Thomas Smith ’92Ph.D., the arts and sciences dean at The Catholic University of America, drew on his years of experience in higher education to write The Young Adult Playbook.
Published in September, the book, co-written with Villanova University professor Anna Bonta Moreland, explores young adults’ underlying desires and helps them grapple with what it means to lead a happy life.
Smith discusses how the book came about and what he hopes readers will take away from it.
How has your experience in higher education informed The Young Adult Playbook?
I love my students. Faculty go into teaching because we love young people and want to see them flourish. Over the years, many students would come to me with typical struggles: I have an anxiety disorder and I haven’t been in class, or somebody in my family is sick, for example. But about seven or eight years ago, students started coming to me with very different struggles — they were struggling with success. These were students who were firing on all cylinders. They were building resumes, getting internships and good grades, but they were struggling with feeling trapped, even though from the outside everything looked great. And then I realized that the kind of success they were pursuing and the path they were on was the problem.
The book came out of a series of co-curricular courses I developed when I was director of the honors program at Villanova to respond to that insight — one on adjusting to college life, one on meaningful work, and one on ‘adulting’ after college. As I realized how much my students were struggling, I thought we needed to give them opportunities to come together and talk and think about these issues. And we kept coming back to these themes of meaningful work, work-life balance and relationships as the areas they really needed to work on.
How does the book incorporate the perspectives of young adults?
The book is really written with the voices of our students. Over many decades in higher education, my co-author and I have talked to hundreds of students. As we wrote the book, we showed drafts to students in these co-curricular courses. The book is dedicated to our students. It’s written for the students that we couldn’t teach, and it also honors the students who shared their experiences with us.
What was your process for developing the journal exercises throughout the chapters? How do you envision them helping readers tailor strategies to their own lives?
The co-curricular courses have a lot of practical components, and the book is built on these activities. For example, in the freshman course, there’s a dating exercise where students can go out on a date for extra credit. Several of the exercises consist of discernment practices, where we ask readers to imaginatively put themselves in different kinds of lives and careers, and then notice how it makes them feel to inhabit those lives. Who would you meet? What kind of work would you do? What would you feel joyful about? What kind of person would that make you?
What can educators learn from your findings about supporting young adults in their quest for meaningful lives?
It’s a window into the experience of young people today because so many students had their input in the book. What we find when we talk to faculty, parents and grandparents is that the book is a kind of a revelation about what's going on in the lives of young people. They know intuitively that young people are struggling, but they don’t know exactly what their experience is because it's so different from the experience they had when they were young adults. One message is to meet students where they are. I think that students today have the key to unlocking these feelings of stuckness; we just need to help them find it.
How has writing this book changed your own views on happiness or the paths to fulfillment?
It's made me think more carefully about how I value achievement. I’ve achieved a lot of things in my career that I’m really proud of, but they’re not lines to put on a resume — they’re the ways that I have served people.
Interview by Caroline Collins ’25, a senior environmental science major and journalism minor, who is this magazine’s fall intern.