The old career advice isn’t relevant anymore.

Start in the mailroom. Get your foot in the door. Grab a rung on the ladder and start climbing.

But what if there’s no actual office door, because your colleagues work remotely?

What if that mailroom is merely a metaphor in an age of electronic communications and AI-written emails?

Julianna Pillemer ’09, an assistant professor of management and organizations at NYU’s Stern School of Business

And as for the ladder, who among us actually still stays at one company for decades, waiting for a gold watch and a pension?

“It’s a totally different landscape,” says Julianna Pillemer ’09, an assistant professor of management and organizations at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

A New Generation of Workers

Young workers inhabit a changed work world, and they bring very different attitudes than previous generations. The last of the baby boomers who dominated workplace culture for decades turned 60 last year and are moving toward retirement. A decade ago millennials became the largest generation in the U.S. workforce, surpassing Gen X. Just two years ago, the boomers were eclipsed by Gen Z, those born from 1997 to 2010.

What do young workers want? Among the key values identified in a 2023 survey directed by Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business was that workers ages 24 to 35 prioritized flexibility and work-life balance.

That rings true to Hazel Raja, senior director of Pomona’s Career Development Office (CDO)—a Gen Xer who encouraged the office book club to read millennial author Lindsey Pollak’s The Remix: How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace, so that the CDO team could better understand both the job seekers they counsel and their own colleagues.

The Remote Work Revolution

The pandemic ushered in the era of telecommuting, but many young people who experienced the isolation of the COVID shutdown have come to crave in-person collaboration, while also appreciating the versatility of hybrid work options.

“I think there’s this feeling of wanting the best of both worlds, to have days in the office where you can connect with the community but also the flexibility to say, ‘I’m working from home today,’” Raja says.

Even after return-to-work calls following the pandemic, remote work is entrenched in many organizations. Folks with bachelor’s degrees have benefited most: 52 percent of college graduates now work remotely some or all of the time, compared to 35 percent of the overall workforce.

Hybrid jobs offer potential gains for work-life balance. Yet NYU’s Pillemer—who earned a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and studies workplace relationships—says friendships can be key sources of motivation and support at work when managed effectively.

“I think this is often what leads to work feeling like a community, a place where you don’t have to hide who you are,” she says, noting her research on the concept of “strategic authenticity,” which involves finding the right balance between self-disclosure and professionalism at work. “I think there might be a disconnect between how little this younger generation is thinking these relationships matter and how much they actually do matter to their workplace happiness.”

Gen Z workers say they yearn for more in-person connection, but that it doesn’t have to be with colleagues. Now trending: meetup activities such as book clubs and hiking groups, and even platonic matchmaking apps like Bumble BFF.

Cohen ‘81 spoke in her TED talk about how to transition back into the workforce after career breaks.

Still, remote workers may miss out not only on networking and friendships but also on mentoring, says Carol Fishman Cohen ’81, a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and co-founder and CEO of iRelaunch, a career re-entry company.

“To be in the office side-by-side with more seasoned professionals and have informal interactions with people is part of how you learn,” Cohen says. “You stop by someone’s office or walk out together from a meeting, and that’s where relationships are built and knowledge is transferred. If early-stage professionals don’t get to have that experience, it’s going to be much more difficult for them to learn what they need to know.”

A Sense of Purpose

Work-life balance is no longer something people focus on only once they have kids and a household to run. Many Pomona students are thinking ahead, evaluating career choices by considering their personal priorities—sometimes choosing a city and then finding a job instead of finding a job and moving to that city—as well as by seeking more meaning in their work.

Raja says many students these days are often much more driven by things they’re passionate about, though she notes some students from less-advantaged backgrounds may still feel the need to maximize the financial return on their education.

“Generally, there’s not this aim for a ‘35 years of service’ pin,” she says. “More students are anchored by their values being met and doing work that is personally fulfilling.”

Nate Dailey ’23

Nate Dailey ’23, a high school senior when his family fled Paradise, California, in the early morning hours of the November 2018 “Camp Fire,” is one example of melding professional skills with personally meaningful work. He arrived on campus less than a year after his family’s home was one of nearly 19,000 structures destroyed in the deadliest wildfire in California history.

After majoring in computer science, Dailey embarked on a career in wildfire science as a research analyst for Deer Creek Resources, which helps communities and landowners prepare for wildfire. There he developed a computer model to detect overgrown parcels from roadside imagery that aids in both vegetation management and evacuation planning.

“I was really inspired to pursue something that was connected to the Camp Fire, and also my interest in computers and maps,” Dailey recently told Professor Char Miller in a Sagecast podcast. “Now I’ve been able to put it all together, and I think my Pomona education really helped me with that.”

Another key differentiator for the next generation of workers is that if a job isn’t right for whatever reason, today’s young people are not afraid to move on. While job-hopping once was a resume red flag, Raja and others say that applicants are now more likely to raise eyebrows if they stay too long, potentially suggesting that they don’t have other opportunities.

According to U.S. Labor Department statistics, in early 2024 the median time workers had been with current employers was only 3.9 years—the shortest tenure recorded since 2002. While the average job-stay for older workers was almost 10 years, for workers ages 25-34 it was a mere 2.7 years.

Camille Molas ’21, co-president of the New York City Alumni Chapter with her husband, Diego Vergara ’20, sees that phenomenon around her.

“A lot of people are on their third job already,” she says. “A friend of Diego’s already is on his fourth. Younger people are just more willing to say, ‘I’m out. This is not working for me.’” (See page 27 for more on Molas.)

Uncertain Outlook

While younger generations are being given more grace for job-hopping, their prospects aren’t uniformally positive. This year there were many headlines lamenting the job market for the Class of 2025 and, for the first time in decades, unemployment rates for college graduates under 27 have surpassed the overall average. Even the typically staid Economist chimed in with “Why Today’s Graduates Are Screwed.”

Factors include everything from federal spending cuts to the explosive rise of artificial intelligence, which experts say will affect entry-level jobs most because of more replicable tasks such as coding, number-crunching and summary writing. Despite that, Raja says she has seen such admirable adaptability for Sagehen job seekers.

“While it’s nice to be able to get a job at Amazon or Apple or Google, I think students like ours are versatile enough to say, ‘Well, I have these tech skills I could apply to another industry,’” she says. “‘Maybe a lot of the values I have are still being met because I’m not only working in an area that I’m actually interested in, but I’m making the same salary or I’m still building my network.’”

Ultimately, it may be the massive uncertainty in academia brought on by new federal policies that will have the largest impact on Pomona alumni, considering that one in four respondents from Pomona’s Class of 2024 First Destinations Report said they were headed straight to graduate school. In addition, many alumni who enter the workforce right out of college pursue a graduate degree within five years, Raja says.

Federal research grant cuts and wrangling over student visas and policies such as DEI mean some jobs and graduate school opportunities that used to be stable have evaporated, particularly in STEM fields and for international alumni. Proposals to limit federal loans for graduate students could also have a chilling effect, particularly on those seeking expensive medical degrees.

The impact on academia is likely to be felt by more than just graduate students: In Pomona’s 2023 Alumni and Family Attitude Survey, higher education was the number one job sector reported by alumni, ahead of science and medicine (36 vs. 27 percent).

Pillemer says most of her undergraduate business students at NYU remain focused on finance, consulting and tech, though they also are keenly aware of the potential to pursue more independent career paths such as internet content creation, entrepreneurship and gig work.

“As a scholar I’m reckoning with things like how we think about work and how organizations are structured, especially in a future when ‘employees’ could be bots and people are striking out on their own as entrepreneurs or influencers,” Pillemer says. “As students grapple with an uncertain job market and these sweeping changes in the way we work, they’re asking themselves, ‘What do I value?’ ‘What’s meaningful to me?’ And ‘How am I going to get paid to do it?’”

After a long, slow slide that began in the era of petticoats and suffragettes, the American fertility rate recently reached a new nadir. In 2023 U.S. moms birthed 3.6 million babies—about 76,000 fewer than the year before and one of the lowest totals since 1979.

A University of Chicago professor,
Heffington ‘09 has written about motherhood and women’s movements for TIME, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

It was a low-water mark that hinted at a bigger sea change. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, between 2018 and 2023 the share of adults under 50 who have no children and say they are unlikely to ever do so rose from 37 to (what else?) 47 percent. Fertility is falling in “basically every county: rich and poor, rural and urban,” says University of Chicago historian Peggy Heffington ’09, who studies contemporary and historical motherhood and reproduction. In 1970, the American fertility rate was about 2.5, above the replacement rate of 2. Today, it sits around 1.6.

Academics and parents themselves agree: this is a remarkably arduous moment to raise a child in the United States. But women opting not to have children is nothing new. In her book Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother, Heffington traces the history of non-motherhood from ancient Roman women who used lemons as ad-hoc diaphragms, through abstinent medieval nuns, and all the way to the present. “It felt important to me as a historian to establish that there is significant evidence of women limiting fertility for a very long time,” she says. “As long as people have been trying to have babies, they have been trying not to have babies.”

Still, many factors make parenting feel particularly difficult in 2025, including economic struggles, gender inequities, climate anxiety, mental health concerns and shifting expectations of community support. These accumulating challenges have been central to an increasingly common choice for young people of parenting age: not to parent at all.

Factor 1: Money talks

More than one-third of respondents to the 2024 Pew survey cited money concerns as a major reason for deciding against parenthood. The financial landscape for young people is tough, to say the least: a 2016 study from the Center for Household Financial Stability found that median millennial savings were 34 percent below what historic trends would predict; in a recent survey by the financial platform Step, more than one-third of Gen Z respondents reported running out of money every month.

Shadiah Sigala ’06

Among the many costs of raising a new human, child care has emerged as especially exorbitant. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, American families pay upward of one-sixth of their median income on care for just one child—as much or more than what most pay for rent or mortgage. As tech entrepreneur Shadiah Sigala ’06 puts it, “You can see how with two or three children the calculus becomes absolutely untenable.”

On top of the cost of child care is its availability: over half of Americans live in “child care deserts,” with low-income rural and communities of color disproportionately impacted. This issue inspired Sigala to found Kinside, which provides a marketplace connecting families to caregivers in their area, helps companies build child care into their employee benefits, and works with local governments to improve larger care ecosystems.

But more accessible child care doesn’t help those who struggle to get pregnant in the first place. Fertility issues afflict many aspiring mothers, and while technologies like in-vitro fertilization (IVF) have opened up many new possibilities, they don’t come cheap, with a single round of IVF costing some $20,000. Heffington argues that, for some, such technologies actually “increase the pain of infertility in offering a promise where previously there was nothing you could do.”

Empathy Across Generations With Prof. Jessica Stern ‘12

By Lorraine Wu Harry ’97

Jessica Stern ’12

This spring a child development paper from assistant professor Jessica Stern ’12 was selected by University of California at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center as one of 2024’s “most provocative and influential findings on the science of a meaningful life.” We talked to Stern to learn more about her paper “Empathy across three generations.”

What is your study’s central research question?

Adolescents get a bad rap. The misconception goes something like this: Teens are self-focused, easily pressured to do bad things by their peers, and lacking mature social skills like empathy. But does the evidence bear this out?

Not really. In our observations, teens are deeply engaged in supporting others, particularly their friends, and peer interactions often encourage them to be prosocial. Our research team wanted to understand: How do teens learn empathy? How is empathy transmitted across generations? And what’s the role of teenage friendships?

How did you collect the data?

The KLIFF VIDA longitudinal study, led by the University of Virginia, began in 1998. We tracked 184 teens from age 13 into their mid-30s, and every year invited teens to the lab with their parents and closest friend, and recorded videos of their interactions. When teens were 13 we observed them talking to their moms about a problem they could use help on, and tracked how much empathy moms showed during that conversation. We looked for things like how emotionally engaged the mom was, whether she had an accurate understanding of the teen’s problem, and how much help and emotional support she provided.

Then, every year for seven years, we observed teens talking to their closest friend about a problem their friend needed help with. We looked for those same types of empathic behaviors in how the teen treated their friends. When some of those same teens were starting to have kids of their own about a decade later, we sent them surveys asking about their parenting behavior and their children’s empathy.

What were your key findings?

We found that teens who experienced more empathy from their mothers at age 13 were more likely to “pay it forward” by showing empathy for their friends in adolescence. For the teens who later had children, practicing empathy with close friends in late adolescence predicted more supportive parenting behavior a decade later. We were able to see how empathy is transmitted across three generations.

Our message is this: if we want to raise empathic teens, we need to give them firsthand experiences of receiving empathy from adults at home. More than lectures or pressure, teens need to feel what it’s like to be understood and supported. This gives them a model of empathy in action.

We also hope [to] give parents peace of mind, knowing that teens’ desire to hang out with friends is a boon for their social development (and perhaps their future success as caregivers). Supporting teens to cultivate close friendships may be important for them to hone their social skills by practicing caregiving for their friends.

Factor 2: Balancing the load

As she discusses the current state of non-parenthood, Heffington cites a Pew survey statistic she finds telling: 45 percent of women said they wanted kids in the future, compared to 57 percent of men. “What we’re seeing is not that women like babies less than they did,” she says. “It’s that they’re very aware of who’s going to be doing the work, whose career is going to take the hit, and who will do the vast majority of mental labor.”

That dynamic is familiar to Karen Magoon Pearson ’05, who adopted four children with her husband. As a couple, they seek to be egalitarian in their sharing of household chores, and mostly succeed. But, like many mothers, Magoon Pearson has been tasked with nearly all the intangibles: keeping track of the kids’ schedules and school workloads, planning outings, problem-solving and managing the logistics of a six-person family. “Emotional labor, the mental load; the code hasn’t fully been cracked there, even when both people want it to be,” she says.

Sigala, who now has two children, has also struggled in that arena. She experienced deep postpartum depression after her first child, exacerbated by a lack of support from her then-husband. “Mothers are the nucleus and the electrons; they’re keeping everything together,” she says. “They’re called to be many, many elements in the atom. And they’re just breaking.”

Although the twin concepts of mental load and emotional labor have finally entered the collective conversation, Heffington argues that that awareness is not enough to counter the deeply ingrained expectations that befall mothers. “Women have become more aware of the effect [parenting] will have on their lives, their marriages, their careers,” Heffington says, “and are increasingly thinking that it’s not a good trade-off.”

Factor 3: A hostile climate

The changing climate has also had profound effects on people’s parenting proclivities. In the 2024 Pew study, one in four respondents said their choice to not have children was primarily for “environmental reasons,” while 38 percent cited a slightly broader “state of the world.” (Cue meme of “gesturing broadly at everything.”)

Jade S. Sasser ’97 (Photo by Matthew Reiter Photography)

These choices are not evenly distributed among young people, notes Jade Sasser ’97, an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at University of California, Riverside. Surveys by the Yale Center for Climate Communications consistently find that people of color experience more emotional distress—and suffer from more clinically diagnosable mental health issues—due to climate change. Their fertility decisions are also more likely to reflect that experience. In a 2020 survey, 41 percent of Latino respondents and 30 percent of Black respondents cited climate change as a factor in why they did not have children, compared to 21 percent of white respondents.

This trend was compelling enough to inspire Sasser to write a book about it. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question explores younger generations’ fear and grief around the climate emergency, the ways that people of color are disproportionately impacted, and the reproductive decisions that result.

One of Sasser’s more surprising findings was that young people are less fixated on the negative impacts their hypothetical children will have on the planet, than on the negative impacts the planet will have on their children. That is, in previous decades people who cited environmental factors in their fertility decisions were usually considering issues like overpopulation and pollution—how bringing a new human into the world would damage their surroundings. Now, the feeling is that the damage has been done, and the fears focus more on how the consequences will affect quality of life for a new generation.

Many people Sasser interviewed wanted children but felt that subjecting new humans to the potential horrors of climate change felt unethical. “If I had kids amidst a catastrophe like a hurricane, I would be worried every day,” one woman told Sasser. Would she be able to keep them safe?

Although climate anxiety and grief are common across race and socioeconomic strata, people of color experience them more strongly due to structural inequities, Sasser says. (In her book, she points to one potent example; a report analyzing FEMA records from 1999 to 2013, which found that 85 percent of post-disaster buyouts went to white families.) “Climate change seems to be a threat multiplier,” she explains, “meaning that the other reasons people have for either not wanting children or being ambivalent are compounded by emotional responses to climate change—and that’s worse for young people from marginalized communities.”

Factor 4: The parenting happiness gap

One hot take you won’t hear on Oprah: American parents seem to consistently report feeling less happy than people without children. (Specifically, 12.7 percent less happy, according to a 2016 meta-analysis of adults across 22 countries.) Heffington says that, in the U.S. at least, there is no kind of parent—new parents in the thick of it, empty nesters, step-parents—that is, on average, happier than people without children.

The so-called “happiness gap” is particularly acute for women, which Sigala and others attribute to the true emotional weight of motherhood and the opportunities young women give up by having children. Since full-time child care can often cost as much as a professional woman earns, Sigala says that women around her often feel the “pernicious, intractable” pressure to step away from work and care for their children or families. “You can see how it starts to pile up, and before you know it, women are hugely disadvantaged in their professional lives and their ability to have strength and freedom,” she says.

Still, data from Europe suggests that, while raising children is challenging everywhere, the kids themselves are not the problem. In a meta-analysis, researchers found that in countries such as France, Finland, Norway and Sweden, the gap disappears or is even reversed, with parents reporting that they are happier than non-parents by up to 8 percent. Their results showed that a few simple factors make this paradigm possible: vacation time, parental leave, sick leave, and affordable or free child care. “It doesn’t require massive infrastructure,” Heffington says. “Just dialing down some of the pressure American parents experience could make a huge difference.”

GET THEE TO A NUNNERY

In 1869 Arabella Mansfield was the first woman to pass the bar to become a lawyer. This milestone was a sign of a larger trend: women gaining better access to education and entering the workforce in increasing numbers.

In response, starting around 1900, both private companies and government entities began instituting “marriage bars” that banned married women from the workplace. These bans, which stemmed in part from racist fears around a plunging white birth rate, were common in industries such as insurance, publishing and banking, but in some cases were implemented statewide. A 1935 Wisconsin resolution called working married women “a calling card for disintegration of family life.”

Single women picketing a relief headquarters in Boston, 1935 (Bettmann Archive)

Heffington says that marriage bars were intended to force women to go back to domestic spaces after they got married, which is “often exactly what they did.” But a growing number chose instead to delay marriage or opt out of family life altogether—either to pursue their professional priorities or because they could not afford the economic costs of ceasing work.

Factor 5: Losing the village

In writing her history of non-parenthood, Heffington found that she was actually writing a story about the transformation of the American home, a transition “from something deeply embedded in community structures offering support to the isolated nuclear family.” Although the familiar single-biological-unit structure might seem inevitable from our perspective, work from Pomona professor emerita Helena Wall shows that alternative configurations were flourishing in North America as recently as 400 years ago. “Colonial Americans understood the family only in context of community, with women from throughout a community taking active part in raising children,” Heffington explains. “They spent their whole lives passing in and out of each other’s houses.”

But during the 19th century, a major demographic shift found young people flocking from rural to urban areas for factory jobs—away from those support systems and toward the smaller, suburbanized nuclear family so typical today. Heffington sees today’s millennial experience as an extension of that shift. “We’ve replaced community support structures with ones you have to pay for, with relatively predictable results in terms of fertility,” she says.

Indeed, the loss of the proverbial “village” it once took to raise a child is significantly impacting younger generations’ parental reluctance. For example, while a network of relatives and neighbors watched over Sigala during her childhood, as a young adult she lived in a succession of different cities, each time starting anew and alone. “When my friends have grandparents around to take the kids, even one day per week, I’m very envious,” she says. And babysitting neighbors? As extinct as the dinos and the dodos.

Magoon Pearson also struggled with a lack of support after her oldest child’s academic troubles led her to homeschooling; not long after, the pandemic found her at home teaching all four children. “By the end of that year, I just couldn’t do it anymore,’” she remembers. Continued changes to parenting norms only intensified the difficulty. During her own childhood, she often spent time independently at friends’ houses or birthday parties. “It wasn’t like parents were expected to be everywhere all the time, doing everything their kids were doing,” she says. “Now, you kind of are, so you never get a break.”

Next steps: should we (population) panic?

Since President Trump started his second term, his administration has taken a staunchly pronatalist approach. Vice President JD Vance has spoken disdainfully of “childless cat ladies” while Trump touts $5,000 “baby bonuses” for mothers-to-be.

Sasser interprets it all as part of a larger, politics-driven “population panic”—and one that she treats with a heavy dose of skepticism.

Indeed, while Magoon Pearson feels some anxiety when she considers a future with fewer children—what will happen to Social Security? Will there be enough young people to keep the gears of society moving?—she rejects the idea that the childfree are inherently selfish, citing family and friends who instead spend their time on other meaningful endeavors. With four children’s lives to manage, and so many places where the world needs help or healing, “I’m bogged down with this anxiety that I’m not doing enough, stuck at home,” she says. “Thank goodness there’s people out there with the time and energy I don’t have!”

Sasser, Heffington and others argue that any supposed population crisis is at best overblown, and at worst manufactured. While some East Asian countries are indeed seeing small towns depopulating and villages with no children, the U.S. has “the privilege of being a place where people want to come to raise their families,” Heffington says.

Zooming out, the larger context is that fertility rates tend to reliably settle under 2 across time and cultures as women get more access to education, contraception and professional opportunities.

Heffington suggests that policymakers could look to the European countries with happier parents for a model of how to make parenting healthier. France and Sweden, for example, have built infrastructures conducive to parenting that include paid and extended maternity leave, prenatal care, free child health care and subsidized daycare. “If you’re forcing women to choose—whether it’s because of professional ambition or economic survival—some are going to choose not to have kids,” Heffington says. “If you make it easier for them to have both, they’re going to have both.”

The numbers tell a sobering story. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for 10- to 24-year-olds—a hefty chunk of Gen Z— suicide is the second leading cause of death and has increased more than 50 percent since 2000. Across a range of psychological surveys Gen Z often is found to be the loneliest, most anxious, depressed and heavily medicated generation ever.

Many mental health professionals call it a crisis—but perhaps there is also a crisis of perception.

Gen Z folks—and, to some extent, their millennial elders—have often been slapped with disparaging labels like “the Anxious Generation,” “the Therapist Generation” or even “the Snowflake Generation.” While no one can contest the heartbreaking stats on suicide, loneliness and depression, another thing that can’t be dismissed is Gen Z’s ability to adapt to adversity. They report being sadder, but—based on conversations with several mental health professionals in the field—in many ways they are also braver.

We recently spoke to three experts on the topic:

• Pomona College Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students for Academic and Personal Success Tracy Arwari
• Crisis Systems Medical Director at King County, Washington Dr. Matthew L. Goldman ’08
• Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Clinical Director Jasmine Lamitte ’08 (below), author of The Black Mental Health Workbook: Break the Stigma, Find Space for Reflection, and Reclaim Self-Care

Today’s young adults have had more than their fair share of battle wounds. They were a key casualty of COVID-19, both in actual deaths—approximately 15 million worldwide—and in the wrap-around effects of the pandemic on their mental health. When some of your most formative years are spent communicating via screens, the consequences are sharply felt.

“Psychosocial development was basically stalled for a period of time for a lot of kids,” says Goldman. “The increased use of services, and increased suicidality among youth, suggests that COVID was absolutely a catalyst for worsening the youth mental health crisis.”

Jasmine Lamitte ’08, author of The Black Mental Health Workbook: Break the Stigma, Find Space for Reflection, and Reclaim Self-Care

Lamitte agrees, pointing specifically to something she noticed when schools reopened: Young people who had isolated at home had missed key developmental milestones, leading to behavioral challenges and a huge uptick in both social and generalized anxiety.

The social isolation may be exacerbated by increased digital connection. Social media and digital connectivity certainly have their benefits in increasing awareness of challenges that other young people might be going through.

Although Lamitte is encouraged by Gen Z’s growing comfort talking about mental health, she says that platforms such as TikTok have rampant misinformation that can lead users to self-diagnose and feel like they can handle things on their own without therapy.

Pomona College Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students for Academic and Personal Success Tracy Arwari

Arwari says that help-seeking behavior has become much more ubiquitous on campus in recent years, which she attributes to Pomona’s own proactive efforts toward outreach and prevention, as well as a larger societal trend toward being open around mental health and self-care.

“Ten or 15 years ago, you did your best to tread water on your own and you had to have quiet faith that this, too, would pass,” she says.

Experts see a greater willingness among Gen Z to seek therapy earlier and more consistently, versus waiting until things get intensely challenging.

“With my generation, the process started in college or after,” says Lamitte. “Now kids are coming out in high school and exploring trauma they’ve experienced, to not necessarily carry that burden by themselves.”

While some label Gen Z as “the Therapist Generation” with disdain, Goldman considers it a net positive that there’s been such a banishment of stigma, which translates to prioritization of funding for mental health services, not to mention greater receptivity to treatment and more engagement in the healing process.

Lamitte adds that younger generations are increasingly open to exploring different modalities that they may have first encountered on social media, including mindfulness meditation and “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.”

The experts argue that Gen Z has gotten increasingly comfortable being vulnerable about everything from anxiety to past trauma.

New Models of Care: What Systems Need to Catch Up

If the youth have caught up with the times, the systems unfortunately have not. Goldman says that the greatest barriers to care are the lack of services plus access. It’s a bind: there aren’t enough youth mental health services in general, much less ones that insurance will pay for. Complicating an already knotty situation is that pediatricians are often the ones prescribing medications for youth, without extra training in mental health or psychiatry.

“They’re doing their best and want to help, but often end up using the tools that they have at their disposal, like medications,” says Goldman. “There is plenty of data showing overprescription of psychiatric meds among kids.”

While many kids absolutely need the meds, data suggests widespread overprescription of antipsychotic medication that’s especially acute for children who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), including boys who are involved in a juvenile justice or foster care system. Goldman says that this form of “diagnostic overshadowing”—in which BIPOC folks are more likely to be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder or more serious mental illness—often can mask other diagnoses such as trauma or complex trauma.

Concern regarding mental health among youth in general is appropriately high. In King County, where Goldman serves as medical director for its crisis systems, there will soon be a 24-7 youth crisis facility with both urgent care and higher acuity units.

Given that dedicated behavioral health facilities tend to be much more effective at crisis care than in emergency departments or general hospitals, Goldman hopes that policymakers nationwide see the need to cover the gaps in care and support these crisis stabilization services. He cites Washington state’s requirement for commercial payment, which creates alternatives to sitting in an emergency room for hours or days waiting to be seen, or getting involved in a criminal legal system where people end up unnecessarily incarcerated.

Goldman says it’s also critical to have an outpatient system that can receive people in the aftermath of a crisis. Post-crisis follow-up resources tend to be quite limited. Someone may receive good care during the crisis, but then face a lot of post-discharge barriers to being able to access ongoing support to prevent future relapse.

“There’s a risk of them falling through the cracks again,” says Goldman.

To mitigate that risk, King County is investing in post-crisis follow-up services that are dedicated to the aftermath of a crisis, so that anyone who comes through the crisis centers has access to ongoing care. It’s based on one of the leading national models for youth crisis response, Mobile Response and Stabilization Services, or MRSS, a youth-specific model that comes from Connecticut; it is a field-based, community-based crisis response.

“Your anxiety or despair may sometimes be so overwhelming that you can’t see anything else. But it won’t be like that forever. There can still be lighter times ahead.” —Liz

If a young person or a parent calls into a crisis hotline like 988 or other local hotlines or a teen-specific hotline, and the call taker is concerned that the level of the crisis is more acute or severe than what can be handled on the phone, then they might dispatch a mobile response-type resource. While a lot of places have a general mobile crisis response that serves both adults and youth, the gold standard model is to have dedicated youth-specialized mobile teams, Goldman says.

“They’ll do the initial mobile response, but then they’ll also continue to support that child for six to eight to even up to 12 weeks after the initial mobile response,” he says. “And the idea is that it’s the team that does the initial mobile response that makes that initial bond with both the child and their family and then can continue to support them for that extended period.”

Sometimes that’s all that you need, Goldman says. Long-term outpatient or any other kind of community support isn’t always necessary because if it’s a crisis that’s related to something situational or circumstantial—bereavement, some event that happens—then youth can eventually do really well.

What Gives Us Hope

Gen Z’s crisis overwhelms, but there is hope rising nonetheless. For Lamitte, it’s their early pursuit of healing. For Goldman, it’s young people’s openness and receptivity. And for Arwari, it’s Gen Z’s commitment to kindness, camaraderie and advocacy.

“There is a lot in this world that can feel like doom and gloom at every turn,” she says. “But the thing that gives me hope is witnessing the way that students will hold each other up [and make] a rooted good faith effort to be kind to one another. The kids are all right.”

“It’s easy to equate success with visible achievements like a promotion or a new job. But it’s important to acknowledge and celebrate all growth, especially when it comes to mental health and well-being.” —Liz

We asked the same set of questions to 3 individual alums from 55, 30 and 5 years ago, as well as 4 couples across multiple generations. Ahead, our super-scientific results.

How did you meet?
Larry Hauser ’64 and Barbara Hauser ’65: We met in 1962-1963 at a “Served Dinner” at Frary Dining Hall, where a vigorous courtship ensued with lots of coffee dates that had to be completed by the 10 p.m. curfew.

Richard Bookwaiter ’82 and Galen Leung ’82:
We met as first-years when we were both elected to the Freshman Dorm Council representing Oldenborg and Walker, respectively.
Rob Ricketts ’97 and Karla Romero ’97:
We met in January 1996 in Harwood Basement. Rob was a transfer student, and Karla was his assigned sponsor.
Kai Fukutaki ’17 and Sameen Boparai ’17:
While we first met during Orientation Adventure in Sequoia, we didn’t start hanging out until we crossed paths in the social dance clubs, including ballroom dance.

What is your favorite Pomona College
memory together?

Hauser and Hauser: Our “Pinning Ceremony”—the entire Zeta Chi Sigma Fraternity marched down to South Campus and sang a romantic serenade at Mudd-Blaisdell, marking the start of our lifelong journey together.
Bookwaiter and Leung: After the “Survivors’ Party” for students who had made it through the fall, we were the only two who showed up on the cleaning committee.

Ricketts and Romero: Harwood Halloween, where we saw a relevantly unknown opening act called the Black Eyed Peas.
Fukutaki and Boparai: During senior week in San Diego, we put our liberal arts degrees to good use: we won pub trivia, sang karaoke and had our ecology friends help us identify tide pool creatures!

How long have you been together?

Hauser and Hauser: Married 60 years! We just attended Barbara’s 60th Pomona reunion and are forever bonded to this beautiful campus with all of its memories.

Bookwaiter and Leung: 34 years! By the end of our senior year we knew we wanted to be together. We married in August 2008.

Ricketts and Romero: We’ve been together since May 1996, with one brief intermission in 1998-99. We found our way back to each other, and have been inseparable ever since.

Fukutaki and Boparai: 9 years! We immediately had to do two years of long-distance after college but fortunately both ended up in Seattle for graduate school.

What is your secret to a successful relationship?

Hauser and Hauser: Patience, optimism and a sense of firm commitment. Per philosopher Brian Andreas: “I’m deciding everything is falling into place perfectly, as long as you don’t get too picky about what you mean by ‘place’. Or ‘perfectly.’”

Bookwaiter and Leung: Our relationship has lasted over 34 years because we are able to communicate with each other.

Ricketts and Romero: Relationships aren’t about being right—they’re about growing together. Also, we laugh a lot. Humor keeps things light even when things get heavy. We don’t agree on everything or spend every waking moment together, but we consistently show up for one another.

Fukutaki and Boparai: Cultivating healthy communities has helped us feel fulfilled and supported so that we don’t depend solely on each other. Staying curious and always learning new things, together and apart, keeps us excited about the world—and each other.

What is your fondest memory of Pomona?
Blair: Groups of us would get tickets to classical concerts in Big Bridges, where we’d see Arthur Rubinstein, Van Cliburn, Christopher Parkening and the Romeros, among many others.
Trupin: I think a lot about the freshman seminar, the intramural sports and, of course, both the good friends and the meaningful conversations I had all the time there.

Addo-Ashong: I don’t think I could truly narrow down to just one memory—I look back at dozens of moments spent with my friends and laugh all the time.

Where did you and your friends hang out?

Blair: I developed some of my longer-lasting friendships when I lived in Oldenborg for two years. We hung out in the language lounge for the Russian and Chinese students. I was studying Russian. We studied, we partied and had a great time there.

Trupin: We attempted to study at pools, a lot. Somehow I still passed my classes. We ate a lot of fried food and shakes at the Coop. And we ventured to parties on whatever campus was hosting one.
Addo-Ashong: I could guarantee that you’d see me and my friends in Frary at some point, especially for Snack. My Sontag suite was also a glorified community center my senior year with the number of people that were in and out every day.

The career path you first envisioned in college—is that what you’re doing now?

Blair: I fell in love with the fields of anthropology and education. As a result, I studied at Stanford and received an MA in Education. Although later I studied theology, was ordained a Presbyterian minister and received a Ph.D. from the Claremont School of Theology, I was always using what I had learned at Pomona.

Trupin: I majored in American Studies, so I wouldn’t say I had a planned career path. But I did get to spend a lot of time focusing on youth homelessness at Pomona, including a Watson Fellowship in Latin America. I still work on that today, so the answer, I guess, is yes!

Addo-Ashong: I didn’t have one career path clearly laid out, but my current job working in data analysis and research for litigation is a good mix of my public policy analysis and math background. My next steps are to apply for a master’s in similar fields, so in that sense, I think I’m following what I set out to do!

What do you wish you’d known before you came to Pomona?

Blair: I felt instantly at home at Pomona because of the many new students who, like me, had lived outside the United States. I was embarrassed, however, that I had not yet heard of Jefferson Airplane and their music.

Trupin: This is a rare four-year opportunity that you’ll never get again, and you should take advantage of all it has to offer during your time there. A lot of us would come back for another year if we could.

Addo-Ashong: I wish I’d known that the pluses and minuses on grades do in fact affect your GPA, because that was a very rude awakening my freshman fall!

What was your favorite dining-hall food?

Blair: I have little memories of the food. It was better in Oldenborg than elsewhere.

Trupin: Fried mozzarella sticks at the Coop. In the dining hall, maybe the omelet bar—how nice it would be to have that in my house now!

Addo-Ashong: My usual breakfast omelet and avocado toast, maybe the tomato/burrata, and balsamic sandwiches and the oatmeal craisin cookies!

What was the best book you read during your Pomona years?

Blair: A book that over the long term shaped me the most was Mysticism, by Evelyn Underhill. I read it for a course I took at Pitzer; we also read Tillich and William James.

Trupin: In the Name of Eugenics by Daniel Kevles stuck with me and stays relevant today as a frightening and helpful exploration of using science to justify racism and every type of discrimination.

Addo-Ashong: I don’t know how many books I read for fun , but I really enjoyed American Hookup by Lisa Wade!

What was your favorite band while you were in college?

Blair: The Beatles, then Jefferson Airplane and the Doors.

Trupin: I have fond memories of seeing No Doubt perform in my dorm. They weren’t my favorite band, and I think my glasses fell into the mosh pit and got crushed, but it still stands out.

Addo-Ashong: I’d say favorite actual band was Glass Animals, and individuals were SZA and Childish Gambino.

What was the first electronic device you ever owned?

Blair: I got my first computer in 1986, when I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation.

Trupin: My roommate and I had a combo tape/record/CD player that I think was the size of half of one of our walls.

Addo-Ashong: My Game Boy Advance.