In early November, a swirl of accusations and counter-accusations erupted in social media from the University of Miami. A disagreement between two students, one of them a prominent campus influencer, became fueled by commentary and reaction videos from strangers across the country. It swelled into a conversation about cruelty that led to the dean’s office and eventually to a national news story about young adult influencer culture and social status. But it roiled with something even larger and darker for young adults figuring out their place in the world: what it means to matter or not.

The incident, covered in The Washington Post, highlighted a core truth about the social waters young people swim in today. Popularity — if it can even be reduced to a single word that sounds so 80s, so geeks and jocks, so John Hughes movies — is no longer about just being cool at school. For this generation, social standing is shaped by a temperamental mix of in-person dynamics, the curated worlds of social media, and the invisible pull of moral and emotional expectations among peers. What makes it noteworthy, however, is this: The more psychologists and social scientists learn about wellness, the more so-called popularity is understood as something not outgrown after the mercurial adolescent years. The way a young person chases social standing — and comes to think of themselves during these years — has an impact upon social maturity and wellness for life. 

“The dynamics of popularity affect our relationships, our careers, our success in meeting our goals, and ultimately our happiness,” said psychologist Mitch Prinstein, author of “Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World.” As director of clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Prinstein has researched adolescent and young adult social dynamics for decades. And he believes the new landscape of popularity includes multiple categories. 

“There is likability, and there is status,” he said, “and there is now an online popularity that looks a lot like status, but it’s reinforced with actual quantified metrics that tell you exactly how popular you and every post and comment you’ve ever made may be.”  

As some cold countries are said to have 50 words for snow, the digital age may need an expanded vocabulary for popularity.

Status, or Perceived Popularity

A generation ago, the popular students were those with visible influence: the athletes, the charismatic leaders, the beautiful people and style setters. Prinstein calls this “status popularity,” built on visibility, dominance, and the ability to set social norms. It’s less about being well-liked than being noticed and acknowledged as powerful. It often emerges in adolescence but continues to matter into adulthood, especially in environments that reward hierarchy, competitiveness, and performance. 

This is the terrain of old-school status that still exists, where the superficially strong survive and bullies thrive. Physical attractiveness still carries an advantage; in young adults, so do subtle cues of wealth or access, like coming from certain zip codes or private schools, having a luxurious vacation home or fancy car.

Students are remarkably clear-eyed about this. One junior who described her sorority as “top tier” recognized that social circles sometimes coalesce around people with access to attributes of wealth and connections. But even in that environment, access doesn’t buy genuine affection. “People hang out with some kids because of the things they have access to — like money, drinks, drugs — even if they don’t like them that much.” Clothes can matter as barometers of style, she said, but the more subtle the better, lest you be seen as trying too hard, or “too Gucci.” Those might be your party friends, but “you wouldn’t trust them with your secrets.”

Athletic success can function as modern status currency as well. Ben, a recent graduate of Northeastern University, noted that athletes who are recognized as being on the path toward professional fame can have name recognition on campus — though he was quick to add that if they are jerks, they might be more notorious than popular, per se. Tessa Garcia, a therapist who works with adolescents and young adults in the San Francisco Bay area, called athletic achievement one of the “most intense” forms of comparison, for better or for worse, because “it’s concrete — it’s right there, publicly seen, how many goals you scored or missed.”

On many campuses, Greek life reinforces a hyper-visible hierarchy. For some students, Greek life becomes a social safety net, perhaps after struggling to make connections elsewhere. But it can also be a gauntlet of scrutiny and self-doubt, of striving for “top-tier” houses that offer the QR codes as door entry to the best parties. Garcia compared parts of the sorority rush process to “getting recruited for a sport — except your sport is your identity.” Appearance, enthusiasm, and social-media presence are evaluated as if they were performance metrics. 

Donna Steinberg, a longtime college mental health counselor in New Hampshire who has worked with Dartmouth students, sees this emotional toll up close. “Freshmen are going to the frat parties, trying to belong,” she said. “By sophomore year they have to decide whether to pledge, and the Greek system can look like pure tiers and ranking. They can be crushed by rejection, and they have to make sense of it somehow. Usually, they patch themselves up by the time they become seniors, but that sense of questioning why can stay with them.”

The New Status Economy Online

If traditional status operates through in-person visibility, digital status popularity operates through metrics: follower counts, likes, shares, and algorithmic amplification. This form of popularity is volatile, public, and precarious. Any interpersonal conflict can become a public spectacle, and any student’s reputation can be remade or destroyed in real time, at least for those who put stock in digital popularity. 

If traditional status operates through in-person visibility, digital status popularity operates through metrics.

Online popularity looks a whole lot like status, Prinstein said. But instead of being inferred through social cues, it is quantified with numbers. Students now live with a permanent scoreboard next to their names. “Things like follower counts play a really big role, and that could be because you're a good content creator and you just happen to attract a lot of people to your content, and that has nothing to do with your social skills. And that alone is enough to give you high status in your particular online niche.”

The University of Miami controversy illustrates how quickly online status can ignite conflict — and how swiftly it can smolder in public humiliation. Students who were previously known only within their campus community suddenly found themselves scrutinized by thousands of strangers. Some aspiring influencers who want to monetize this milieu choose majors in marketing, communications, and digital media, giving academic clout and higher stakes to the personal side of content creation and brand building.

For some undergraduates, courting this attention is intentional, but can be fleeting. Because online status can be gained or lost overnight, students may find themselves constantly monitoring, adjusting, curating, and performing — an emotional drain further removing them from the “real world” of interaction. It shapes perceptions — who is seen as aspirational, who is judged, who is excluded. Prinstein worries that social media collapses the nuance of human relationships into flattened, reactive fragments. “Your humanity is 128 characters long. You’re as good as your last post.” Young adults internalize this without realizing they are aligning their behavior with a system that rewards controversy, beauty, or performance more than kindness or integrity. 

And yet, the paradox is striking: Online popularity is everywhere, yet often irrelevant to the relationships that make college life meaningful. Someone cultivating an influencer persona isn’t necessarily an authentic person others want to call friend. 

“You see these people trying to be influencers, posting day-in-the-life videos. Usually, it’s considered kind of… cringey. Like it’s trying too hard,” said Sophie, a senior at the University of Virginia. The reaction, she said, is often skeptical: “We know you. You’re not living that life.”

Zoe, a sophomore at Vanderbilt, sees similar disconnects. “Someone can be huge on TikTok,” she said, “but on campus nobody cares. It doesn’t translate.”

Some students recognize this, and speak about the difference between the friends you “go out with to clubs” and the friends you “go grocery shopping with in pajamas.” 

Interestingly, many students emphasize the shift from status-based judgments in high school to authenticity-based judgments in college — a form of social standing that depends less on being admired and more on being someone others feel comfortable around. Once you find your people, Sophie said, there’s really no such thing as popularity anymore. 

“Honestly,” Ben agreed, “I don’t think there is really the idea of popularity in college these days, or at least not at Northeastern. There are fraternities; there are sororities; there are athletes and theater kids and everything in between. But nobody really looks at a different clique and feels like they’re less. Do you know a lot of people and do fun things? It’s not like high school. There’s no prom king.”

Warmth, Empathy, and the Social Skills that Last 

Likability — or sociometric popularity — reflects the degree to which someone is genuinely well-liked, trusted, and valued by peers. It emerges from warmth, empathy, emotional intelligence, and kindness. A young person who embodies these traits is often recognized early as someone other kids want to be around and parents want their children to spend time with. 

That degree of natural confidence might be the most organically attractive factor of all: the confidence to be kind to others without worrying how cool it makes you look or not, or whether being nice to someone who isn’t cool will be a social liability. “Being a generally likable person — someone who is a really good communicator, a good listener, and someone who’s interesting, — is what honestly makes you well-known and well-liked by the greatest number of people,” Sophie said. 

Zoe echoed this. Being outgoing and confident is naturally attractive, she said. If you are comfortable in your own skin, and interesting, it makes others want to be in your orbit. And it also gives you more latitude to be different. “People are attracted to people who’ve got spice and pizzazz. One of my guy friends is a huge history geek. He went to a museum during his fraternity formal road trip to New Orleans,” she said. “People really respect when you got something that's a little bit edgy to you because it shows that you have a personality. There's more than just what meets the eye. It's endearing and alluring because it's like, ‘Oh, I want to hear more about this person.’”

Prinstein considers likability the most important of the popularity types, noting that it predicts our health, our marriage, our salary, our parenting skills, even our age at death. Unlike status, which can be addictive but hollow, likability forms the basis for stable, meaningful relationships across the lifespan and decreases the chances that we’ll be lonely — a real wellness risk as we age.

Educators’ Takeaway: Recognize the Forces at Work

College students today are navigating an exceptionally layered social reality. For educators, counselors, and other adults who work with young adults, understanding this complexity is essential to being able to provide guidance that resonates with them.

Adults who grew up in an era before social media may underestimate the emotional force of public scrutiny, said Garcia, who emphasizes that these students are “the first generation growing up with themselves being exposed in ways previous generations weren’t.” And the punitive repercussions of social media situations like those at the University of Miami have to be recognized as a significant risk to wellbeing. Acknowledging the legitimacy of these pressures is the first step toward helping students manage them.

Because likability predicts long-term well-being, educators can foster it through intentional shifts in group discussions, promoting collaborative rather than competitive norms, and creating structured opportunities for students to form meaningful relationships.

In environments where Greek life, varsity athletics, selective majors, or elite internships are status dynamics that carry enormous weight, educators and counselors can help students make sense of these systems and disentangle personal worth from external ranking. For students who may feel “crushed” by rush rejection or other status-based competitive pressure, compassionate reframing can prevent temporary disappointment from becoming lasting harm.

Popularity today is a complex and sometimes contradictory matrix of status, visibility, and genuine connection. Students may be admired online but lonely on campus, or socially powerful in one community and invisible in another. They may chase influence without realizing they are sacrificing belonging — or believe they are failing socially when they are actually cultivating the kind of friendships that endure. 

Prinstein’s research underscores that these distinctions matter. For educators and other adults, the work is not to dismantle popularity but to guide students toward the version that sustains them. In a world where social media can amplify every misstep, and where the stakes of visibility feel impossibly high, helping students build the skills of authentic connection is not ancillary to their success — it is central to it. 

“Likability and status can go hand in hand. In fact, about, I think, a third of kids who have high social status are also very likable,” Prinstein said. “We should be investing lots of time and energy in helping kids to appropriately navigate a social world in real life instead of chasing metrics that end up not lasting. Even kids who are having the hardest time with peers can do really, really well with one trusted mutual friend and positive friendship. We need to help those who are suffering by helping them to have an actual relationship with a real human offline.” 

Prinstein emphasizes moving away from metrics: encouraging students to invest in the relationships that ground them, rather than the platforms that distract or distort — and to appreciate that status doesn’t have to build at the expense of authenticity. You can have status and style and still be the friend people choose to go grocery shopping.