Sarah Wong

Through intentional policies and elite “dream hoarding,” we’ve allowed this formative period to sort our lives by class. This was a choice. But we can also make another choice: to rebuild the adult transition to promote the connection and flourishing of all our neighbors, not just the ones we went to school with.

With intention, the adult transition can again become a major leverage point for strengthening the connectedness of all Americans.

This is not an individualized form of loneliness; it’s a structural aloneness rooted in the adult transition, with the college degree as the dividing line.

today’s emerging adults who do not attend four-year colleges and do not join the military often completely miss out on a collective experience of the adult transition. They may attend community, commuter, or for-profit colleges that are predominantly for part-time students and lack a cohort experience. They may get full- or part-time jobs immediate... See more

What is the ground on which you're standing to make those deeper commitments? And is that ground sturdy enough and resilient enough to bear the weight of the messiness of it all?”

As anyone who's been in a relationship or family unit knows, it's really messy work. The question facing us now is: “How do we build societal structures that can hold that... See more

If democracy is this challenge of people coming together to figure out the kind of shared lives they want to forge, then the behaviors that they use to negotiate difference are going to flow from the commitments they have to each other.

Social connections created outside of a shared institution — such as work, school, or church — require greater resources to build and more intentionality to maintain. Belonging and trust are more slowly earned, more tenuously held, and more easily broken

In a recent report, “Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life,” we found that nearly a quarter of Americans without degrees report having no close friends, compared to 10 percent of Americans who completed college.

thing we do most, which is shop and browse. These privatized solutions fit into that consumptive way of being more than what we don't practice — going to a new place, creating our own mechanisms for connection, encountering a lot of unknowns, and having to talk to people we don't already know. Those are not practices that we’re literally spending h... See more