The Four Years of College, Explained for Young Men and Their Parents
The Four Years of College, Explained for Young Men and Their Parents
College is the default ritual for transitioning boys to young men in the US. Not the military, a civil service posting, puberty, or religious ceremony defeats college in its ubiquity and importance in ushering youths from dependent to productive. Fortunately, rituals have some predictable unfoldings, and this is meant to be a guide to navigating the college transition for guys at every stage of university. My hope is this will better orient to where you are and help you think through what you might want to do next.
Don’t panic if things feel like they’re coming off the rails in college. Most of us seriously struggle with at least one if not multiple life transitions: finding or changing a career, marriage, the 1st child, the last child to leave and retirement. For men, college has overtaken the ‘midlife crisis corvette’ and emerged as the primary stumbling block. The current generation of young men is struggling in college at record rates, both in enrollment and in completion. According to a 2024 study from the American Institute for Boys and Men, there are now 2.4 million more female than male undergraduates on U.S. campuses: 8.9 million women versus 6.5 million men, and the four-year graduation rate is 54% for women versus 43% for men.
Yet most young men – with support measured out appropriately to their maturity and age – can eventually figure out how to live independent of parents, take up adult relationships and responsibilites, and find jobs over roughly the same 4 to 6 years as their peers.
Breaking College Down Year by Year
I like to break college down year by year. Within each year, I’ll outline what to expect and what a young man might want to think of accomplishing each year.
The summary version is: newness is freshman year, solidifying your peer group and academic interests sophomore year, then junior year kicks off several transitions, and the fourth year deciding the direction for early adulthood. I’m also planning to write a post about taking a semester off.
While there are hundreds of useful frameworks that you can reference to make sense of your college experience or your son’s college experience, I often go with this model because it’s so intuitive and specific. Year 1 expect A and do B. Year 2, expect X and do Z. One read is probably all it will take to make this stick, and therefore easier to recall when you need.
If you’re college aged, I encourage you to read this guide with a balance of skepticism and reflection.
Becoming an adult regularly means holding two somewhat conflicting things at once: trusting yourself and trusting others. In sessions, I lead with the idea that we are all individuals with unique circumstances. I do my best not to overgeneralize a client’s experience and to leave my biases on the side, which I realize have recently started leaning more corporate and collectivist and are competing with my more contrarian, creative and free-spirit first instincts. Whatever my bias or the bias of the next guide you encounter, know that you’re an adult and we are peers in many ways, and you will need to contemplate how what I say fits and doesn’t fit with your own experience.
Then again, we can only be so unique and it’s important to see how our lives are consistent with and shaped by shared themes. Becoming an adult also means realizing you don’t know everything and recognizing when and how to outsource knowledge collection to others. With my guide, you're drawing on the memories of a traditional college student not too long ago, coupled with my work over 5+ years and 1000+ hours of sessions as a counselor for young men in the mental health field.
What to Expect as a Freshman Guy
Think of going to college like moving to a foreign country. The buildings, people, customs, and food are all new to you, all at once. This stirs up feelings of excitement, curiosity and awe for long periods of time. And as you settle into college and master a new routine, you might notice a growing sense of achievement and confidence that you can make it in all kinds of environments.
The dark cousins of these feelings are overwhelm and anxiety, since our tolerance for change and uncertainty is finite. Well-adjusted college freshmen will have their moments. The less adaptable could have months where all this change feels more overwhelming than anything else.
If you’re a freshman guy, you might notice there are not as many other men on campus in 2026. It’s normal for universities to have only 30% of the population identifying as male. On the one hand, it’s not so bad to be dating at an all-womens college, huh? On the other hand, you might feel a bit of an outsider on campus and less sense of belonging.
So, exit criteria for a successful freshman year for a guy is to have found a group of guys you like spending time with and are having an overall positive impact on your character.
One of the easiest ways to do this can be joining a fraternity. Research and strongly consider pledging a fraternity you respect. I can’t imagine writing that sentence 15 some years ago given the bad PR of fraternities and my own independent nature at the time. Humbled by the impressive men I met when I joined a fraternity, I learned a healthy fratnerity greases the wheels for friendships and sets you up with many positive male role models.
In fact, I’m writing this post seated on a couch in Rio next to one of my fraternity brothers, David, who I travel with at least once almost every year since college. Not only is he a great friend and weirdly good at Brazilian samba as it turns out, but his character is beyond admirable: constantly generous without judging others who are less, a talented and hard-working software engineer who was one of the first employees at a multi-BN start up Plaid (founded by two of our other fraternity brothers), a writer and reader on the side, polite, funny and infinitely thoughtful. I can’t imagine my life turning out as good as it did if I hadn’t met David at my fraternity.
Finding a tribe matters more for your generation than it did for mine. Survey after survey now finds the hardest part of college for Gen Z guys isn't the academics, but developing a sense of community. Male loneliness is at record highs for Gen Z men, which is exactly why I treat finding your people as the year-one priority.
A fraternity is not for you? I would have 100% agreed with you when I was 18. Or the fraternities at your school just don’t click with you? That’s okay, too, just don’t be an island. Set your goal for this year to get meaningfully and consistently involved with the campus radio station, join flag football or find an on-campus job with social employees. The idea here is to find a group of people that will become an anchor for the rest of your time in school.
Sophomore Strides and Slumps
You’ve likely accumulated some stability and experience by the time second year comes around, especially when you compare yourself to the new first years wandering around campus. Many sophomores adjusting well to college will be feeling confident in their major. Assuming you hit year 1 goal (rememer: find a tribe), the budding friendships have blossomed.
You are thriving, until one day you aren’t. College started as an exciting blank canvas that you creatively and masterfully filled in. The same colors you admired with pride now look a bit duller. Is this it? Or perhaps you never found your footing freshman year and were banking on a reset this year.
Young Men's Mental Health Issues in College
Academically, the major isn’t working out and you’re panicked about what you’re going to do and anxious about the money you and/or your family have invested in this process. Socially, you’re struggling to connect and be at ease with other students on campus. Both can have negative impacts on your psychology, resulting in depression, anxiety, impulsive decision making to stop attending classes or drop out of college, and dangerous drinking and drug usage.
Men tend to handle this stretch differently. We're less likely to walk into the counseling center and talk about our troubles. 2022 data shows that while male and female students report similar rates of psychological distress, only 36% of male undergraduates have ever received mental health services compared with 54% of female students. For your generation of men, coping with this stretch looks less like the stereotypical heavy drinking and more like the quieter stuff: weed, zyn and edibles, gaming or scrolling till 4 a.m., or venting to Claude.
Two Goals for Your Sophomore Year
Looking back on sophomore year, you should be able to recall multiple moments of your resilience and flexibility. Freshman year is made up of opportunities, potential, experimentation, and plans. Second year, some things you launched come crashing down and you are tested. How do you respond? On the brink of failing pre-med classes, for example, you need to either lock in to pass organic chemistry or do some soul searching and land on a new major with more optimism and interest about your new direction.
The other developmental goal I’d set is around leadership. You have enough experience to help others in the community, while still being one of the less seasoned on campus and could benefit from mentorship. So do two things: find a leader to take you under their wing (an advisor, scholar, upper classman) and lead someone yourself (become a resident advisor, orientation leader, volunteer leader).
Third Year Transitions
Though to a less intense degree as freshman year, junior year is still one of transitions and contradictions. Just as you’re most settled into the rhythms of college life, you are already more than half finished. Waves of nervousness about what’s next might break amongst the comfort and calm. You’ve probably finished your general education classes. Your coursework becomes more specialized and demanding. Given this is now so much of your focus, you might have more ambivalence about this major.
In my view, the biggest developmental goal is professional as a junior. By this time your academic path is more planned out. You’ll either start thinking about what’s next after college organically, get nudged by your peer group or department, or some combination of both.
Exit criteria you might want to consider for junior year:
Getting a summer internship in your field of interest
Writing out (and I mean with pen on paper) a professional plan for your next year or so.
The Final Year
By senior year, you're supposed to have it figured out. You're 21 or 22, you've been a legal adult for a while, and the culture hands you a script: graduate, get the job, get the apartment, launch. Almost no one actually feels that ready and a lot of you won't be fully independent for years yet. That gap, between the adult you're expected to be and the one you actually are, can be the central tension of fourth year.
But you don't need the offer letter, the city, the five-year vision. Anyone who tells you that you in 2026 is likely selling something, insecure or aloof. Instead, what you do need by graduation is a defensible sense of which way you're pointed and why.
Listen to the difference in these two hypothetical clients.
One client says, "A couple of my buddies and I are getting a place in DC, I've got a lead on a job, and if that falls through I'll temp while I keep applying."
Another client says, "I don't know… maybe I'll just go back home and crash at my parents place in Arlington." There’s the same uncertainty about the future, with completely different postures.
The first guy has a direction, some momentum, and people around him. The second has a default and often a quiet hope that if he never decides, he won't have to. This pattern of a capable young adult son living at home with no real momentum is what a lot of parents end up calling 'failure to launch.'" Moving back to save money while you apply to grad school can be a strategy. Moving back because deciding is frightening and home is where you don't have to is avoidance.
There's a particularly male weight on this year. A lot of guys have absorbed the idea that a man is the one who's supposed to have the plan, the income, the place, and so admitting you don't have it figured out feels like failing at being a man. That shame drives a silent retreat. I’ll try to take some charge out of this feeling and add context: this is genuinely harder than it was for your dad. A 2024 Bank of America study found over half of adult Gen Zers don't pay for their own housing. It was a historical freak occurrence that so many new grads were able to make it on their own day one for the past few generations. Outside the US, it’s the norm for you to live with your parents until well into your 20s and early 30s, or until you marry.
The goal for your fourth year is closing the distance between what you say you want and what you're actually doing about it.
This is where I'm most useful as a counselor. We name a direction in the fall and then check it against your behavior over the following months. You said you want to work in DC. Have you talked to anyone who lives there? Applied to anything? Visited?
Exit criteria for senior year: a provisional direction you can say out loud and defend, at least one concrete action taken toward it (an application, a move-in date, a deposit, an honest conversation with your parents about the plan), and a clear-eyed read on if your daily life is drifting toward that direction or away from it.
The Final Word
Wherever you are in these four years, the throughline is the same: you don't have to sort it out alone. Sometimes one of the best people in your corner can be a therapist. If you or your son are in this stretch and want a mens therapist who closely relates to the experience, I offer counseling for college-age men in Arlington, VA. Please reach out for a free consultation to learn more.
