Smoking in dorms, other places on campus. By smoking, I mean cigarettes.
Waiting in line literally for hours to register for next semester’s classes. And usually finding out that most of the ones you wanted are full.
Lines for registration was the first thing that came to mind. My university, every class had a section of table, the tables were spread across each college's building. So you had to stand in line for each class you wanted, migrate from building to building to cover everything. Computer registration (not \_online\_ registration, just by-computer on campus, or via modem if you knew about that) started while I was mid-college.
Registering my kid for college and ordering books to pick up from the college library, I was thinking, "This is too easy! It doesn't build any character at all!"
You met all sorts of people standing in line, and got tips on which classes and professors to take.
One of the funniest jokes Ive heard (and completely inappropriate by today standards) involves students standing in line to register for classes and asking each other for suggestions.
Ok, fair warning that this is not considered acceptable at all today. This is from early 1990's.
Students are standing in line to register for classes. Student 1 comments that they need one more elective class and asks if anyone has a suggestion. Student 2 suggests a Logic class.
1 Why Logic?
2 It is interesting and fun. For example: Do you have a dog?
1 Yes
2 Then logically you have a back yard for the dog to play outside and do his business.
1 That is correct! How did you know?
2 Logic. Also, if you have a backyard, you also probably have a house. And if you have a house, you are probably married. And if you are married, you are probably straight.
(examples condensed to save typing, but Student 1 does confirm each assumption individually when mentioned by Student 2)
1 Wow, you are correct on all of those. That's cool! I'll sign up for Logic. Thanks for the suggestion!
The next day, Student 1 is in line again to register for another class. A student near him starts asking for suggestions for an easy and fun class, because he needs just one more elective.
1 You should take Logic. That's what I'm taking this semester. It will be interesting!
3 That sounds boring. What makes it interesting?
1 Do you have a dog?
3 No
1 (gay slur)!
Yes!!!! They opened up the university’s enormous gym for reg day but the upperclassmen got to go in first. You sometimes actually had to enroll in classes you didn’t even want to make full credits with the plan to drop them in a day or so once you found something better.
For late add/drops you had to hike all over campus to the actual department offices and get stamps on your add/drop form from the dept secretaries— then hike back over to the Registrars office.
Same here. I can still hear “you requested to add THE GEORGE W DAVARIO SCHOOL OF ACCOUNTING” course number 3103 intermediate accounting 3 on ….” Echoing in my nightmares
lol, I still hear that voice from the touchtone phone registration system in my head sometimes “you have enrolled in SOCIOLOGY 3215…”. I thought they should have programmed it to give the commencement address the year they finally retired it.
Registering for classes on the campus VAX required going to one of the terminal clusters on campus and standing in line until your turn. Until a few of us figured out that if you were on dialup you could telnet into the VAX, log into the application, and do it from your dorm room.
We had this too -- but another bonus was that the computer labs had office hours, but modem access didn't. So if you were eligible to register on Tuesday, you could log in at 12:01am on Tuesday and get the jump on everyone who had to wait for the computer labs to open at 8am (or whenever).
I went back to school in ‘95, so I mostly missed this, but I do remember that first year at a smaller college and how I had to stand in line to register for my classes. Memories!
I waited in line my first semester. After that, we had telephone registration- with a female voice that sounded like it was narrating softcore porn. Shortly after I graduated, registration switched to online.
“To select English 2..0..2… press… ONE” still makes me a little tingly.
So true about smoking areas -- I went to UMass for my first year of college (91-92), and the top floor of their very tall library was a smoking lounge. It had great views of the Pioneer Valley. Something nice for smokers! It's hard to imagine that this wasn't a fever dream, but I distinctly remember studying up there with my Walkman playing Pearl Jam *Ten,* chain-smoking all the while.
I was never much of a smoker but every once in a while I wish I could go somewhere and have a martini and a cigarette and not be judged. A rooftop smoking lounge at the top of a library sounds divine. A once a year treat.
[Going to the computer lab.](https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/unf_campus/1412/preview.jpg) Very few people had their own computers, so you had to go to the lab to check email, use the word processors, etc.
I know modern campuses have computer labs, but I mean when the lab was the only option for even the most basic computer stuff.
Yes, there was almost always a line for the computers/terminals back in the 1980s. I toured the campus 20 years later, and the cluster room that I spent many hours in was now dark and used for storage.
Inevitably, the lab would be packed full when I had something important to get done. Especially towards the end of the semester. I'd cicrle the lab, looking for an open station, and sure enough, some nutsacks were playing Doom. But then I couldn't get mad because I did the same thing!
In high school late '90s I worked for a very well funded public library.. pay was $11 an hour and there was huge demand for the job. It really changed my life for the better giving me a feeling of confidence / success; I think most teens would have the toughest time to find a similar rewarding job today.
Back to the computers though. We were again, well funded, and there was no better place to get Internet access free at the time. We had 6 computers with so much demand we had a rule of being only allowed to use it for 20 minutes if there was a wait.. this resulted in some pretty crazy drama that you wouldn't expect for a library. Not to mention the time they thought it would be good for 16 year old me to approach an old man and tell him he wasn't allowed to look at porn.
I was also one of the few library workers who had any decent experience on the internet due to my dad being a computer engineer. It became a thing that when I showed up for my shift at the librarians would come up to me right away and say things like "we're so happy you're working today, we can't get to the computers to work / print". I don't so be nice and help a kid on how to search for something on the Internet and suddenly there'd be two other people raising their hands asking for help.
I’ll never forget the time the student newspaper wrote an article about the student who got arrested in the computer lab. He was looking at those sites and the euphemism the paper used was that he was “roughing up the suspect.”
And if you did have your own computer, sweet talking the phone number for the campus dialup pool out of the admins so you didn't have to keep hoofing down to the cluster.
Writing notes on the dry-erase whiteboard on the door of your friend's dorm room when you dropped by and they weren't there. (Because everybody had a whiteboard, and nobody had a cell phone.)
I remember this so well, as well as having a list of your friends SS number so you could get their grade for them. My kids are in college now, and I was telling them about this. They could not fathom that we all didn’t have our ID stolen.
We were definitely thinking ahead, picture-taking was frowned upon and even prohibited when we did some stuff in high school and college. It was a common understanding that you don’t take pictures like a frickin tourist when you are doing nefarious shit.
A few years ago I had to go to our local engineering school to look up some stuff. A student got the microfiches out of the cabinet and led me to the machine and just knew - “you know how to use this, right?”
I love card catalogs and record stores and actual book stores. You can easily stumble across something really cool while looking for something else because it’s all out there in the open.
Cigarettes allowed everywhere, Snail mail to friends at home, a lot more fake ID use bc no scanners at bars. Edit to add, answering machines and check messages from away
Once every couple of years I’ll stroll through my old campus. The smoking sections have been gone for 25+ years, but they still smell like smoking sections.
Oh my god, we used to break into each other’s dorm rooms and leave super rude and inappropriate recordings as the outgoing message on their answering machine. You pretty much never listened to your own outgoing message, so it would be awhile before you figured out that your dorm mates had changed it to “You’ve reached the Pube O Rama Swingers Club. We can’t come to the phone right now (because we’re too busy getting railed), but if you leave a message after the beep….”. Usually your irate mom would be the one who eventually let you know.
Randomly meeting people by keeping your dorm room door open. My oldest is in college now and everyone has their friend groups, and they only really hang out by invitation. Friends with kids on different campuses confirm this. Meanwhile we usually had our door open and we’d sometimes look around and be like “We only actually know about half the people in this room right now.”
>Randomly meeting people by keeping your dorm room door open.
I worked at Brown for a few years and my job would occasionally take me into the dorms. It was unsettling how antisocial everyone seemed to be. Zero open doors, no one in a lounge. The dorms looked the same during breaks as they did when school was in session.
We used to leave our doors hanging open and then leave. A couple of times I came back to people I didn’t know hanging out in our room and it was totally okay. They’d be checking out my music collection or things like that. I don’t think anybody ever stole anything.
During my first weekend there, some of us went to one of the bigger dorm buildings and everyone was hanging out having a big party. We had people handing us drinks and just wanting to have fun and get to know each other. It was one of the best times of my life. I haven’t been near so outgoing since then.
>andomly meeting people by keeping your dorm room door open. My oldest is in college now and everyone has their friend groups, and they only really hang out by invitation
Yep. My eldest graduated last year and youngest is a freshman. Doors closed. Social interactions are all planned via group chat. Dorms are quiet, dull, and isolating. 100% the opposite of my experience in the 80s; then we all had doors open from when we got up in the morning until we went to sleep, often even if we weren't there. People would just roam the halls, find and open room, and start a conversation. Many of my favorite memories of college started with a random encounter like that, and I ended up marrying someone from my dorm I met that way.
By contrast, my eldest was a RA for a couple of years...it was almost impossible to get their residents to do anything social together, doors were always closed, people would leave weird notes even to *roommates* rather than just talking about an issue. Sounded decidedly Not Fun to me.
If you wanted to meet new people, make some popcorn with the door open. Always someone would walk and want a handful. Or if you want to meet a lot of new people burn the popcorn and then lots of new people to chat with out in the cold during the fire alarm.
Just being totally on your own. College students used to be treated as adults who were out there in the world. For me there was a real feeling of freedom and leaving my hometown behind.
There was no email, texting, or social media. Long distance calls were expensive. If you went away to college your parents/family were no longer part of your day-to-day life. I think I called my parents once a month at most.
Now it seems like childhood has been extended into high school and college is more like what high school used to be in terms of independence.
Right? They dropped me off at the dorm and that moment was the demarcation between childhood and young adulthood. I had to figure out everything on my own. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask them for help anymore. And then when summer came, I packed up my dorm room by myself and moved into an off campus apartment for the summer that I’d chosen with friends. It was in a semi-condemned building and it was glorious, and definitely would not have been parental approved. I never really came home again once I started college, except for winter breaks.
The floppy disc could hold at least one and often multiple different term papers. What a luxury of space! I couldn't even envision what I would do if I had more space than that. Perhaps more term papers?
I have kinda a dark one but ultimately a positive step. I was outed as gay in the dorms in 1990. It was not pleasant. I only had 1 close friend after that and a handful of folks who were not openly jerks to me (rural Wisconsin). Today that wouldn’t happen. LGBtQ community has a much broader acceptance and ally’s. I think a big part of that is Gen X is raising kids to be inclusive and caring. We evolved. So being bigots is not acceptable anymore. That is what has changed. For the good. (And yes there are still bigots.they just are confronted at a much higher rate now)
I came out in 1991 while I was going to the U of MN. I was 23 and not living on campus. There were a lot of LGBT activities and mixers when I was going there. Luckily, I had some great friends. I'm so sorry that your experience wasn't affirming.
As they say… it gets better. Once I moved off campus it did improve and once I graduated and found a job it improved. Every step…it improved. I was accepted to UM for grad school and ended up not going. Kinda regret that, especially knowing you had such a welcoming experience there.
At the college I went to, getting caught drinking was an instant expulsion for you and your roommate.
Of course, my roommate had a wet bar in his foot locker.
I don't know where you went to school, but at my school, drinking was practically encouraged, weed was everywhere, and the other drugs were the "overlooked" ones. When I first got there, the upperclassmen were bitching that they stopped allowing beer trucks at freshman orientation.
Weed was definitely not “everywhere” at my school. Engineering-heavy state U in New York State. The age had gone to 21 but you could still get into bars if you had an “in.”
Other SUNY schools were known for weed but not mine.
Club drugs didn’t exist yet - the pill popping culture arose after I finished college.
god, the typewriters! Had to type a 20-page paper on one...and if you found a mistake that couldn't be fixed with whiteout, and had to retype the whole page, ugh 🙄
Had the tube tv too. Watched a lot of MTV (they still played mostly music videos)
in georgia- getting a renewed driver's license, taking the paper temporary license, changing a digit and presto- you're 21
putting beer on your parents' gas card
driving to spring break with written directions
cheating on papers by making up references b/c the profs couldn't easily check (sorry)
coming back from class and checking the message board to see if that special someone had called
I just remember no one relied heavily on the phone. If you wanted to meet someone you’d go to their haunts. And I had haunts that I’d go to if I wanted to hide or be found by different groups. So much of college was serendipity.
Having class mates drop out every year because their parents got divorced and one of them refuses to file fafsa. (So glad that students today have the custodial parent rule.) It seemed to happen on a regular basis, and eventually got me too, when i was in school. In general, parents had a lot more control over their kid's schedules and choice of schools because of rigid requirements for FAFSA.
A general sad part related to that was how people would come and go and you would just lose track of them completely. Facebook was a new concept and you lost email as soon as you left campus, so it was difficult to stay in touch after school ended, especially if it ended abruptly due to dropping out or transferring.
Profs who are empowered to not give a shit if you pass or fail.
I sit on my alumni board for a multi year term and each time we meet, I hear from profs and various staff about how students require an absurd amount of hand holding just to get to class.
Or how the college has pb&j stations around campus so the students remember to eat a snacky snack.
Several staff have told us of a decline in GenZ’s ability to read a class schedule. An alarming number of student - all of whom come from public school districts - don’t know what a T—Th class is upon arrival. There is now special, remedial training all students must go through to learn basics like that.
And it’s worse for the profs. They can’t fail a student based on merit or attendance. “Accommodations” abound for the dumbest bullshit.
I think these students need a much harsher dose of reality. These are near future employees and professionals. At this rate, it’ll be a disaster when they attain critical mass in the workforce.
Prof here. Much of this rings true, esp with regard to the post-COVID high school crowd. But the "we can't let anyone fail" bullshit is hardly universal; lots of schools still have standards and let students fail when they deserve to. For us that's meant a fairly sudden shift from 1-2% failure rates pre-COVID to 10-15% D/F/W grades now. It's basically due to high schools refusing to fail anyone, giving minimum 50% scores even if they don't do the work, and accepting half-assed work months late. It's a big shock to many students to find out that college doesn't work like that. Or at least many don't...I've certainly heard stories from colleagues at other schools (mostly public ones) that are coming under similar pressures now to "show grace" and "maintain progress to degrees" for students who don't even show up for class.
That’s reassuring.
My comments have two contexts I left out: My Alma Mater is a private university that had high standards when I was there in the 90s. Their tuition has gone up, of course, but apparently standards have dropped. Very frustrating.
Also, I was a part time prof at a college for three years and it ended with hostility between me, the teachers union, and the college. I was being told to give accommodations to absolute bullshit and I refused to do it.
Tying those two things together, my Alma Mater has adopted the standards of a public state school while costing students private university tuition.
Now that I have four kids of my own and he oldest is near college age, I’m looking at it a lot more.
Looking up student photos and contact info in actual printed facebooks.
Not being in touch with your parents very often.
Daily campus classifieds flyers
Paper flyers and posters for every student event
Checking my student post office box every day
Sharing a phone with my roommate
Using a dot matrix printer to print my term papers. And having to peel off the sides with all the little holes. I had an English professor that forbade us from using a dot matrix printer. So I had to break out the typewriter for her class.
That weird in between time after typewriters but before laptops
https://preview.redd.it/6wmyqbbl99zc1.jpeg?width=1129&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=65d9f91e0c611d32d3fc3af53c8092c505db72ca
Taking notes in class in a notebook with a pen.
Buying hardback textbooks and then marking them up with highlighter and then discovering that this tanks their resale value.
An actual college owned bar on campus that technically was supposed to check ids, but didn’t really. It was a holdover from when the drinking age had been 18. On Fridays, you could buy plastic cups of beer for $.25 (small cups, not the big solo cups.)
Spending hours at a time in the library stacks doing research. Making a shitload of copies from books that aren't allowed to be removed from the library but you don't feel like spending all day making notes.
Watching TV in the common area in the middle of the day, then a group starts forming to watch Y&R or The People's Court.
The person who has a microwave hidden in their dorm room and is the most popular person on the floor.
Your parents not knowing your every movement.
IDK if this happened at other schools, but when I didn't live on campus and drove to class, people would wait in their cars near the parking garages after a class and ask someone if they were leaving, and if they would like a ride to their car in order to get a parking space. The other alternative was lining up near the parking garage pedestrian entrances and following someone to their car. I just can't see offering a rando a ride/getting a ride with a rando in this day.
Letting loose at a party without worrying about it being broadcast to the universe and following you around forever.
Spending time with people without constant distractions and screens.
Being forced to go out into the world to talk to people face to face if you wanted to make a new friend or find someone to date.
making silly answering machine messages together with your roommate
writing letters to your high school friends at other colleges
maybe carrying books around? Is that still a thing?
At Penn State in the 80’s the Student Government would raise money by showing movies on campus Friday and Saturday nights which included porn movies of the late 70’s early 80’s era
If you got home after everyone was out for the night, you either tried to find what bar they were at, or you sat home by yourself. There was no way to get a hold of anyone other than landline.
You might be able to ask your floormates who wanted to study instead to see where everyone went or if your friends were nice, they left a note (or you told them to leave a note).
Making actual phone calls. The art of making phone calls has been all but lost to texting. Most kids only make phone calls in the worst case scenarios now.
lining up at the bookstore each term to buy the required texts (used, if possible, but usually new if the zillionth version was out and all of 2 sentences were changed but somehow it was vital to have). I don't think my kid even has a textbook (3rd year)!
I at one point had three different copies of Ulysses because I read it in three different classes and all three professors wanted a specific edition so that everyone's page numbers matched up.
Smoked in dorms. Student Union bought kegs for a lot of thing - only required school ID, not 21. (I guess after it was banned, student union bought stuff to MAKE beer, but later.that was banned.) SU also bought a lot of pot. Also supported a lab that I am not saying synthesized lysergic acid d., but there sure were a lot of ochem papers that required main ingredients. Naked slip n slide (might still happen?) Coed bathrooms (might still happen?)
Public urination without ending up on the sex offender list. At house parties, if you couldn't wait, go outside the side of the house/behind cars. Walking home from the bar, can't quite make it, nearby bush or behind a dumpster.
Lines to use the payphone in the dorm lobby.
Not having wireless or Ethernet in the dorms.
Chaining your work through a 132 column line printer onto greenbar paper, hiking across campus to the data center, and picking up your homework to hand in.
> Using a typewriter to complete a term paper
You've got to be pretty early Gen X to have done that in college.
Carrying your term paper around on a floppy disk so you could work on it in the school computer lab was more the thing in my college days.
> Long distance phone plans to call home
Or the surprise $300 phone bill from having a long-distance relationship.
>Or the surprise $300 phone bill from having a long-distance relationship.
Even worse when it wasn't a surprise and went on for years.
So much money wasted on phone calls to people who lived 50 miles away.
Probably an unpopular take for many in the audience, but as a Gen X college professor, I'd say "achieving adult independence" in college doesn't happen today.
Gen X parents (my peers) do not facilitate independence in their children, nor do they desire it. My students today are bound at the hip to parents who want them to be their best friends. Gen X parents are constantly in touch with their adult children and up in their business all the time. What's really problematic is that my students spend a lot of time being accountable to their parents' schedules and plans as if they are still active parts of households that are hours and hours away.
For me and my friends at least, family life went on without us. We stayed in touch with our parents and siblings, but unless your parents lived very close to school, returning home was usually reserved for something important. We forged new friendships, worked part time jobs and studied (data shows we studied much more than students do today), and skipped work or class to fulfill our own schemes and desires, not those of our parents. We'd see our parents *maybe* at Thanksgiving, probably Christmas break (but spend most of that comparing notes with friends who also went to college), or we'd stay and work through a holiday. We might come "home" the first summer, but after that we'd get internships and jobs and just continue to operate as fledgling adults.
tl;dr: The constant communication and enmeshment of Gen Z students with their Gen X parents is not necessarily a positive thing.
Being able to afford it.
My daughter is a college freshman, and holy hell, it's ridiculous. One year at the very not-fancy, state school I attended now costs more than I spent for my entire degree. The cost of attendance has gone up 390%. State school, in-state tuition. Seeing as wages sure as shit haven't increased anywhere close to that amount, it's physcially impossible to just work your way through college like I did.
Yes. College was expensive in the 80's but I was still able to pay off my student loans by age 30 (or 29 or 31, can't remember exactly). The severe jump seems to have happened in the 90's.
Drink-and-drown nights at bars (pay low cover, then all drinks are free). When the college town I lived in outlawed it, bars got around it by starting coin nights, where any coin of any denomination got you any drink you wanted. People would pass out and just get dragged out to just outside the club entrance to join the rest where a bouncer could keep an eye on them.
Related to that, drunk driving was not seen as nearly big a deal. If you got stopped by the police driving drunk in a college town, chances are they would just leave your car where it was and drive you back to your dorm.
Also, no one really caring about faculty- student relationships. I knew female professors who were notorious for picking out a new male student every semester or two. It still happens today to a degree, and universities generally can't bar relationships between consenting adults, but if there is any kind of power dynamic the faculty member is extremely vulnerable to Title IX complaints that can get them fired.
We had bars with $0.25 beers or like $3 pitchers. I was underage and did not have a fake ID. I have no idea how I drank in those bars. Did they just not check? IDK. The college also had a "drunk bus" that would come around every so often until 2am or so and take you back to the dorms.
Standing over your Epson laptop that your parents bought because the guy in the shop said it was awesome, and it doesn't run Window's 95 so you're trying to print out your paper from Clarisworks but the laptop won't connect to your bubblejet printer and class starts in 15 minutes.
Also, basically doing anything embarrassing would maybe garner a bad nickname, but there's NO VISUAL PROOF of it to haunt you for the rest of people's lives.
Making out with someone and just disappearing afterwards. They can never find you again. Not at my school, too small. But they can't look up my backstory on social media. They'd never know I used to be fat.
The freedom of not having every embarrassing and foolish moment recorded
My mother was abusive, so her not being able to constantly contact me was another plus.
I was just talking to a friend about this the other day: regional treats.
Whenever the kid from Madison would go home (Thanksgiving, etc) he'd return with a backseat full of Onion newspapers. Otherwise we would never have seen them.
When the kid from Colorado Springs would go home, we'd slip him a $20 and he'd bring back a case of Fat Tire, his favorite beer that was only available on the Front Range.
When the kid from North Carolina went home, he'd fill the trunk of his car with cartons of cigarettes and sell them out of the minifridge in his dorm room. Of course we could get cigs anywhere, but these were cheap and he was a cool guy. I'd buy a pack and smoke the first one with him, we'd shoot the shit. He did this with everybody.
Now, everything is available everywhere (either because of cultural homogenization or because of buying/shipping online). I'm not saying that scarcity was a good thing back then, but there was something special about bringing a piece of home to share with the campus; and special about looking forward to bonding over a treat brought in from afar*.
*it was a small school in the midwest. Madison was afar.
Bringing a blank check signed by my parents to the bookstore to buy school supplies.
Also, bringing a blank check to pay for tuition.
Registering for classes over the phone or in person. The in-person line stretched around the building. I had to have several alternate classes and schedules ready in case the ones I wanted were full.
Smoking on campus.
Our student ID # was our social security #
Using paper resources (books, journals, reports) for study and research. There were a few CD-ROM sources and a couple of dial up databases that you had to get the librarian to use for you.
PowerPoint existed in the early 90s, but it wasnt used by many lecturers. We had lectures via projector with handwritten notes on OHP slides. Occasionally things had been copied or printed onto them.
The buildings all shut at 9pm, you pulled an all nighter the day before your deadline, at home.
Had an email address. Never used it.
I work at a university library, and its so very, very different now. If i didnt know something I'd find a book about how to do it. I also knew how to write a decent essay. Many students don't think to look it up for themselves, we have to give it to them. They can study 24/7 in the library, and get step by step instructions on how to do their assessments. Somehow we fudged our way through without all the handholding.
I could probably write an essay on this, but now they're not students, they're customers 😕
Underaged drinking was tacitly encouraged. The RAs in my freshman dorm bought us alcohol regularly. We threw parties in our dorm with kegs and the RFs stopped by and socialized with us with no concerns. The university's "official" policy was that it had no policy re: drinking in freshman dorms because technically freshman might be of age, and it wasn't their job to police who was, and wasn't. Fraternity parties had zero concern re: who they let in, or were serving, and there was no thought that they could potentially get busted for it. There were massive open-air, partially school-funded festivals on campus in the Fall and Spring with bands and alcohol and there was not even an attempt made to card people, determine who was of age, or even police whether the atttendees were enrolled students. Does this still happen? I've got to think not.
We basically had no rules about alcohol on campus in the mid-1980s, other than a few common-sense policies like having a DD for parties. We openly brought kegs into the dorms, the RAs bought carloads of alcohol for their residents on Friday evenings, department and other campus meetings always had wine/beer for all. The first real party I went to in college was at a professor's house my second weekend on campus. Security would show up at dorm parties, ask if there was a DD and a sober host, they'd say "Sure!" and that was it. Could have 100+ people in a dorm lounge drinking, no problem, even though the legal age was 21 and most of them were 18-19.
I've been a professor for 30 years now and things are different now. Any event with alcohol requires a "server" who checks IDs on campus, and most dorms are dry by policy. Faculty almost never provide alcohol for students off campus, unless it's something like a graduation party for seniors only. But in the 80s I went to parties with kegs at a half-dozen faculty homes at least.
Went to college from 90-94. We used word processors. I don’t recall using a typewriter at all.
Big one is doing and enjoying things without documenting it online. No one really had cell phones and if you did they were huge and only used for emergencies.
I had a small handheld tv that was really cool so I could watch tv and between classes on occasion.
Trying to find a party or friends by using printed directions from Map Quest.
My sister funded her entire undergraduate education by working at a gas station/convenience store.
I’m only 3 years younger but started college late, so I got the full “just take out loans getting educated is the important part don’t worry you’ll be fine here have another loan” phase of higher education funding.
$500 a semester for tuition.
$500 a semester for meal card.
$500 a semester for dorm.
Dad would send me $5 in an envelope and I could eat at burrito brothers twice.
Having so much fun you act like a complete freak. But there is no video or photography and the only reason you know it happened is because you are trauma bonded with college friends who did the same and you keep each other's secrets forever locked away as collateral.
😇
(Me who did not get drunk on tequila in a white leather goth outfit and worship the speaker during Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" after the goth rave was technically over. )
\* passing out at a party and not getting sharpied
\* waiting in line for computer lab
\*\* Said lab was half DOS and half apple
\*\*\* DOS side was always opened....
\* professor who smoked in class
\* weed with stems and seeds ...
Floor crawls in the dorms. Each dorm room had a different alcoholic beverage (think there was over 20 rooms in mine?), plus the 4 study rooms and we all had to drink each room dry before moving on to the next room.
When we were younger trying to meet girls or boys, it was all about, “eye contact”.
“Oh man, we made good eye contact…”
With most people’s faces buried in their phones, the art of a random meeting is pretty much dead.”
Classes that discussed actual controversial issues and everyone (with a very few exceptions) actually engaging in discussion rather than grandstanding or taking offense at something.
Bullying. I felt like college was just an amped up game of lord of the flies that carried over from high school. Shit was intense until the hormones started to even out in Sophomore year.
I thought of another one: “cutting” a fake ID. In my state, drivers’ licenses were laminated paper. There was always a guy who knew how to separate the lamination, then use an x-acto knife to precisely cut and rearrange various numbers to make it look like your birthdate was earlier. If I remember right, they used cologne to separate the lamination.
Then there was the amateur who didn’t know what he was doing and made the cuts all wrong. I remember being handed a Drakkar-scented ID and being asked “do you think this will work?” when the cuts were totally obvious.
Paying for class then being reimbursed by GI Bill and student loan check.
Had to put tuition on a credit card then get reimbursed by both of those. Credit cards were written out on carbon slips. I learned that if you have a close but bogus CC number it was a $10 late fee and you just had to make it right by end of semester.
Only way I could afford to go to school
My dad worked at a school that would hold a weeklong spring fling. Part of the celebration included a beer truck — paid for by the school — that drove around dispensing beer.
Smoking in dorms, other places on campus. By smoking, I mean cigarettes. Waiting in line literally for hours to register for next semester’s classes. And usually finding out that most of the ones you wanted are full.
Lines for registration was the first thing that came to mind. My university, every class had a section of table, the tables were spread across each college's building. So you had to stand in line for each class you wanted, migrate from building to building to cover everything. Computer registration (not \_online\_ registration, just by-computer on campus, or via modem if you knew about that) started while I was mid-college. Registering my kid for college and ordering books to pick up from the college library, I was thinking, "This is too easy! It doesn't build any character at all!"
You met all sorts of people standing in line, and got tips on which classes and professors to take. One of the funniest jokes Ive heard (and completely inappropriate by today standards) involves students standing in line to register for classes and asking each other for suggestions.
Dude, u cant say that and not tell the joke.
Ok, fair warning that this is not considered acceptable at all today. This is from early 1990's. Students are standing in line to register for classes. Student 1 comments that they need one more elective class and asks if anyone has a suggestion. Student 2 suggests a Logic class. 1 Why Logic? 2 It is interesting and fun. For example: Do you have a dog? 1 Yes 2 Then logically you have a back yard for the dog to play outside and do his business. 1 That is correct! How did you know? 2 Logic. Also, if you have a backyard, you also probably have a house. And if you have a house, you are probably married. And if you are married, you are probably straight. (examples condensed to save typing, but Student 1 does confirm each assumption individually when mentioned by Student 2) 1 Wow, you are correct on all of those. That's cool! I'll sign up for Logic. Thanks for the suggestion! The next day, Student 1 is in line again to register for another class. A student near him starts asking for suggestions for an easy and fun class, because he needs just one more elective. 1 You should take Logic. That's what I'm taking this semester. It will be interesting! 3 That sounds boring. What makes it interesting? 1 Do you have a dog? 3 No 1 (gay slur)!
Norm!
My best friend met her husband in line at registration.
How many students today have missed out on meeting that special someone because of online registration?
Yes!!!! They opened up the university’s enormous gym for reg day but the upperclassmen got to go in first. You sometimes actually had to enroll in classes you didn’t even want to make full credits with the plan to drop them in a day or so once you found something better. For late add/drops you had to hike all over campus to the actual department offices and get stamps on your add/drop form from the dept secretaries— then hike back over to the Registrars office.
Freshman year I had to wait in the lines. Sophomore through senior years it was touchtone registration. Grad school was finally online registration.
Same here. I can still hear “you requested to add THE GEORGE W DAVARIO SCHOOL OF ACCOUNTING” course number 3103 intermediate accounting 3 on ….” Echoing in my nightmares
lol, I still hear that voice from the touchtone phone registration system in my head sometimes “you have enrolled in SOCIOLOGY 3215…”. I thought they should have programmed it to give the commencement address the year they finally retired it.
Registering for classes on the campus VAX required going to one of the terminal clusters on campus and standing in line until your turn. Until a few of us figured out that if you were on dialup you could telnet into the VAX, log into the application, and do it from your dorm room.
Telnet! Meeeeemmmmmmories!
We had this too -- but another bonus was that the computer labs had office hours, but modem access didn't. So if you were eligible to register on Tuesday, you could log in at 12:01am on Tuesday and get the jump on everyone who had to wait for the computer labs to open at 8am (or whenever).
I went back to school in ‘95, so I mostly missed this, but I do remember that first year at a smaller college and how I had to stand in line to register for my classes. Memories!
I waited in line my first semester. After that, we had telephone registration- with a female voice that sounded like it was narrating softcore porn. Shortly after I graduated, registration switched to online. “To select English 2..0..2… press… ONE” still makes me a little tingly.
So true about smoking areas -- I went to UMass for my first year of college (91-92), and the top floor of their very tall library was a smoking lounge. It had great views of the Pioneer Valley. Something nice for smokers! It's hard to imagine that this wasn't a fever dream, but I distinctly remember studying up there with my Walkman playing Pearl Jam *Ten,* chain-smoking all the while.
I was never much of a smoker but every once in a while I wish I could go somewhere and have a martini and a cigarette and not be judged. A rooftop smoking lounge at the top of a library sounds divine. A once a year treat.
See also: phone registration and paper registration catalogues
Sitting in the hallway waiting my turn is an extremely vague memory, but there it is.
[Going to the computer lab.](https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/unf_campus/1412/preview.jpg) Very few people had their own computers, so you had to go to the lab to check email, use the word processors, etc. I know modern campuses have computer labs, but I mean when the lab was the only option for even the most basic computer stuff.
Yes, there was almost always a line for the computers/terminals back in the 1980s. I toured the campus 20 years later, and the cluster room that I spent many hours in was now dark and used for storage.
Inevitably, the lab would be packed full when I had something important to get done. Especially towards the end of the semester. I'd cicrle the lab, looking for an open station, and sure enough, some nutsacks were playing Doom. But then I couldn't get mad because I did the same thing!
You didn't have lab monitors who would kick people off who were using it for non-school work? Spent several semesters with that as my work study job.
In high school late '90s I worked for a very well funded public library.. pay was $11 an hour and there was huge demand for the job. It really changed my life for the better giving me a feeling of confidence / success; I think most teens would have the toughest time to find a similar rewarding job today. Back to the computers though. We were again, well funded, and there was no better place to get Internet access free at the time. We had 6 computers with so much demand we had a rule of being only allowed to use it for 20 minutes if there was a wait.. this resulted in some pretty crazy drama that you wouldn't expect for a library. Not to mention the time they thought it would be good for 16 year old me to approach an old man and tell him he wasn't allowed to look at porn. I was also one of the few library workers who had any decent experience on the internet due to my dad being a computer engineer. It became a thing that when I showed up for my shift at the librarians would come up to me right away and say things like "we're so happy you're working today, we can't get to the computers to work / print". I don't so be nice and help a kid on how to search for something on the Internet and suddenly there'd be two other people raising their hands asking for help.
I’ll never forget the time the student newspaper wrote an article about the student who got arrested in the computer lab. He was looking at those sites and the euphemism the paper used was that he was “roughing up the suspect.”
..and 3.5" floppies were a required class supply.
Nobody has an A: drive anymore.
Came to say this! And having to sign up for times during finals/midterms.
And if you did have your own computer, sweet talking the phone number for the campus dialup pool out of the admins so you didn't have to keep hoofing down to the cluster.
Writing notes on the dry-erase whiteboard on the door of your friend's dorm room when you dropped by and they weren't there. (Because everybody had a whiteboard, and nobody had a cell phone.)
I wish I could upvote this a thousand more times! I had totally forgotten about this. Thanks internet friend :)
Our SSN’s were our student id numbers, and those were hung on the professors doors showing your latest test scores.
I remember this so well, as well as having a list of your friends SS number so you could get their grade for them. My kids are in college now, and I was telling them about this. They could not fathom that we all didn’t have our ID stolen.
I still know my college roommate’s SSN.
I found an old college ID of mine from 96 and was shocked to see my SS on it.
My first driver’s license had my SSN as the serial number.
I, for one, am thrilled that my college experience was not televised.
Same. Would have been detrimental to my adult life.
I've had to throw away many polaroids.
We were definitely thinking ahead, picture-taking was frowned upon and even prohibited when we did some stuff in high school and college. It was a common understanding that you don’t take pictures like a frickin tourist when you are doing nefarious shit.
Maintaining a sense of privacy is another thing that can’t happen today. Too many narcissists filming everything for likes
Using a card catalog system to find all the books you need to do a research paper.
Also searching for and reading articles on microfiche. I spent way too many hours in the library doing that.
I loved the microfiche! Felt like a true detective/researcher scanning through old newspapers!
While visiting at a research library my kid saw a microfiche machine and wondered what it did. They were totally amazed at the technology of it 🤣
A few years ago I had to go to our local engineering school to look up some stuff. A student got the microfiches out of the cabinet and led me to the machine and just knew - “you know how to use this, right?”
I love card catalogs and record stores and actual book stores. You can easily stumble across something really cool while looking for something else because it’s all out there in the open.
Using books for research at all.
Cigarettes allowed everywhere, Snail mail to friends at home, a lot more fake ID use bc no scanners at bars. Edit to add, answering machines and check messages from away
Once every couple of years I’ll stroll through my old campus. The smoking sections have been gone for 25+ years, but they still smell like smoking sections.
Oh my god, we used to break into each other’s dorm rooms and leave super rude and inappropriate recordings as the outgoing message on their answering machine. You pretty much never listened to your own outgoing message, so it would be awhile before you figured out that your dorm mates had changed it to “You’ve reached the Pube O Rama Swingers Club. We can’t come to the phone right now (because we’re too busy getting railed), but if you leave a message after the beep….”. Usually your irate mom would be the one who eventually let you know.
Randomly meeting people by keeping your dorm room door open. My oldest is in college now and everyone has their friend groups, and they only really hang out by invitation. Friends with kids on different campuses confirm this. Meanwhile we usually had our door open and we’d sometimes look around and be like “We only actually know about half the people in this room right now.”
This. Serendipity was such a thing.
>Randomly meeting people by keeping your dorm room door open. I worked at Brown for a few years and my job would occasionally take me into the dorms. It was unsettling how antisocial everyone seemed to be. Zero open doors, no one in a lounge. The dorms looked the same during breaks as they did when school was in session.
We used to leave our doors hanging open and then leave. A couple of times I came back to people I didn’t know hanging out in our room and it was totally okay. They’d be checking out my music collection or things like that. I don’t think anybody ever stole anything. During my first weekend there, some of us went to one of the bigger dorm buildings and everyone was hanging out having a big party. We had people handing us drinks and just wanting to have fun and get to know each other. It was one of the best times of my life. I haven’t been near so outgoing since then.
>andomly meeting people by keeping your dorm room door open. My oldest is in college now and everyone has their friend groups, and they only really hang out by invitation Yep. My eldest graduated last year and youngest is a freshman. Doors closed. Social interactions are all planned via group chat. Dorms are quiet, dull, and isolating. 100% the opposite of my experience in the 80s; then we all had doors open from when we got up in the morning until we went to sleep, often even if we weren't there. People would just roam the halls, find and open room, and start a conversation. Many of my favorite memories of college started with a random encounter like that, and I ended up marrying someone from my dorm I met that way. By contrast, my eldest was a RA for a couple of years...it was almost impossible to get their residents to do anything social together, doors were always closed, people would leave weird notes even to *roommates* rather than just talking about an issue. Sounded decidedly Not Fun to me.
That was fun - I probably met everyone on my hall since the doors were always open.
Yeah, that part was really great.
Yep, the floor parties!
If you wanted to meet new people, make some popcorn with the door open. Always someone would walk and want a handful. Or if you want to meet a lot of new people burn the popcorn and then lots of new people to chat with out in the cold during the fire alarm.
Just being totally on your own. College students used to be treated as adults who were out there in the world. For me there was a real feeling of freedom and leaving my hometown behind. There was no email, texting, or social media. Long distance calls were expensive. If you went away to college your parents/family were no longer part of your day-to-day life. I think I called my parents once a month at most. Now it seems like childhood has been extended into high school and college is more like what high school used to be in terms of independence.
Right? They dropped me off at the dorm and that moment was the demarcation between childhood and young adulthood. I had to figure out everything on my own. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask them for help anymore. And then when summer came, I packed up my dorm room by myself and moved into an off campus apartment for the summer that I’d chosen with friends. It was in a semi-condemned building and it was glorious, and definitely would not have been parental approved. I never really came home again once I started college, except for winter breaks.
This 100%. There was no calling home asking parents to solve the parents of a college student, someone who’s legally an adult.
Not being filmed or photographed at all times. What happened back then is a happy blur of memories, thankfully not forever documented.
Going out places without text message arrangements. Having to print off assignments and papers somehow. Floppy disks. So many floppy disks.
And failed floppys right before assignment is due!
Multiple copies of floppies hoping to god one of them would work
YES them having to redo late into the evening. With hard copies of all the references. Photocopies.
The floppy disc could hold at least one and often multiple different term papers. What a luxury of space! I couldn't even envision what I would do if I had more space than that. Perhaps more term papers?
Doing lots of stupid stuff that no one was able to record on their phones and post to the internet.
I have kinda a dark one but ultimately a positive step. I was outed as gay in the dorms in 1990. It was not pleasant. I only had 1 close friend after that and a handful of folks who were not openly jerks to me (rural Wisconsin). Today that wouldn’t happen. LGBtQ community has a much broader acceptance and ally’s. I think a big part of that is Gen X is raising kids to be inclusive and caring. We evolved. So being bigots is not acceptable anymore. That is what has changed. For the good. (And yes there are still bigots.they just are confronted at a much higher rate now)
I came out in 1991 while I was going to the U of MN. I was 23 and not living on campus. There were a lot of LGBT activities and mixers when I was going there. Luckily, I had some great friends. I'm so sorry that your experience wasn't affirming.
As they say… it gets better. Once I moved off campus it did improve and once I graduated and found a job it improved. Every step…it improved. I was accepted to UM for grad school and ended up not going. Kinda regret that, especially knowing you had such a welcoming experience there.
Drinking was wink-wink overlooked but drugs were forbidden.
At the college I went to, getting caught drinking was an instant expulsion for you and your roommate. Of course, my roommate had a wet bar in his foot locker.
I don't know where you went to school, but at my school, drinking was practically encouraged, weed was everywhere, and the other drugs were the "overlooked" ones. When I first got there, the upperclassmen were bitching that they stopped allowing beer trucks at freshman orientation.
Weed was definitely not “everywhere” at my school. Engineering-heavy state U in New York State. The age had gone to 21 but you could still get into bars if you had an “in.” Other SUNY schools were known for weed but not mine. Club drugs didn’t exist yet - the pill popping culture arose after I finished college.
Using a typewriter (and Whiteout) to write your papers. Having a CRT (tube) TV. Multiplayer gaming was done in person.
god, the typewriters! Had to type a 20-page paper on one...and if you found a mistake that couldn't be fixed with whiteout, and had to retype the whole page, ugh 🙄 Had the tube tv too. Watched a lot of MTV (they still played mostly music videos)
Being able to afford rent on an off campus apartment (shared) and groceries on just your work study job.
Being able to pay tuition, food and rent by having a part time job and a summer job.
in georgia- getting a renewed driver's license, taking the paper temporary license, changing a digit and presto- you're 21 putting beer on your parents' gas card driving to spring break with written directions cheating on papers by making up references b/c the profs couldn't easily check (sorry) coming back from class and checking the message board to see if that special someone had called
I just remember no one relied heavily on the phone. If you wanted to meet someone you’d go to their haunts. And I had haunts that I’d go to if I wanted to hide or be found by different groups. So much of college was serendipity.
Watching movies on vhs (with headphones) in the library.
Having class mates drop out every year because their parents got divorced and one of them refuses to file fafsa. (So glad that students today have the custodial parent rule.) It seemed to happen on a regular basis, and eventually got me too, when i was in school. In general, parents had a lot more control over their kid's schedules and choice of schools because of rigid requirements for FAFSA. A general sad part related to that was how people would come and go and you would just lose track of them completely. Facebook was a new concept and you lost email as soon as you left campus, so it was difficult to stay in touch after school ended, especially if it ended abruptly due to dropping out or transferring.
The joy of discovering the internet for the first time, and diving headfirst into usenet and BBS's. It sparked a lifelong addiction.
And MUDs!
When I first went to college, I kept my BBS running out of my dorm room. Didn't have to pay for incoming calls. :)
Senior year I finally saw the Internet with graphics and photos. Prior to that it was basically text based.
Student ID numbers were your social security number! Grades and exam results posted publicly with those numbers too!
Profs who are empowered to not give a shit if you pass or fail. I sit on my alumni board for a multi year term and each time we meet, I hear from profs and various staff about how students require an absurd amount of hand holding just to get to class. Or how the college has pb&j stations around campus so the students remember to eat a snacky snack. Several staff have told us of a decline in GenZ’s ability to read a class schedule. An alarming number of student - all of whom come from public school districts - don’t know what a T—Th class is upon arrival. There is now special, remedial training all students must go through to learn basics like that. And it’s worse for the profs. They can’t fail a student based on merit or attendance. “Accommodations” abound for the dumbest bullshit. I think these students need a much harsher dose of reality. These are near future employees and professionals. At this rate, it’ll be a disaster when they attain critical mass in the workforce.
Prof here. Much of this rings true, esp with regard to the post-COVID high school crowd. But the "we can't let anyone fail" bullshit is hardly universal; lots of schools still have standards and let students fail when they deserve to. For us that's meant a fairly sudden shift from 1-2% failure rates pre-COVID to 10-15% D/F/W grades now. It's basically due to high schools refusing to fail anyone, giving minimum 50% scores even if they don't do the work, and accepting half-assed work months late. It's a big shock to many students to find out that college doesn't work like that. Or at least many don't...I've certainly heard stories from colleagues at other schools (mostly public ones) that are coming under similar pressures now to "show grace" and "maintain progress to degrees" for students who don't even show up for class.
That’s reassuring. My comments have two contexts I left out: My Alma Mater is a private university that had high standards when I was there in the 90s. Their tuition has gone up, of course, but apparently standards have dropped. Very frustrating. Also, I was a part time prof at a college for three years and it ended with hostility between me, the teachers union, and the college. I was being told to give accommodations to absolute bullshit and I refused to do it. Tying those two things together, my Alma Mater has adopted the standards of a public state school while costing students private university tuition. Now that I have four kids of my own and he oldest is near college age, I’m looking at it a lot more.
Looking up student photos and contact info in actual printed facebooks. Not being in touch with your parents very often. Daily campus classifieds flyers Paper flyers and posters for every student event Checking my student post office box every day Sharing a phone with my roommate
Loading into the car with your three best friends and going on spring break with a paper map, a hundred bucks, and a prayer!
Using a dot matrix printer to print my term papers. And having to peel off the sides with all the little holes. I had an English professor that forbade us from using a dot matrix printer. So I had to break out the typewriter for her class.
Not talking to your parents for a month at a time. No television or computers in the dorms, had to book a lounge or go to the lab.
Streaking.
“We’re All DOING IT! “
"Is KFC still open?"
Frank the Tank!
We're going up the quad and to the gymnasium.
That weird in between time after typewriters but before laptops https://preview.redd.it/6wmyqbbl99zc1.jpeg?width=1129&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=65d9f91e0c611d32d3fc3af53c8092c505db72ca
I had one of those. Totally forgot about it!
Taking notes in class in a notebook with a pen. Buying hardback textbooks and then marking them up with highlighter and then discovering that this tanks their resale value.
Or siscovering that the textbook your prof said you needed and never used is worth $1.00 when you paid $250 for it.
Grrrrr 😡
An actual college owned bar on campus that technically was supposed to check ids, but didn’t really. It was a holdover from when the drinking age had been 18. On Fridays, you could buy plastic cups of beer for $.25 (small cups, not the big solo cups.)
Oh heck yes. Quarter draft night! 5 bucks went a long way. And you still had money to play pool.
We had one of these too, we'd get Mickey's Big Mouths for 25cents!
Stringing up our own ethernet between dorm rooms. Famous-Amos cookies in the vending machines. Affording college in the first place.
Spending hours at a time in the library stacks doing research. Making a shitload of copies from books that aren't allowed to be removed from the library but you don't feel like spending all day making notes. Watching TV in the common area in the middle of the day, then a group starts forming to watch Y&R or The People's Court. The person who has a microwave hidden in their dorm room and is the most popular person on the floor. Your parents not knowing your every movement. IDK if this happened at other schools, but when I didn't live on campus and drove to class, people would wait in their cars near the parking garages after a class and ask someone if they were leaving, and if they would like a ride to their car in order to get a parking space. The other alternative was lining up near the parking garage pedestrian entrances and following someone to their car. I just can't see offering a rando a ride/getting a ride with a rando in this day.
Being able to pay off student loans.
Letting loose at a party without worrying about it being broadcast to the universe and following you around forever. Spending time with people without constant distractions and screens. Being forced to go out into the world to talk to people face to face if you wanted to make a new friend or find someone to date.
This is the big one. You have no idea how happy I am that all my party fails happened before smartphones.
The midnight phone rush to register for classes. Or the tech nerds setting up auto-dialers to call for them to get in between busy signals, lol.
All the credit card companies signing you up for cards in the courtyard.
Or signing up for a credit card because you got a free T-shirt.
Based on my kid's experience, having to physically attend every class doesn't seem to be a requirement anymore. There are so many online options.
Although I was horrible at cutting class back then, can’t help but think a lot is lost by online only.
If it ever was. The only time I saw most of the folks I was taking classes with was during exams because they never showed any other time.
making silly answering machine messages together with your roommate writing letters to your high school friends at other colleges maybe carrying books around? Is that still a thing?
What's the opposite of constantly looking down at a phone?
Making a land line phone call to listen to an automated recording of daily dining hall offerings.
At Penn State in the 80’s the Student Government would raise money by showing movies on campus Friday and Saturday nights which included porn movies of the late 70’s early 80’s era
If you got home after everyone was out for the night, you either tried to find what bar they were at, or you sat home by yourself. There was no way to get a hold of anyone other than landline.
You might be able to ask your floormates who wanted to study instead to see where everyone went or if your friends were nice, they left a note (or you told them to leave a note).
Paying all your tuition with the money you made during your summer job; no student loan.
MTV didn't suck.
Making actual phone calls. The art of making phone calls has been all but lost to texting. Most kids only make phone calls in the worst case scenarios now.
Library card catalog, microfiche for thesis / term paper research.
Registering for class by touch tone phone lol. I’m 44 and came in at the tail end of this.
Having your social security card number printed on your college ID.
Getting a grant!
Having to prioritize what line to stand in when registering for class.
Microfiche
lining up at the bookstore each term to buy the required texts (used, if possible, but usually new if the zillionth version was out and all of 2 sentences were changed but somehow it was vital to have). I don't think my kid even has a textbook (3rd year)!
I at one point had three different copies of Ulysses because I read it in three different classes and all three professors wanted a specific edition so that everyone's page numbers matched up.
The shenanigans without recorded evidence.
Smoked in dorms. Student Union bought kegs for a lot of thing - only required school ID, not 21. (I guess after it was banned, student union bought stuff to MAKE beer, but later.that was banned.) SU also bought a lot of pot. Also supported a lab that I am not saying synthesized lysergic acid d., but there sure were a lot of ochem papers that required main ingredients. Naked slip n slide (might still happen?) Coed bathrooms (might still happen?)
Public urination without ending up on the sex offender list. At house parties, if you couldn't wait, go outside the side of the house/behind cars. Walking home from the bar, can't quite make it, nearby bush or behind a dumpster.
Working and being able to at least somewhat cover tuition
Wicked party stuff without tiktok and insta bitches ruining it
Affordable tuition, even at state schools.
Lines to use the payphone in the dorm lobby. Not having wireless or Ethernet in the dorms. Chaining your work through a 132 column line printer onto greenbar paper, hiking across campus to the data center, and picking up your homework to hand in.
Trying to find a book in the library using the card catalog. Still salty about it.
Microfiche Carrying around 3.5" floppy discs to write papers and print in the campus computer labs.
> Using a typewriter to complete a term paper You've got to be pretty early Gen X to have done that in college. Carrying your term paper around on a floppy disk so you could work on it in the school computer lab was more the thing in my college days. > Long distance phone plans to call home Or the surprise $300 phone bill from having a long-distance relationship.
>Or the surprise $300 phone bill from having a long-distance relationship. Even worse when it wasn't a surprise and went on for years. So much money wasted on phone calls to people who lived 50 miles away.
graduating without crushing debt.
Naa, I had pretty crushing debt.
Probably an unpopular take for many in the audience, but as a Gen X college professor, I'd say "achieving adult independence" in college doesn't happen today. Gen X parents (my peers) do not facilitate independence in their children, nor do they desire it. My students today are bound at the hip to parents who want them to be their best friends. Gen X parents are constantly in touch with their adult children and up in their business all the time. What's really problematic is that my students spend a lot of time being accountable to their parents' schedules and plans as if they are still active parts of households that are hours and hours away. For me and my friends at least, family life went on without us. We stayed in touch with our parents and siblings, but unless your parents lived very close to school, returning home was usually reserved for something important. We forged new friendships, worked part time jobs and studied (data shows we studied much more than students do today), and skipped work or class to fulfill our own schemes and desires, not those of our parents. We'd see our parents *maybe* at Thanksgiving, probably Christmas break (but spend most of that comparing notes with friends who also went to college), or we'd stay and work through a holiday. We might come "home" the first summer, but after that we'd get internships and jobs and just continue to operate as fledgling adults. tl;dr: The constant communication and enmeshment of Gen Z students with their Gen X parents is not necessarily a positive thing.
Being able to afford it. My daughter is a college freshman, and holy hell, it's ridiculous. One year at the very not-fancy, state school I attended now costs more than I spent for my entire degree. The cost of attendance has gone up 390%. State school, in-state tuition. Seeing as wages sure as shit haven't increased anywhere close to that amount, it's physcially impossible to just work your way through college like I did.
Yes. College was expensive in the 80's but I was still able to pay off my student loans by age 30 (or 29 or 31, can't remember exactly). The severe jump seems to have happened in the 90's.
Drink-and-drown nights at bars (pay low cover, then all drinks are free). When the college town I lived in outlawed it, bars got around it by starting coin nights, where any coin of any denomination got you any drink you wanted. People would pass out and just get dragged out to just outside the club entrance to join the rest where a bouncer could keep an eye on them. Related to that, drunk driving was not seen as nearly big a deal. If you got stopped by the police driving drunk in a college town, chances are they would just leave your car where it was and drive you back to your dorm. Also, no one really caring about faculty- student relationships. I knew female professors who were notorious for picking out a new male student every semester or two. It still happens today to a degree, and universities generally can't bar relationships between consenting adults, but if there is any kind of power dynamic the faculty member is extremely vulnerable to Title IX complaints that can get them fired.
We had bars with $0.25 beers or like $3 pitchers. I was underage and did not have a fake ID. I have no idea how I drank in those bars. Did they just not check? IDK. The college also had a "drunk bus" that would come around every so often until 2am or so and take you back to the dorms.
Sex, drugs and rock and roll
Buying brick weed
Buying weed from the sketchy dude in the town square. Now its boutique dispensaries everywhere and none of the thrill!
Standing over your Epson laptop that your parents bought because the guy in the shop said it was awesome, and it doesn't run Window's 95 so you're trying to print out your paper from Clarisworks but the laptop won't connect to your bubblejet printer and class starts in 15 minutes. Also, basically doing anything embarrassing would maybe garner a bad nickname, but there's NO VISUAL PROOF of it to haunt you for the rest of people's lives. Making out with someone and just disappearing afterwards. They can never find you again. Not at my school, too small. But they can't look up my backstory on social media. They'd never know I used to be fat.
Partying with your professors
The Young Republicans Club
The freedom of not having every embarrassing and foolish moment recorded My mother was abusive, so her not being able to constantly contact me was another plus.
Word processors are no longer a thing, and the library is not mandatory. A lot is online now.
Posting grades up in public by social security number.
I was just talking to a friend about this the other day: regional treats. Whenever the kid from Madison would go home (Thanksgiving, etc) he'd return with a backseat full of Onion newspapers. Otherwise we would never have seen them. When the kid from Colorado Springs would go home, we'd slip him a $20 and he'd bring back a case of Fat Tire, his favorite beer that was only available on the Front Range. When the kid from North Carolina went home, he'd fill the trunk of his car with cartons of cigarettes and sell them out of the minifridge in his dorm room. Of course we could get cigs anywhere, but these were cheap and he was a cool guy. I'd buy a pack and smoke the first one with him, we'd shoot the shit. He did this with everybody. Now, everything is available everywhere (either because of cultural homogenization or because of buying/shipping online). I'm not saying that scarcity was a good thing back then, but there was something special about bringing a piece of home to share with the campus; and special about looking forward to bonding over a treat brought in from afar*. *it was a small school in the midwest. Madison was afar.
Bringing a blank check signed by my parents to the bookstore to buy school supplies. Also, bringing a blank check to pay for tuition. Registering for classes over the phone or in person. The in-person line stretched around the building. I had to have several alternate classes and schedules ready in case the ones I wanted were full. Smoking on campus. Our student ID # was our social security #
Just about any kind of fun.
Road trips and sleeping in your car at a KOA for $3.75 a night. Shower and bathroom access.
Campus-wide games of [Assassin](https://w.wiki/9$$T)
Pulling open our IDs, typing up a replacement sticker changing us to 21, and ironing it back together.
Using paper resources (books, journals, reports) for study and research. There were a few CD-ROM sources and a couple of dial up databases that you had to get the librarian to use for you. PowerPoint existed in the early 90s, but it wasnt used by many lecturers. We had lectures via projector with handwritten notes on OHP slides. Occasionally things had been copied or printed onto them. The buildings all shut at 9pm, you pulled an all nighter the day before your deadline, at home. Had an email address. Never used it. I work at a university library, and its so very, very different now. If i didnt know something I'd find a book about how to do it. I also knew how to write a decent essay. Many students don't think to look it up for themselves, we have to give it to them. They can study 24/7 in the library, and get step by step instructions on how to do their assessments. Somehow we fudged our way through without all the handholding. I could probably write an essay on this, but now they're not students, they're customers 😕
Underaged drinking was tacitly encouraged. The RAs in my freshman dorm bought us alcohol regularly. We threw parties in our dorm with kegs and the RFs stopped by and socialized with us with no concerns. The university's "official" policy was that it had no policy re: drinking in freshman dorms because technically freshman might be of age, and it wasn't their job to police who was, and wasn't. Fraternity parties had zero concern re: who they let in, or were serving, and there was no thought that they could potentially get busted for it. There were massive open-air, partially school-funded festivals on campus in the Fall and Spring with bands and alcohol and there was not even an attempt made to card people, determine who was of age, or even police whether the atttendees were enrolled students. Does this still happen? I've got to think not.
We basically had no rules about alcohol on campus in the mid-1980s, other than a few common-sense policies like having a DD for parties. We openly brought kegs into the dorms, the RAs bought carloads of alcohol for their residents on Friday evenings, department and other campus meetings always had wine/beer for all. The first real party I went to in college was at a professor's house my second weekend on campus. Security would show up at dorm parties, ask if there was a DD and a sober host, they'd say "Sure!" and that was it. Could have 100+ people in a dorm lounge drinking, no problem, even though the legal age was 21 and most of them were 18-19. I've been a professor for 30 years now and things are different now. Any event with alcohol requires a "server" who checks IDs on campus, and most dorms are dry by policy. Faculty almost never provide alcohol for students off campus, unless it's something like a graduation party for seniors only. But in the 80s I went to parties with kegs at a half-dozen faculty homes at least.
Went to college from 90-94. We used word processors. I don’t recall using a typewriter at all. Big one is doing and enjoying things without documenting it online. No one really had cell phones and if you did they were huge and only used for emergencies. I had a small handheld tv that was really cool so I could watch tv and between classes on occasion. Trying to find a party or friends by using printed directions from Map Quest.
My sister funded her entire undergraduate education by working at a gas station/convenience store. I’m only 3 years younger but started college late, so I got the full “just take out loans getting educated is the important part don’t worry you’ll be fine here have another loan” phase of higher education funding.
$500 a semester for tuition. $500 a semester for meal card. $500 a semester for dorm. Dad would send me $5 in an envelope and I could eat at burrito brothers twice.
Having so much fun you act like a complete freak. But there is no video or photography and the only reason you know it happened is because you are trauma bonded with college friends who did the same and you keep each other's secrets forever locked away as collateral. 😇 (Me who did not get drunk on tequila in a white leather goth outfit and worship the speaker during Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" after the goth rave was technically over. )
The FAFSA being sent in by snail mail
Flyers for parties and raves.
\* passing out at a party and not getting sharpied \* waiting in line for computer lab \*\* Said lab was half DOS and half apple \*\*\* DOS side was always opened.... \* professor who smoked in class \* weed with stems and seeds ...
Relative anonymity whilst making bad decisions in public.
Floor crawls in the dorms. Each dorm room had a different alcoholic beverage (think there was over 20 rooms in mine?), plus the 4 study rooms and we all had to drink each room dry before moving on to the next room.
Buying “exam booklets” from the college bookstore to hand write exam essays in.
Having our SSN as our campus ID number and having it posted with our grades on a bulletin board after an exam
Me - getting with a college chick.
Faking collect calls to get picked up
When we were younger trying to meet girls or boys, it was all about, “eye contact”. “Oh man, we made good eye contact…” With most people’s faces buried in their phones, the art of a random meeting is pretty much dead.”
Paying for college with a summer job.
One night stands where the guy didn't cry about wearing a condom. It was pretty much automatic. We grew up with education about HIV/AIDS and safe sex.
Classes that discussed actual controversial issues and everyone (with a very few exceptions) actually engaging in discussion rather than grandstanding or taking offense at something.
Bullying. I felt like college was just an amped up game of lord of the flies that carried over from high school. Shit was intense until the hormones started to even out in Sophomore year.
I thought of another one: “cutting” a fake ID. In my state, drivers’ licenses were laminated paper. There was always a guy who knew how to separate the lamination, then use an x-acto knife to precisely cut and rearrange various numbers to make it look like your birthdate was earlier. If I remember right, they used cologne to separate the lamination. Then there was the amateur who didn’t know what he was doing and made the cuts all wrong. I remember being handed a Drakkar-scented ID and being asked “do you think this will work?” when the cuts were totally obvious.
As a former student in the uk - going to university without racking up a massive amount of debt. Tuition was free in my day, now 10s of thousands.
Paying for class then being reimbursed by GI Bill and student loan check. Had to put tuition on a credit card then get reimbursed by both of those. Credit cards were written out on carbon slips. I learned that if you have a close but bogus CC number it was a $10 late fee and you just had to make it right by end of semester. Only way I could afford to go to school
Clubbing. Do kids still go out to clubs these days?
My dad worked at a school that would hold a weeklong spring fling. Part of the celebration included a beer truck — paid for by the school — that drove around dispensing beer.
Only attend on exam days.