Editor’s note: This is part of a Deseret Magazine series examining the question: What happened to the promise of college?

America’s college-age students are facing an emotional and directional crisis. A recent Harvard Graduate School of Education study showed that nearly 3 in 5 young adults feel a lack of purpose in their lives. Half of that same group describe their mental health as being negatively impacted by “not knowing what to do with my life.” The well-documented rise in anxiety and depression in Gen Z has been linked to what a former U.S. surgeon general has called an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.”

Many social scientists, including Robert Putnam, Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge and others have linked this rise in anxiety, depression and loneliness to the emergence of smar

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