole. There are too many powerful differences among young people—by class, gender, race, ethnicity, geography, experience, and age itself, as well as among individuals.

We learn this repeatedly from research in the once-new field of children and youth studies since the 1960s. Generalizations from sources descriptive of and prescriptive to the middle classes substitute for evidence and understanding of “Other Peoples’ Children,” as we ironically and contradictorily called them.

Consider college students since the 1960s. There are profound changes, many of them negative, that refute simplistic declarations of gains or lack of change. My evidence synthesizes historical and more recent research. I combine it with my observations as an undergraduate in the late 1960s, a graduate student in the first half of the 1970s, and a professor at two new suburban public universities in Texas and one very large urban university in Ohio, all in large cities.

Change is the name of the game. “Myths” of changlessness, progress, or rises and falls are ideological, not historical conclusions. The US college student population began its modern transformations after World War II between the GI Bill and the expansion of public educational systems. Despite continuing changes, the experiences of late adolescent and early adult students growing up form a baseline that is ignored with assertions about “unprecedented” later changes.

My generation of early- to mid-Baby Boomers attended an expanding array of colleges amidst conflicts over race, gender, and civil rights; urban and suburban changes; Vietnam War; and a modern technologizing economy. All contributed to rising enrollments. Many factors often associated with the 1980s and later played in the 1960s and early 1970s. Business and STEM programs grew. Students felt familial and socioeconomic pressures in choices of majors and careers. Other factors mediated.

At the same time, it was a more open, optimistic, social, interactive, and broadly educational time. The period represented for many (though not all) a positive moment for both US higher education and growing up toward greater maturity.

From our freshman dormitories to classrooms, and open spaces in between, students interacted across many lines, more actively than later. Graduate teaching assistants were better trained and more conscientious than many later. Intellectual, social, cultural, and political interests brought undergraduates and graduate students together.

Although we screamed loudly when tuition in my final year reached six hundred dollars a quarter, both my future wife and I balanced costs with scholarships, small loans, small family contributions, and for her a work-study job. We each graduated with debts of about two thousand dollars, which we paid off easily.

Most distinctive were faculty–student relationships. Faculty were more involved in student advising. My advisor expected to see his advisees. He invited me home for dinner with his family. He offered to write recommendations for fellowships or graduate schools. We spent hours in his wood paneled, book-lined office, pouring over the print-only Guide to Departments of History, selecting a range of graduate programs.

Faculty varied in their politics and expressiveness in part by age and fields. Some welcomed interactions; some integrated current events—almost always when relevant—into courses, office hours, or social events. Faculty and students were often interested in each other as people of different ages and experiences and mutual teachers and learners.

Unlike recently, strong arguments when clearly articulated and presented with evidence were not condemned as “politicized” or “presentist.” They were considered objective. This was important for future scholars making multiple and enlightening connections.

I recall no overt faculty hostility to campus radicals, the first Black student government president and Black student strike, and broad support for the almost universal one-week student strike after admission of US bombing of North Vietnam and Kent State student massacre in May 1970. I was a member of the history department faculty–student reforms committee that followed, a profound learning experience.

These relationships heightened in graduate studies. A number of professors led by my graduate supervisor became lifelong friends and colleagues. They never relinquished constructive criticism.

Over the last three or more decades, these once central elements have deeply diminished. Growing up narrows and darkens. Fears of limited economic futures—from parents, universities, popular culture, and peers—are too great for eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds to confront without active roles for faculty or genuinely student-oriented student life programs. As one exceptional quadruple major with his puppy-in-training by his side told me, “You know, we’re still young, and we sometimes need help.”

My bright undergraduate friends have no personal relationships with professors, little with their non-faculty advisors, and, exacerbated by the pandemic, few close student friendships. Most experience various degrees of anxiety, insecurity, and sometimes depression, usually without help. University services are rarely adequate. Twenty-one and twenty-two-year-olds talk about “burnout.” They are a new “lost generation.”

With general education narrowing to reflect interests of competing disciplinary clusters rather than broader student needs, and departments competing for budget-accruing credit hours, teaching, learning, and the “college experience” are shadows of themselves. Maturing for adulthood shrinks between the lines of higher education’s spreadsheets.

Harvey J. Graff is professor emeritus of English and history and inaugural Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies at Ohio State University. He writes about the history and contemporary condition of higher education for Times Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, Academe Blog, Washington Monthly, Publishers Weekly, Against the Current, Columbus Free Press, and newspapers. His new monographs include Searching for Literacy: The Social and Intellectual Origins of Literacy and My Life with Literacy: The Continuing Education of a Historian. The Intersections of the Personal, the Political, the Academic, and Place (forthcoming). He thanks undergraduate friends, former students, and colleagues of all ages and orientations.