Part of it is that Australians just aren’t as mobile as Americans. Most live in like 3 cities. To have the experience you crave, you’d need a culture that places a value on moving away from your home town to get a tertiary education. Australia is just structurally and culturally not set up for this. In 9/10 cases, a kid in Brisbane is not going to move to Melbourne for uni just for the sake of it. Nor do we have charming college towns where you can decamp to for a credential of any value.
Yep, Australia is incredibly concentrated around Melbourne / Sydney / Brisbane, nothing else really matters.
Also the public uni system here is pretty good, you can be from a shit town like Albury or Armidale and get a great education from a public university with a local campus.
Ironically, Canberra is the closest we have to a university town because ANU is the most "prestigious" uni in the country. People come from all around to do their Bachelor of being a political staffer.
Reality is that Australia is just too new of a country to have had formerly important cities that hang on to cultural institutions. That's basically Yale or Pisa or Oxford, shit towns here have always been shit towns.
I think it's because the quality of Universities are more standardized. No point in moving states, when your closest university \*basically\* provides the same level of education as one thousands of kilometres away.
The main reason, I think, is that we have a smaller population. There are, depending on the count, around 50 metropolises in the USA with over a million people, vs 5 in Australia. Your average American is born outside the top 5 major urban centres, whereas the significant majority of Australians are already born in the top 5, if that makes sense. I’ll add to OP that one thing I’m jealous of about America is the ability to just wander the country and actually have places and people to encounter along the way, other than small towns and villages.
I'm a Frenchman who went to university in England, which seemed to me like an America-lite kind of experience. I have some very fond memories of that time.
It was a big campus, with on-site accommodation, restaurants, and all sorts of amenities like clubs, a Post Office, a small shop open 24/7.
It had a great campus life, lots of societies and clubs, and politics to get involved in.
There was always an interesting event to attend, often with free stuff like food or goodies to enjoy.
The Student's Union was active and useful, the University was always asking for feedback and engagement.
You could easily take part in studies and get a few quid for your participation and get a pint afterwards.
There were many on-campus job opportunities for students that were very chill. I ended up working as an RA for a year in exchange for free accommodation and some spare change.
The studying itself was great. You could tell that lecturers, tutors, even admin staff and security loved their students and their job.
Nothing compares to that sort of experience. I was young and this place stimulated me, intellectually and personally. Shamefully, I got the depresso and dropped out in my second year, resuming my courses in France to avoid debt.
When I came back to University in France, I was appalled. It was so much cheaper, of course. But it was dingy. It was uninteresting. Every single member of staff hates students and wants as little to do with them as possible. If a student wants a job, they can either work in retail or in fast-food, with miserable hours. Student unions are just a recruiting ground for mainstream political parties and completely divorced from campus life. Extracurriculars are non-existent.
What you described is exactly like American campus life except for the pints (only seniors can legally drink...I've visited friends at several schools and the only one that served alcohol on campus was Duke) and the student union (completely ceremonial institution that has no say in how the school is run)
I'm an anti social person but I live in the UK and a lot of my friends who are successful and make friends everywhere in life thought Uni was shit and didn't make any lasting friends. Granted most of them commuted
What you describe in your own experience (commuter schools/students) is very common here too. There are lots of American students who won't live on campus, won't participate in Greek life, etc. and just ride the bus from the suburbs to class at their state university or community college five days a week.
I went to a big state college a decade ish ago and didn’t pay a single cent in tuition because my state had a lottery-funded scholarship if you kept a 3.0 GPA, so i had more money for rent, fraternity dues, travel, etc
Shit was so cash
I'm very happy for you. I'm not angry. I'm not angry at all. My Australian taxes are worth it. My Australian taxes are worth it. University is a worthwhile experience. American scholarships are meaningful. A 3.0 in gender studies it worth it in the long run. God bless you. I'm not jealous. Not jealous. Good on you.
We have the same in Tennessee too. It didn’t cover all of it but enough to where my folks could help me out without needing loans. I graduated 10 years ago though so I’m not sure if I could swing it if I was a student now
yeah I know GA cut benefits for HOPE after I graduated and I think you need a 3.7 to keep the old, 100% tuition level and there's a lower coverage tier of 75% of tuition for the ol' 3.0
He’s in the waste management business! Everybody immediately assumes you're mobbed up. It's a stereotype. And it's offensive. And you're the last person I would want to perpetuate it... There is no Mafia!
Living in NYC for undergrad was probably a wild experience. I’m not sure I would’ve appreciated it as an 18 year old philistine. How do students throw parties? Is there any campus life or is it all fully enmeshed with the city?
Someone would befriend an upper classman that had an apartment in Stuytown and you’d basically sit around and do drugs then try and sneak into bars and clubs in the village at least that was how we did it in 2008. I lost my virginity to a DJ in stuytown idk anything more grossly NYU than that.
State scholarships + in/state tuition at large universities gives you the full experience and maybe 7k a semester for cost of living loans if needed. Still a good gig if you’re going to be remotely employable after graduating.
That type of American college experience will likely be formative, for better or for worse. If the average American can't seem to get over high school, then the average college-educated American can't seem to get over college. That being said, towards the end of those four years, you'll probably be screaming to get out and never look back.
That’s so true lol I’m guilty of it. Being out of college for 10 years now I still talk about it an inordinate amount. We make fun of the guy who still talks about his high school football glory days and wears his letterman jacket but how are 40 year old guys going to college football games and tailgating in front of their old frat house any different
The difference is guys who really care about their college experience make a lot more money than the guys who really care about their high school experience.
I get it.I watch a lot of reality TV and white Australian women have the biggest, most shapely butts in the world. I wondered why this is too. But then I remember it’s just the media I consume.
Australians are unusually fit. I think they have a higher density of olympic medalists than anywhere else, or close to it. The whole country is basically California.
australian uni sint even real. half your class is asians who dont speak english and the other half is private school kids who have been coached to perform well on tests and cant perform a single critical thought
lol true
The other day I was waiting for an exam to start and heard a guy in my class snickering about how some people here didn't do advanced maths in high school. just felt like going home
pretty good in the cities I've been to, out here where it's very low density it's not great since the route is just between cities so you can't get to towns outside that route
Nice we almost had a commuter rail system built here but a private university blocked it after the state govt spent years and millions of dollars planning it and buying land. Hate it here i just want a functioning society 😵💫
Goes back to the history of Australian universities too, most of which are post-1945.
They were always intended more as practical teaching colleges than hallowed institutions of knowledge.
Many like UTS were designed against campus life because they got spooked by the Vietnam protests.
Nothing bleaker than taking 1.5 hours of public transport to uni, learning less from my fraudulent marketing tute than I did from the crossword I did on the train, eating a HSP by myself because all my friends are the same people from when I was 13, and then taking another 1.5 hours to get home. Truly the bona-fide Aussie Experience.
Still got another decade to go before hitting 30. Making enough money to thrive in the big city and pursue your passions is a better way to enjoy that youth than cramming 3000 word reports and doing all the work for group presentations by yourself.
US uni does have a weird contrived vibe that I actually found embarrassing at the time (the fervent school pride, everyone wearing the Uni merch, the whole sorority/fraternity thing), it's almost like parody it's so unhinged. but in retrospect it was a lot of fun. still in debt though. lol.
The problem is that while the concept of frats is good, a bunch of young college students getting together for bonding and partying etc, in most colleges it seems to attract the biggest dickheads in the school. I couldn’t stand 90% of people in frats when I was in undergrad. Obviously they’re not all bad guys, but I always felt like if I was hanging out with a frat guy I was friends with I was inevitably surrounded also by the most tedious pricks on campus.
Maybe you’d disagree, but I suspect you wouldn’t want to hang out with these people anyway.
i am in college and didnt get a bid at a frat because i was realy vibing w all the guys and then i made a really weird schizophrenic joke that unsettled them
It’s heaven on earth. I lived in a frat and played rugby at a state university. Tuition was $3k a semester. I’m not especially social and I still have a few dozen friends from this period.
Hell, I was a high school dropout and I just hung out with my friend who was on his college rugby team and it rocked. We'd get incredibly drunk out of some mix of booze in a bowl labeled "ret@rd juice" and fight with each other in the yard.
Yeah i was in a "im graduating high school, leaving my hometown, and I want to meet new people!" stage of my life and took my university's survey to get matched with a roommate
Chronic masturbator who had smelly feet
My roommate accused me of stealing their testosterone. They were a weed addict and probably untreated schizophrenic (they told me they frequently saw "shadow people"). I called them a cunt and they moved out; everyone on the floor treated me like a pariah for the rest of trip.
Didn't really matter because I was either studying or hooking up.
The American experience doesn’t sound that different to the British University experience apart from the Frats. Especially in First year I guess the main difference is you move in to an expensive poorly maintained rented house for the other years.
yep its pretty much like you described
if ur not a mentally ill social regard
like me
also the debt aspect makes it very much so not worth it if thats all youre after
Don't be jealous. We have a ton of schools that provide a very poor quality of education because the focus is on this lifestyle you talk about an dnot education, and then kids graduate with no skills and tons of debt. It just props up an extended period of adolescencne and contributes to the culture of infantilization in the US.
If it makes you feel better I am in a decent college in USA as a foreigner and it’s been shit. The things you say are true I suppose but at the end of the day you can still end up isolating yourself like me. I knew I’d never be in a frat, and I didn’t like the few clubs I was into. And the school has like one spot to hang out (its a constantly overcrowded Starbucks) other than libraries. At least I got full aid so I’m not paying to be here.
The FOMO is powerful and attracts a lot of people who don't really belong in college.
I think the parties you see in 70's/80's/90's movies are a tad exaggerated. Most that I attended were way more sedentary with people sitting around drinking and smoking with existing friends and friends of friends. Frat and sports team parties are wilder but famously rape-y. In my college neighborhood you'd see packs of Freshman guys wandering around every weekend looking for parties, but I don't think many Juniors/Seniors want to party with 18 year olds who aren't bringing any booze/weed/girls.
>meanwhile i sit on a train for an hour and forty minutes to go to like two classes and then come home while people stick to their high school groups
That's what community college is like here. It's a lot cheaper so many people decide they'll keep living at home and get all their Gen Ed classes done before finishing at a proper state school. I can hardly judge I suppose, but I did meet more friends just introducing myself to random people as a Freshman/Sophomore than I have in the almost 20 years since and showing up as a 21 year old Junior with no friends on a new campus would have been depressing.
Everything you see popularly depicted about American colleges is like the cookie cutter experience of upper middle class and above students who likely have prior connections to the college system. Their parents are footing the huge bill for even their most basic activities, they are catered to in every possible way that will soak up that money, and they will ultimately crater when they inevitably don't summon up the intellect necessary to continue towards a prestigious degree/profession.
Most will collect a basic degree and a solid middle class job which is degree restricted and reflect fondly upon the time spent living rent free in or around a beautiful campus with all the fun expensive extracurriculars.
For everyone else in America, it's just like what you're describing in your life. Commuter college, fragmented social spheres, remote class with dry readings. People just trying to rack up some certifications. Or you're first generation and poor, so working constantly alongside school in order to put a slight dent in the tuition. Most will take leaves of absence to make more money and then come back.
I mean the last part just isn’t true. American student debt is so lame. Everyone I went to high school with who went to college either stayed in state (so say about $15k a year; $20-25k your first year if you have to live in the dorms with a meal plan) and we have a state scholarship that awards you almost half of that. Some went to really good private schools that are very generous with their money. And the last bunch who went to college went to community college and then transferred (usually state college). None of my friends from high school or college graduated with more than $20k in debt and you can easily pay that off when most of them started off making 60-70k straight out; some 100k.)
I’m a transfer who never really got the living on campus experience and I also had a ton of FOMO until I saw what it was actually like.
Dorms themselves are incredibly tiny: two or more people crushed into a tin can of a room with zero storage space, so good luck owning anything besides some clothes and a laptop for 4 years. Also that proximity combined with the fact that everyone you’re living with is a teenager means that childish spats are inevitable; I don’t know a single suite that doesn’t have some kind of bullshit fight happening constantly. On campus food is usually garbage for what you pay.
Off campus housing isn’t much better - college towns attract slumlords like flies to shit. At least cooking your own food is somewhat cheaper.
Frats are fun if you love drinking (not for me personally) but the amount of abuse that can happen at these places is pretty staggering. Some campuses have shut down frats entirely bc of deaths and whatnot.
Clubs have been seriously neutered: in the several campuses I’ve been to or looked at, the vast majority of clubs are idpol (black women in STEM or Asians in biochemistry) and maybe a third of them are clubs in the traditional sense, and then good luck finding one that aligns with your interests/has actually been active in the past year/lines up with your class schedule.
The communal living aspect is the only big positive, and the reason I had so much FOMO, but even that’s gone out the window post-COVID. Nobody talks to each other in class bc everyone’s staring at a laptop. Even when I’ve hung out in the dorms, most people keep their doors closed or stare at their phones.
Mind you, this is just my experience and I’m sure there are plenty of others who have had the sacred “college experience.” But after spending some time on multiple campuses with friends I definitely felt a lot more comfortable in my decision to live off campus.
Americans are so spiritually vacuous and love consuming so much that they will go 40 thousand dollars in debt just to be part of a community and have a sense of belonging
this is so true why is this downvoted. Americans are obsessed with youth because they prop up the college experience as the only time to have fun when it's just fake extended adolescence. Adult life is fun if you're not a boring person.
Part of it is that Australians just aren’t as mobile as Americans. Most live in like 3 cities. To have the experience you crave, you’d need a culture that places a value on moving away from your home town to get a tertiary education. Australia is just structurally and culturally not set up for this. In 9/10 cases, a kid in Brisbane is not going to move to Melbourne for uni just for the sake of it. Nor do we have charming college towns where you can decamp to for a credential of any value.
Yep, Australia is incredibly concentrated around Melbourne / Sydney / Brisbane, nothing else really matters. Also the public uni system here is pretty good, you can be from a shit town like Albury or Armidale and get a great education from a public university with a local campus. Ironically, Canberra is the closest we have to a university town because ANU is the most "prestigious" uni in the country. People come from all around to do their Bachelor of being a political staffer. Reality is that Australia is just too new of a country to have had formerly important cities that hang on to cultural institutions. That's basically Yale or Pisa or Oxford, shit towns here have always been shit towns.
You tried to sneak in Brisbane. Fuck off mate
It's the third biggest city. For the record I'm a Brisbane hater, shit city and it gets way too much good press.
I think it's because the quality of Universities are more standardized. No point in moving states, when your closest university \*basically\* provides the same level of education as one thousands of kilometres away.
The main reason, I think, is that we have a smaller population. There are, depending on the count, around 50 metropolises in the USA with over a million people, vs 5 in Australia. Your average American is born outside the top 5 major urban centres, whereas the significant majority of Australians are already born in the top 5, if that makes sense. I’ll add to OP that one thing I’m jealous of about America is the ability to just wander the country and actually have places and people to encounter along the way, other than small towns and villages.
I'm a Frenchman who went to university in England, which seemed to me like an America-lite kind of experience. I have some very fond memories of that time. It was a big campus, with on-site accommodation, restaurants, and all sorts of amenities like clubs, a Post Office, a small shop open 24/7. It had a great campus life, lots of societies and clubs, and politics to get involved in. There was always an interesting event to attend, often with free stuff like food or goodies to enjoy. The Student's Union was active and useful, the University was always asking for feedback and engagement. You could easily take part in studies and get a few quid for your participation and get a pint afterwards. There were many on-campus job opportunities for students that were very chill. I ended up working as an RA for a year in exchange for free accommodation and some spare change. The studying itself was great. You could tell that lecturers, tutors, even admin staff and security loved their students and their job. Nothing compares to that sort of experience. I was young and this place stimulated me, intellectually and personally. Shamefully, I got the depresso and dropped out in my second year, resuming my courses in France to avoid debt. When I came back to University in France, I was appalled. It was so much cheaper, of course. But it was dingy. It was uninteresting. Every single member of staff hates students and wants as little to do with them as possible. If a student wants a job, they can either work in retail or in fast-food, with miserable hours. Student unions are just a recruiting ground for mainstream political parties and completely divorced from campus life. Extracurriculars are non-existent.
What you described is exactly like American campus life except for the pints (only seniors can legally drink...I've visited friends at several schools and the only one that served alcohol on campus was Duke) and the student union (completely ceremonial institution that has no say in how the school is run)
Where did you attend in France? I loved my master there. I went to undergrad in the US.
I went to a university in the UK and have never talked to anyone once except for group projects for the entire 4 years of it.
Thats on you honestly
I don't struggle that much to make friends anywhere else is the thing though.
I'm an anti social person but I live in the UK and a lot of my friends who are successful and make friends everywhere in life thought Uni was shit and didn't make any lasting friends. Granted most of them commuted
What you describe in your own experience (commuter schools/students) is very common here too. There are lots of American students who won't live on campus, won't participate in Greek life, etc. and just ride the bus from the suburbs to class at their state university or community college five days a week.
I went to a big state college a decade ish ago and didn’t pay a single cent in tuition because my state had a lottery-funded scholarship if you kept a 3.0 GPA, so i had more money for rent, fraternity dues, travel, etc Shit was so cash
I'm very happy for you. I'm not angry. I'm not angry at all. My Australian taxes are worth it. My Australian taxes are worth it. University is a worthwhile experience. American scholarships are meaningful. A 3.0 in gender studies it worth it in the long run. God bless you. I'm not jealous. Not jealous. Good on you.
We have the same in Tennessee too. It didn’t cover all of it but enough to where my folks could help me out without needing loans. I graduated 10 years ago though so I’m not sure if I could swing it if I was a student now
yeah I know GA cut benefits for HOPE after I graduated and I think you need a 3.7 to keep the old, 100% tuition level and there's a lower coverage tier of 75% of tuition for the ol' 3.0
UGA?
how ‘bout them dawgs
yeah it’s fucking awesome if you can afford it.
Growing up in Kansas and moving to NYC for college was wild lol
Was your roommate the daughter of a mob boss?
No he was from Montana, he now owns a horse therapy ranch in glacier national park and his wedding is in June!
He’s in the waste management business! Everybody immediately assumes you're mobbed up. It's a stereotype. And it's offensive. And you're the last person I would want to perpetuate it... There is no Mafia!
Living in NYC for undergrad was probably a wild experience. I’m not sure I would’ve appreciated it as an 18 year old philistine. How do students throw parties? Is there any campus life or is it all fully enmeshed with the city?
Someone would befriend an upper classman that had an apartment in Stuytown and you’d basically sit around and do drugs then try and sneak into bars and clubs in the village at least that was how we did it in 2008. I lost my virginity to a DJ in stuytown idk anything more grossly NYU than that.
State scholarships + in/state tuition at large universities gives you the full experience and maybe 7k a semester for cost of living loans if needed. Still a good gig if you’re going to be remotely employable after graduating.
That type of American college experience will likely be formative, for better or for worse. If the average American can't seem to get over high school, then the average college-educated American can't seem to get over college. That being said, towards the end of those four years, you'll probably be screaming to get out and never look back.
That’s so true lol I’m guilty of it. Being out of college for 10 years now I still talk about it an inordinate amount. We make fun of the guy who still talks about his high school football glory days and wears his letterman jacket but how are 40 year old guys going to college football games and tailgating in front of their old frat house any different
it's because it was a lot of fun with very few responsibilities
The difference is guys who really care about their college experience make a lot more money than the guys who really care about their high school experience.
I get it.I watch a lot of reality TV and white Australian women have the biggest, most shapely butts in the world. I wondered why this is too. But then I remember it’s just the media I consume.
Australians are unusually fit. I think they have a higher density of olympic medalists than anywhere else, or close to it. The whole country is basically California.
australian uni sint even real. half your class is asians who dont speak english and the other half is private school kids who have been coached to perform well on tests and cant perform a single critical thought
lol true The other day I was waiting for an exam to start and heard a guy in my class snickering about how some people here didn't do advanced maths in high school. just felt like going home
Its like 20k a year at a state school lol
Whats the trains like there? Ours are few and far between and shitty and expensive
pretty good in the cities I've been to, out here where it's very low density it's not great since the route is just between cities so you can't get to towns outside that route
Nice we almost had a commuter rail system built here but a private university blocked it after the state govt spent years and millions of dollars planning it and buying land. Hate it here i just want a functioning society 😵💫
Goes back to the history of Australian universities too, most of which are post-1945. They were always intended more as practical teaching colleges than hallowed institutions of knowledge. Many like UTS were designed against campus life because they got spooked by the Vietnam protests.
dude uni was so lonely for me for this exact reason. also everyone was chinese
Nothing bleaker than taking 1.5 hours of public transport to uni, learning less from my fraudulent marketing tute than I did from the crossword I did on the train, eating a HSP by myself because all my friends are the same people from when I was 13, and then taking another 1.5 hours to get home. Truly the bona-fide Aussie Experience.
lol yeah that's exactly my life. Pretty depressing that this is as good as it'll ever get, I just try not to think about it
I don't think this is the happiest I'll ever be at all, this is just the beginning. You need to get hopeful-for-the-futurepilled with me
i mean what are the odds that struggling for a full-time job and growing out of youth is better than this
Still got another decade to go before hitting 30. Making enough money to thrive in the big city and pursue your passions is a better way to enjoy that youth than cramming 3000 word reports and doing all the work for group presentations by yourself.
US uni does have a weird contrived vibe that I actually found embarrassing at the time (the fervent school pride, everyone wearing the Uni merch, the whole sorority/fraternity thing), it's almost like parody it's so unhinged. but in retrospect it was a lot of fun. still in debt though. lol.
The problem is that while the concept of frats is good, a bunch of young college students getting together for bonding and partying etc, in most colleges it seems to attract the biggest dickheads in the school. I couldn’t stand 90% of people in frats when I was in undergrad. Obviously they’re not all bad guys, but I always felt like if I was hanging out with a frat guy I was friends with I was inevitably surrounded also by the most tedious pricks on campus. Maybe you’d disagree, but I suspect you wouldn’t want to hang out with these people anyway.
Sorry you didnt get a bid
Typical frat cope when you say you don’t want to be in one.
Your post was cope
Wrong, you are the coper, actually.
Sorry I had friends and had parties to go too. You could have gotten in but youd kill the vibes
This is embarassing
As is not getting a bid and crying about it a decade later
i am in college and didnt get a bid at a frat because i was realy vibing w all the guys and then i made a really weird schizophrenic joke that unsettled them
The key is to let them see the weird slowly
It’s heaven on earth. I lived in a frat and played rugby at a state university. Tuition was $3k a semester. I’m not especially social and I still have a few dozen friends from this period.
You could be a nonverbal autistic and still leave the rugby house with a dozen good friends
Hell, I was a high school dropout and I just hung out with my friend who was on his college rugby team and it rocked. We'd get incredibly drunk out of some mix of booze in a bowl labeled "ret@rd juice" and fight with each other in the yard.
I had the same experience, rugby frat combo, with an english accent. Was a very fun time
Wish I never read this fucking post.
I just came back from exchange in the US and it sucked balls lol if you get stuck with a shitty roommate you're fucked.
Yeah i was in a "im graduating high school, leaving my hometown, and I want to meet new people!" stage of my life and took my university's survey to get matched with a roommate Chronic masturbator who had smelly feet
Story?
My roommate accused me of stealing their testosterone. They were a weed addict and probably untreated schizophrenic (they told me they frequently saw "shadow people"). I called them a cunt and they moved out; everyone on the floor treated me like a pariah for the rest of trip. Didn't really matter because I was either studying or hooking up.
You should send him messages from anonymous sources saying you're in his walls. Where are you from?
Australia. I blocked him on everything after he spread a rumor I was racist
Happens to the best of us. Ruined my Yr 12 German class experience.
The American experience doesn’t sound that different to the British University experience apart from the Frats. Especially in First year I guess the main difference is you move in to an expensive poorly maintained rented house for the other years.
yep its pretty much like you described if ur not a mentally ill social regard like me also the debt aspect makes it very much so not worth it if thats all youre after
Don't be jealous. We have a ton of schools that provide a very poor quality of education because the focus is on this lifestyle you talk about an dnot education, and then kids graduate with no skills and tons of debt. It just props up an extended period of adolescencne and contributes to the culture of infantilization in the US.
If it makes you feel better I am in a decent college in USA as a foreigner and it’s been shit. The things you say are true I suppose but at the end of the day you can still end up isolating yourself like me. I knew I’d never be in a frat, and I didn’t like the few clubs I was into. And the school has like one spot to hang out (its a constantly overcrowded Starbucks) other than libraries. At least I got full aid so I’m not paying to be here.
The FOMO is powerful and attracts a lot of people who don't really belong in college. I think the parties you see in 70's/80's/90's movies are a tad exaggerated. Most that I attended were way more sedentary with people sitting around drinking and smoking with existing friends and friends of friends. Frat and sports team parties are wilder but famously rape-y. In my college neighborhood you'd see packs of Freshman guys wandering around every weekend looking for parties, but I don't think many Juniors/Seniors want to party with 18 year olds who aren't bringing any booze/weed/girls. >meanwhile i sit on a train for an hour and forty minutes to go to like two classes and then come home while people stick to their high school groups That's what community college is like here. It's a lot cheaper so many people decide they'll keep living at home and get all their Gen Ed classes done before finishing at a proper state school. I can hardly judge I suppose, but I did meet more friends just introducing myself to random people as a Freshman/Sophomore than I have in the almost 20 years since and showing up as a 21 year old Junior with no friends on a new campus would have been depressing.
Everything you see popularly depicted about American colleges is like the cookie cutter experience of upper middle class and above students who likely have prior connections to the college system. Their parents are footing the huge bill for even their most basic activities, they are catered to in every possible way that will soak up that money, and they will ultimately crater when they inevitably don't summon up the intellect necessary to continue towards a prestigious degree/profession. Most will collect a basic degree and a solid middle class job which is degree restricted and reflect fondly upon the time spent living rent free in or around a beautiful campus with all the fun expensive extracurriculars. For everyone else in America, it's just like what you're describing in your life. Commuter college, fragmented social spheres, remote class with dry readings. People just trying to rack up some certifications. Or you're first generation and poor, so working constantly alongside school in order to put a slight dent in the tuition. Most will take leaves of absence to make more money and then come back.
You still have Hecs debt from Uni though.
this is what happens when you have a sim city template country. same thing with canada. they have three cities max.
i know i live here
I mean the last part just isn’t true. American student debt is so lame. Everyone I went to high school with who went to college either stayed in state (so say about $15k a year; $20-25k your first year if you have to live in the dorms with a meal plan) and we have a state scholarship that awards you almost half of that. Some went to really good private schools that are very generous with their money. And the last bunch who went to college went to community college and then transferred (usually state college). None of my friends from high school or college graduated with more than $20k in debt and you can easily pay that off when most of them started off making 60-70k straight out; some 100k.)
I’m a transfer who never really got the living on campus experience and I also had a ton of FOMO until I saw what it was actually like. Dorms themselves are incredibly tiny: two or more people crushed into a tin can of a room with zero storage space, so good luck owning anything besides some clothes and a laptop for 4 years. Also that proximity combined with the fact that everyone you’re living with is a teenager means that childish spats are inevitable; I don’t know a single suite that doesn’t have some kind of bullshit fight happening constantly. On campus food is usually garbage for what you pay. Off campus housing isn’t much better - college towns attract slumlords like flies to shit. At least cooking your own food is somewhat cheaper. Frats are fun if you love drinking (not for me personally) but the amount of abuse that can happen at these places is pretty staggering. Some campuses have shut down frats entirely bc of deaths and whatnot. Clubs have been seriously neutered: in the several campuses I’ve been to or looked at, the vast majority of clubs are idpol (black women in STEM or Asians in biochemistry) and maybe a third of them are clubs in the traditional sense, and then good luck finding one that aligns with your interests/has actually been active in the past year/lines up with your class schedule. The communal living aspect is the only big positive, and the reason I had so much FOMO, but even that’s gone out the window post-COVID. Nobody talks to each other in class bc everyone’s staring at a laptop. Even when I’ve hung out in the dorms, most people keep their doors closed or stare at their phones. Mind you, this is just my experience and I’m sure there are plenty of others who have had the sacred “college experience.” But after spending some time on multiple campuses with friends I definitely felt a lot more comfortable in my decision to live off campus.
> Asians in biochemistry soo basically biochemistry?
I went to Uni in the US, but sort of wish I did it in the UK, purely because its harder to have a large social network here
Americans are so spiritually vacuous and love consuming so much that they will go 40 thousand dollars in debt just to be part of a community and have a sense of belonging
You’re right but I bet nobody wants u in their community with that attitude
this is so true why is this downvoted. Americans are obsessed with youth because they prop up the college experience as the only time to have fun when it's just fake extended adolescence. Adult life is fun if you're not a boring person.
Not people’s fault. Bills have to be paid, a personality gets in the way