Young Men’s Internet Use “Foremost Challenge of Our Time”

Concerns about loneliness, social isolation and belonging on college campuses are growing, especially for young men, who tend not to seek mental health support. But the challenges facing them extend beyond mental health, intersecting with how they spend their time online, their relationships with others and their expectations for education, work and their economic futures.

For higher education leaders, those overlapping pressures raise questions about whether existing approaches to mental health are reaching male students—and what colleges can do to better support their well-being and success.

At the Symposium on Young American Men in Washington, D.C., last week, businessman and political commentator Andrew Yang summed up the ways isolation and online life can compound the challenges facing young men:

“Too many of our young men are not getting out there. They’re staying at home. They’re in their parents’ basements. They’re going down internet rabbit holes. They’re becoming radicalized,” Yang said. “I want people to reflect on what that means for that individual, but also their family and their community. This is one of the foremost challenges of our time.”

Joshua Bay/Inside Higher Ed

Technology and human connection: More than half of young men spend more than five hours online each day, according to survey research from Cygnal.

Experts at the event discussed ways to address the impact of so much time online on men’s well-being and relationships. Meg Leta Jones, professor and chair of communication, culture and technology at Georgetown University, compared social media use among young people with activities such as gaming and viewing pornography—issues for which, she argued, the potential risks are better understood.

“We know the rates of addiction for men, and we know that giving people easy access to addictive activities earlier in their life makes them far more likely to be addicts later in life,” Jones said.

“Social media is a little bit of everything,” she added. “When I talk to other families and parents, the challenge is, what analogy is this? Is it like heroin, which we ban for everybody … [or] is it like driving a car, where you can do it when you get to about 15 if you have a parent that’s going to train you and it’s built into the school system. But if you don’t have that, you have to be an adult.”

Michael Marinaccio, executive director of the Center for Responsible Technology, raised concerns about young men relying on AI chatbots for friendships and, in some cases, romantic relationships. This level of reliance on technology could displace the human connections that play an important role in people’s emotional lives, he said.

“One of my greatest fears with the whole chatbot conversation is its anthropomorphization,” Marinaccio said. “It’s a fraudulent conversation, it’s a fraudulent relation and it’s very problematic because it’s replacing those relationships that are so important in a young man’s life.”

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall expressed similar concerns that AI could further exacerbate challenges to forming and maintaining relationships.

“Our human relationships are about, how do we resolve conflict relationally? How do we have those hard decisions? And ultimately, how do we create accountability within those relationships?” Marshall said. “We clearly see social media access to young men and what that’s done relationally to them [and] their view on wanting to develop relationships with … women. Are we going to take it to another level with AI? Are we exacerbating that problem or is it just part of the same thing?”

Joshua Bay/Inside Higher Ed

Policy solutions: At the event, Andrew Hartz, founder and executive director of the Open Therapy Institute, and Jonathan Ellen, former chief executive officer of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, pointed to the disparity in suicide deaths between men and women, with men dying by suicide at roughly four times the rate of women.

In a panel about policy solutions to male mental health challenges, Ellen and Hartz said the barriers for men seeking help include stigma, a shortage of services tailored to men and a mental health workforce that skews female. Hartz argued that some approaches to mental health have failed to adequately consider men’s needs.

“There wasn’t the possibility of ‘Maybe we’re mistreating men in a way, maybe we’re not giving them adequate supports,’” he said. “People are uncomfortable with that … [and] there’s something about the way gender disparities were conceptualized that kind of invalidates male hardship.”

Hartz said issues including the effects of cancel culture and censorship and potential bias against men in family and couples’ therapy have received insufficient attention from researchers. Ellen, meanwhile, called for the creation of a federal office focused on men’s health to help identify and address gaps in research and services.

“I do think we have evolved from the 1960s to now where I think men are more separated and more isolated, and how that manifests—whether it’s substance abuse or it’s crime related or whatever way it’s manifesting—we just haven’t picked it up enough yet,” Ellen said. “We don’t have the resources and the leadership at high enough levels in government and in organizations to really make an impact.”

Joshua Bay/Inside Higher Ed

Building economic opportunity: Another panel featuring Bill Beach, former commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat of California; and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, discussed how the affordability crisis and workforce preparation are shaping young men’s futures.

Job growth being concentrated in fields that employ more women and declining labor force participation among young men were among the workforce trends affecting young men.

Beach said the labor force participation rate among men ages 16 to 24 has fallen from 72 percent in 1995 to 55 percent in 2026. At the same time, panelists noted persistent employer demand for workers in the skilled trades and other fields.

Khanna pointed to the economic barriers to young men to achieving financial independence, an issue he said could be worsened by AI.

“It costs more to have childcare. It costs more to buy a house. It costs more to have health care,” Khanna said. “So people are staying with their parents [and] staying in their communities more. I’m not saying that’s the only explanation, but it’s certainly a harder challenge to get a verdict.”

“The AI revolution is going to accelerate the question about who is best and how we’re making sure that economic success is not just in the hands of the few,” he added.

Better workforce policy, more apprenticeships and changes to secondary education are ways to help more young men build durable careers, the panel agreed.

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