He found that students tended to feel more depressed as seniors than they were as first-year students. The growth of self, he found, has not kept pace in college with the increasing complexity of life that college students experience. There are numerous interrelated factors hindering the maturational process during the college years, including the age isolation college students face. There are typically no children or young adolescents on campuses who can help remind one of what the earlier stages of life were like. There is also an increasing absence of adults on campus.
Dorms tend to be run either by peers or young adults.
Hence, college students often find themselves in a developmental vacuum with no children to remind them of what they have been and no adults to act as models for what they might become. The absence of adults is especially detrimental for, as Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant has persuasively shown, the most significant vehicle for post-childhood development is a mentoring relationship between a young person and an admired adult. Age isolation also tends to reinforce the powerful hold of youth culture on college students. This culture rejects the traditional view that sees youth as a transitional stage between childhood and adulthood, claiming instead that youth should be sustained for as long as possible and adulthood should be avoided like the plague. For all of its exhilaration and excitement, however, youth culture can only produce a repetition of adolescent forms of thought and action with no impetus toward development into mature forms of personal and social life.