Every spring, I watch another class of young men cross stages, shake hands, and step into the next phase of their lives. As President and CEO of the North American Interfraternity Conference (NIC), I have had a front-row seat to this moment for two decades.
This year, the young men graduating will face an even more difficult landscape than generations before. The current job market is challenging. Many of them will move to a new city where they will need to start over socially, a task that does not come easily to many and has become increasingly difficult in the digital age. Coupled with an environment that has largely treated masculine characteristics as factors that must be inhibited instead of social assets that provide value to families, workplaces, and communities, many young men find themselves adrift.
But the ones I am least worried about? The young men who joined a fraternity.
The first fraternity in the United States was created the same year America was founded. Since then, these institutions have provided semi-structured, authentic environments that bring young men together around shared interests and values. These spaces allow them to be strong and vulnerable, ambitious, and unsure, competitive and caring. Fraternities’ diverse communities and consistent in-person engagements pull young men away from isolating activities and push them toward rewarding interaction.
In an October 2025 poll by Cygnal that surveyed 1,000 males ages 16 to 28, those who belong to a fraternity report overwhelmingly healthier behaviors and optimistic outlooks than their unaffiliated peers. They are 12% more likely to report having positive mental health, 24% more likely to say their lives are going the way they envisioned and nearly 30% more likely to have a male mentor. Being part of a fraternity also means these men are significantly more likely to have three or more close friends, less likely to spend time online and more likely to engage in in-person activities. Embracing a pro-social brotherhood is a clear antidote to the social ills that afflict young men.
The exchange of ideas and authentic vulnerability was on full display at the first ever Brotherhood Summit in Anaheim, bringing together more than 500 collegiate fraternity members and alumni from schools of all sizes. With programming focused on leadership, meaning, belonging, and, more generally, what it means to be a young man in 2026, I saw firsthand the power of organic brotherhood.
Story after story affirmed a simple truth: young men need healthy outlets and space to grow and learn. They need friends who challenge them, a network to rely on as they grow academically and professionally, and brothers they can count on for life. And they’ve grown weary of being lectured, rather than communicated with.
Fraternities today have evolved from the past. New member orientations set out academic expectations, often exceeding the university’s, and train students on hazing prevention and intervention. Resources teaching young men how to intervene in high-risk behavior, providing reporting mechanisms and raising awareness of mental health crisis warning signs are standard.
Meanwhile, philanthropic and volunteer initiatives that better communities are central to all fraternity missions and develop better men who care about others. Members are also given opportunities to hold leadership roles that involve serious commitment and responsibility, like balancing budgets, representing their fraternity on university councils, and new member recruitment outreach. Combined with the social benefits of fraternity membership, these experiences provide life skills that sometimes fall through the cracks of a strictly academic college experience.
Even as overall male enrollment in universities has declined, demand for fraternity membership has remained remarkably resilient. It is a signal worth paying attention to. Young men are, in some cases, choosing fraternity life precisely because it offers something the broader college experience increasingly does not: a space designed specifically for them.
Single-sex organizations like fraternities provide a rare environment where young men can build identity, accountability, and true brotherhood. That enduring demand is not nostalgia, but instead, a market signal that young men recognize, even instinctively, what research continues to confirm: belonging to a community of peers who share their values and invest in their growth is not a luxury. Now, more than ever, it is a necessity.
Parents should take note. If you have a son heading to college this fall, or one who is already there, encourage him to consider fraternity life. Not because fraternity is a social shortcut, but because it is one of the most proven tools available for helping young men build the friendships, mentorship and sense of purpose that will carry them through the decades ahead. Richard Reeves, author of “Of Boys and Men” and speaker at the Brotherhood Summit, captured this reality by invoking the late C.P. Scott: "Comment is free, but facts are sacred." The facts are clear: young men are struggling—but they are not without solutions. Fraternities remain one of the most proven. The young men I am not worried about are the ones walking into their futures with a network, mentors, and brothers they can call at any hour, who are almost always the ones who said “yes” to that experience.
As one class walks off campus this spring and another arrives, parents, mentors and the people who love young men have a role to play. Show them the path. Point them toward brotherhood.
Judson Horras is President & CEO of the North American Interfraternity Conference, a trade association representing 61 inter/national men’s fraternities.
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