This is only tangentially related, but I do think that from what I’ve heard from DS, college now, at least at some institutions, is much less personal and involves much less interaction with professors than it did 30 years ago. It also seems to have become much more “cut and dried” with alot of technology involved in streamlining things, and therefore setting up a much more narrow path to success than was there 30 years ago. So, in some cases profs really have almost no interaction with their students or even their students’ work unless the student reaches out for help; they’re not in the loop at all in some cases, apparently. This certainly makes it easier for a student to feel completely isolated and for a prof to be completely clueless or at least less than encouraging when a student does reach out for help. And this is true even at institutions where the enrollment is no bigger than it was 30 years ago. I find it disheartening and disappointing to hear my DS talk about taking multiple choice exams in classes like physics and calculus, having homework in these same technical classes done online via WebAssign, and computer programming assignments graded my an auto-grader online that will hiccup at the slightest deviation in output formatting (even if the meaningful part of the code works as assigned). 30 years ago, in engineering school, I never once had a multiple choice exam in a technical subject. All my homework was written and handed in and graded by a TA. But the prof at least flipped through the graded papers to have some idea of what was going well with his students and where they were stumbling. And when I went into office hours, even though I was in a big class, he had some semblance of an idea of how I was doing. There was some personal connection between student and teacher; that seems to have become much more limited by the use of technology to take the instructor out of the assessment loop almost completely. Makes it much more isolating and a much more narrowly defined path for success.