Last Saturday night, I walked into the backyard of a student-occupied house near the campus of Oberlin College in Ohio. My 82-year old mother held my arm so she wouldn’t stumble on the uneven grass lawn. Smoke drifted through the air, from vapes and joints the students had sparked. The crowd of early 20-somethings pulsed to the progressive jazz played by a pickup band with guitar, drums, saxophone, and vocals, the hosts of this bash. I felt decidedly out of place, as a middle-aged mom of three, but my son Jamie had urged us to attend and hear his friends’ band play. They were all set to graduate in a couple of days.
To my right, a friend of Jamie’s struck up a conversation with my mom. They looked like an incongruous pair: a five-foot tall Chinese American grandmother, with short silver hair, and him a six-foot plus tall white young man, bending his head so he could hear her faint voice over the music and party chatter. I leaned closer to listen in. She inquired about his undergraduate major in economics and philosophy, and shared that she’d received a PhD in economics herself, with a focus on demography.
Their conversation struck me at the time as an anomaly. He listened with courtesy and interest, asked polite follow-up questions about her demographic interests, and didn’t seem the least bit eager to cut it short to join his peers. Did he realize that Gen Z wasn’t supposed to behave this way? According to social media and many commentators, they are supposed to be scared to talk to strangers and buried in their phones, too stunted by social anxiety and naval gazing to engage with the world around them. After all, this generation grew up in a “challenging and constantly changing global environment,” as Nisreen Ameen and colleagues note in a 2023 paper–which is one of the factors that led them to experience higher levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness than prior generations.
But over the course of the weekend, I encountered young person after young person who seemed open to learning and evolving. They were engaged in creative discovery and expression, seeking to change their community for the better, deeply caring about their peers and the relationships they had made in the previous four years.
“Obies” (as Oberlin students are called) aren’t alone. A series of in-depth interviews on multiple college campuses found that “the typical Gen Zer is a self-driver who deeply cares about others, strives for a diverse community, is highly collaborative and social, values flexibility, relevance, authenticity and non-hierarchical leadership,” according to research led by Stanford University Professor Roberta Katz. A McKinsey & Co. analysis of the newest members of the workforce, a few years ahead of this year’s graduating seniors, describes them as “socially progressive dreamers” who are pragmatic, seeking purpose, and deeply concerned about climate change and inequality.
As these new graduates navigate the months and years ahead, I reflected, these characteristics will serve them as well any of the facts and figures they’ve learned in college. I left the graduation weekend thinking that perhaps, the future is in good hands after all with the newest generation of workers and future leaders. Could it be that the reinforcements have arrived?
A gloomy future?
This graduation season has been marked by doom and gloom. Amid the bleak job market, disruption from artificial intelligence, and global violence, new graduates could be forgiven for embarking on their foray into the working world with trepidation. Indeed, commencement speeches on the promise of AI drew boos from the graduating seniors at other universities, such as at the University of Arizona, where former Google CEO Eric Schmidt received a not-so-warm response.
I admit that I’ve harbored some fears about how my children will navigate the future too. After all, I wrote an entire book about the dramatic increase in mental and behavioral disorders in this generation, and spent over a decade in journalism covering how economic disruption affected working families and their pocketbooks.
It’s a perfect storm of uncertainty: social, economic, geopolitical, and technological change like a black cloud over this time of transition. One student told me that she’d sent out over a hundred resumes, with not a single response. Throughout the graduation weekend, I resisted asking seniors I encountered about their plans for the future, for fear of bringing up an anxiety-laden topic. It gave me a pang to sense the unease in the air, when I’d wish that new graduates feel the world is at their feet, with many possible promising paths ahead for career and life.
Oberlin holds a unique place among institutions of higher learning, being the first to admit women and the first to admit Black students. The tradition of social action continues today. The college achieved a goal of carbon neutrality in 2025 and hosted student demonstrations against the war in Gaza over the past two years.
Students continue to push the administration on divestment from war, support for undocumented and immigrant students, preventing sexual assault, and supporting student-run housing and meal cooperatives. They complain that the college leadership focuses more on revenue and growth than Oberlin’s core values, both the president and the board of trustees, which denied the student divestment proposal.
At this year’s graduation ceremonies, when the chair of the board of trustees took the stage, the graduating class stood up and turned their backs to him. For the duration of his remarks, they held white pieces of paper in the air bearing a variety of messages, such as “Protect Trans Students” and “Divest from Genocide” and “Become a Sanctuary Campus.” When they crossed the stage to accept their diplomas, a number of students handed the paper to Oberlin President Carmen Ambar before shaking her hand. I was impressed at the respectful display of their principles, a compromise between outright boos and doing nothing.
At a picnic hosted by the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association, I saw this confident leadership on display again. The student-run, non-profit corporation feeds and houses many Oberlin students, including my son, serving up giant vats of lentils, trays of bread, and other hearty fare three times a day through the school year. The commitment is significant: five shifts a week on a planning, cooking, or clean-up crew, and shared decision making.
Jamie had already told us about the experience of voting on policy changes, which had to be unanimous–meaning deliberations could truly drag on. His coop involvement made sense with our family’s values of hard work and community service: my husband Brian served as a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service, which paid for the vast majority of Jamie’s college tuition, through the G.I. Bill.
The outgoing OSCA president, a graduating senior, gave a speech as professional as any I’ve heard through most of my career, thanking that day’s crew for feeding hundreds of alums, graduating students, and families; sharing the organization’s mission, and updating the assembled picnickers on lease negotiations with the college administration. She thanked her leadership team and her mother, and her poise gave me a flash-forward of the future day when she might be leading a political campaign or acknowledging donors to a nonprofit.
Creativity and connection
Art and music threaded throughout the graduation weekend. We walked through the senior art studios and photography lab, admiring the innovative collages, black-and-white photography, and textured prints exploring a range of themes: identity, relationship, nature, and design. At a showcase for graduating film students, we watched short films exploring interpersonal relationships, the impact of a hoarder’s death on her daughter, and an Oberlin conductor’s connections between his Venezuelan roots and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, who composed under the thumb of the Soviet government.
One short documentary about couples who met late in life, filmed at the Kendal retirement community abutting the campus, struck me in its portrayal of how these relationships can be ones of convenience or deep love, depending on the situation. I felt surprised that a college student would find old-age love a compelling topic, and that the filmmaker succeeded in drawing out 80-somethings to discuss their sex lives, loneliness, and other intimate topics. Talking later to the student, I discovered that her professor had encouraged her to trim the film to 15 minutes, but she couldn’t bear to cut any more portions of her interviews.
In the film showcase and throughout the campus, visual arts shone as well: delicate animations that conveyed the passing of time and eye-catching graphics and murals. Our oldest daughter remarked that students generally seemed engaged in conversation, not buried in their phones. When festivities hit a lull, I’d often turn around to find my son and his friends engaged in a game of cards or Scattergories.
Their house seemed like a revolving door of housemates, relatives, neighbors, and friends, including recent graduates returning to celebrate the next crop of Obies. Everyone was unfailingly friendly and kind, greeting me and my parents with interest, engaging Jamie’s sisters in conversation, and open to getting to know anyone who happened to be in the same space. When tables or counters became crowded with dirty plates and cups, there always seemed to be a student taking out the trash or doing dishes. And they cheered each other on by attending each other’s screenings, recitals, concerts, sports games, and open studios.
I left the weekend feeling unexpectedly moved by the other students, in addition to seeing my own accept his diploma, of course. The thousands of 20-somethings on this campus aren’t alone in creating art and music that probes who we are as a society and what our relationships mean, or in taking action to change their communities. This is the generation that walked out of elementary school to protest gun violence and launched the careers of David Hogg and Greta Thunberg. This is what young people have always done, push human society to be the best version of itself. It’s often when times are the darkest and most uncertain that we turn to them for comfort and hope. Whether the writings of Anne Frank in the Holocaust or the voice of Joan Baez in the Vietnam War era, these voices carry unexpected and needed messages. The answer is in our relationships, in our commitment to and caring for each other.
As author Rebecca Solnit argues, the hero is often the collective, not a lone charismatic figure. We ignore at our peril “that individual actors and collective forces can suddenly emerge or implode, that history often takes sharp turns, that something that has held for decades or centuries can suddenly snap,” she writes.
Ultimately, none of us know what the future holds. We are building it in the present, every day. With these idealistic, creative, community minded young people joining the ranks of changemakers, I feel optimistic for the first time in a while.