Why Kenektic Is for Universities First
Why Kenektic Is for Universities First
By David, Founder & CEO of Kenektic January 19, 2026
Created: February 24, 2026
I made one friend at the University of Oregon.
If you've been reading this series, you know that story. He lived in Portland, ninety miles north of Eugene. He'd invite me to his house on weekends. We eventually moved in together. And even then — even living with someone I considered a real friend — I still couldn't expand beyond that one connection. I'd sit on that barstool at the bar while he drifted into conversations like breathing, like it was the most natural thing in the world, and I'd wait. One person in a school of thousands who would notice if I didn't show up.
I thought Oregon was just Oregon. Maybe the school. Maybe the city. Maybe something specific to that particular social ecosystem that I hadn't cracked.
So I went to business school at USC and tried again.
Same story. Different state.
I arrived eager. Business school — where everyone's there on purpose, where the cohort supposedly bonds over shared suffering and late-night studying and the professional network you'll carry the rest of your career. Where lifelong friendships are forged, as they say.
Same wall. Better weather.
The Friend I Eventually Lost, Too
Here's something I haven't said out loud before.
I eventually lost touch with my one Oregon friend.
Not dramatically. Not with a fight. The way you lose people when you're bad at maintenance — the calls got less frequent, the visits stopped getting planned, and one day you realize it's been longer than it should have been and you don't quite know how to bridge the gap that quietly opened up.
Of all the people I've let drift over the years — the work friends who mattered, the colleagues who were more than colleagues — losing touch with the one person who was my actual friend through the loneliness of college is the one I regret most.
He was the chair at the full table. The one seat I had. And I couldn't hold onto even that.
The Full Arc
I need you to understand how long this pattern ran, because it matters for why I built what I built.
Seventh grade: lunch against the wall. Literally — sliding down to sit on the floor at the edge of the lunchroom because I didn't know how to break into the groups that had already formed.
High school: two, maybe three best friends. Close — the real kind. But nothing beyond them. Always slightly out of sync. Always at the edge of every social world I was trying to inhabit.
Oregon: one friend. Barstool. Waiting.
USC: same pattern. Different zip code.
I carried this for decades. And for most of that time, I assumed it was me. That I was broken in some specific way. That normal people figured this out and I simply hadn't.
Then I went deep into the research. And I found out how wrong I was.
This Is Not a Personal Failing. It's an Epidemic.
Between 60 and 73 percent of college students report feeling significant loneliness.
Let that land for a second. Not a fringe group of socially awkward kids like me. Not the outliers. The majority. The overwhelming majority of students walking across any campus in America right now are carrying some version of what I carried at Oregon and USC — and most of them assume, the way I assumed, that everyone else has figured it out and they're the only one who hasn't.
Gen Z — the generation currently filling college campuses — is the loneliest generation ever measured. Their average loneliness score is the highest of any age group on record. 61% of young people aged 18–25 report serious loneliness. And here's the part that stopped me when I read it: 56% of Gen Zers say they felt lonely growing up. Before college. This is a generation that arrived on campus already lonely, with less practice forming in-person relationships, more years of scrolling instead of being together, and less of the unstructured social time that actually builds the skills friendship requires.
College isn't causing the loneliness. College is just the first place big enough to see it clearly.
35% of students experience severe social isolation — not just feeling a little disconnected, but genuinely cut off. And 49% of college students say they feel lonely even when they are around other people. That one hit close to home. That's the barstool feeling. Surrounded by hundreds of people having the time of their lives, and feeling invisible inside all of it.
What Loneliness Does to a Student
The data on consequences is devastating — and I mean that word precisely.
Loneliness is the single strongest predictor of depression in college students. Not academic pressure. Not financial stress. Loneliness. Students who are severely socially isolated carry a 3× higher risk of anxiety disorders and a 2× higher risk of suicidal ideation. The counseling centers trying to absorb this crisis are overwhelmed — six to twelve week wait times are now the standard at most universities, not the exception.
And it shows up in the classroom. Lonely students carry 0.5 to 1.0 lower GPAs than their connected peers. Lower attendance. Less participation. Less engagement with the education they came to get. The loneliness doesn't stay in the dorm room — it follows them everywhere.
But the most consequential number is this one: one in three freshmen don't return for sophomore year. Thirty-three percent. And when researchers dig into why, social isolation is consistently the primary driver. Not academics. Not finances. The students who leave are disproportionately the ones who never found their people.
My kids did far better than I did — they're naturally social in ways I've never been, and they built big, positive circles in college. But even they had hard first weeks. Even they went through the figuring-out period. Something like Kenektic could have gotten them into their groove faster, compressed those uncertain early weeks into days. For someone experiencing college the way I experienced Oregon and USC, those weeks aren't uncomfortable — they're the beginning of a dropout story.
What Universities Are Actually Losing
I spent my career in financial services, which means my first instinct when I see a problem is to find the number that tells the truth about its size. Here's what the student loneliness crisis costs:
$50,000 to $200,000 in lost tuition revenue per dropout, when you account for all four years a student won't complete. At a university with 5,000 freshmen, if 30% don't return sophomore year, that's 1,500 students walking out the door. At $100,000 average lifetime tuition value, that's $150 million in lost revenue — from one freshman class.
Even a 5% improvement in retention saves that university $7.5 million. Every year.
And the financial damage doesn't stop at tuition. Connected alumni give more. Students who found genuine friends at college — who have something to be nostalgic about, who think about their school the way you think about the place where you met your people — those are the alumni who donate. The disconnected graduate who drifted through four years and left without finding their community? They're not writing checks at the reunion.
Universities are also spending $3 to $5 million annually on counseling services that are already at capacity. Six to twelve week wait times don't serve students in crisis — they just document the problem while the student suffers. Treating loneliness after it becomes a clinical issue is dramatically more expensive than preventing it from getting there.
Why Every Current Solution Falls Short
I have a lot of respect for what universities are trying. I do. But the evidence on what's actually working is not encouraging.
Orientation programs are too short — one week of forced interaction that fades the moment the schedule ends. Random roommate assignment helps about 22% of students form lasting friendships, while 40% experience significant conflict with their assigned roommate. That's not a connection tool; it's a coin flip.
Greek life reaches 8 to 10% of students and costs $1,000 to $5,000 per semester to join. It works well for the students who can access it. Everyone else is on their own.
Student clubs should be the answer — shared interests, natural conversation, built-in structure. But they require you to already know what you're interested in, navigate an intimidating application process, and show up somewhere alone where groups have already formed. Only 18% of students report that joining a club led to a close friendship.
Social media makes it worse, not better. Students watch the curated highlight reels of everyone else's social life and conclude that everyone else has figured it out. 43% of Gen Z students explicitly say social media causes feelings of loneliness and depression — and yet it remains the primary tool universities implicitly rely on for student connection.
The gap isn't lack of effort. It's lack of a scalable, proactive, personalized system that helps all students find compatible friends — not just the ones who are already confident, already connected, already know how to work a room.
That's what's missing. That's what Kenektic is.
Not Just Freshmen
I want to be precise about this, because the freshman dropout narrative — as real and urgent as it is — misses most of the students who are suffering.
The transfer student who shows up mid-year knowing absolutely no one. The graduate student who is five years older than everyone in the cohort and can't find a single peer who gets it. The international student navigating a culture they've never lived in on top of a school they're still figuring out. The commuter student who drives in, goes to class, and drives home without ever connecting to campus life. The first-generation student who feels like everyone else received a manual for how college works that nobody gave them. The student who changed majors and lost the social circle that came with their old department.
First-generation college students are 30% more likely to feel isolated during their first year than their continuing-generation peers. Commuter students report loneliness rates of 85% — the highest of any student population. These aren't edge cases. These are millions of students at every type of institution, in every year of their education, who never got an introduction.
Loneliness on a college campus isn't a freshman problem. It's an everyone problem that just looks different depending on where you are in the experience.
Why Universities Made Sense First
When the three-vertical idea came together — the spreadsheet moment I wrote about last week, the financial models telling a different story once I zoomed out — universities rose to the top immediately.
Part of it is personal. I lived this. My kids lived softer versions of it. I can picture the barstool. I can feel the specific quality of that particular loneliness — surrounded by thousands of people and knowing exactly one of them.
But part of it is structural. Universities have been sounding the alarm on student loneliness for years. Student affairs offices. Deans of students. Vice presidents of wellness. Entire institutional infrastructure built around the exact problem we're solving. These aren't buyers I need to convince that the crisis is real — they know the data better than almost anyone. The pitch isn't "did you know your students are lonely?" The pitch is: we built what you've been looking for.
And the implementation logic is sound. Universities are defined populations with defined timelines and outcomes they already measure. If Kenektic works — if retention improves, if counseling center demand decreases, if students report higher belonging — the data exists to prove it. That proof becomes the foundation for every conversation that comes after.
You start where the problem is clearest, the buyer is most aligned, and the evidence is most measurable.
That's universities. That's why we go there first.
The Introduction I Never Got
I was the kid who made one real friend in four years of college — and eventually lost touch with even him.
I was the business school student who watched a whole cohort build networks and friendships and professional circles while I formed polite acquaintances and wondered what I was missing.
What would have been different if, in the first week at Oregon, something had walked up to that barstool and said — not thrown me into a mixer, not handed me a pamphlet — introduced me. Specifically. Based on something real about who I actually was and what kind of people I'd actually connect with.
I didn't get that. Sixty to seventy-three percent of current college students don't get it either. And every year, a third of all freshmen leave before they ever find their people.
I built Kenektic so that student gets the introduction.
Every student. From the first week. Before the wall becomes the only option.
Starting with universities — because that's where this all began for me, and because they've been waiting the longest for someone to build the answer.
Here it is.
Were you lonely in college? Even if you ended up fine — even if you look back on college as the best years — do you remember those first weeks? The figuring-out period? The moment you finally found your people, or the moment you realized you might not? I'd love to hear about it. And if you were the kid I was in Eugene, sitting on that barstool waiting for your one friend to come back: I especially want to hear from you.
Kenektic is in development and will launch soon. If you want to be notified when we're ready, or if you want to share your story with me directly, reach out at hello@kenektic.com.
Coming Next: "Kenektic for Teams" — The work friends I made and couldn't keep. The colleagues who were more than colleagues. And why the loneliness that starts in college doesn't stop when you finally get the job.