When I was a child, I saw a movie called Monsters University. There, I learned there are groups like fraternities and sororities. At the time I had no idea what they are, but now I know they like to host events and raves. In Canada, asides from one university that I know, I heard other universities don't have such party life. But even that one university, it's said it's still not on the US level of fun.
Are US colleges really on a whole other level when it comes to the experience outside of academics? What makes it fun?
37 comments
On Friday and Saturday yes. Some people start on Thursday. very few people don’t stop. Mostly the communications majors.
Depends on the school.
There are absolutely some that are known as “Party schools” that are totally like that.
Pretty much all of them have *some* parties though.
What makes it fun?
You go from living with you parents to living with a roommate and surrounded by thousands of people your age.
There’s parties practically every night and getting alcohol is a million times easier than high school.
College is fucking awesome.
I’d say so, yeah. I went to a mid-sized liberal arts university and it had all the traditional house parties, frats and sororities, homecomings, busy bar districts, etc.
University party culture is absolutely a thing. To the point it can be a huge draw to some students to go to a certain school.
Even then, nearly every school will have their own party culture that resonates with a large portion of the student body.
It really depends on the university. Some have reputations as “party schools,” while others might have the majority of their students commute/not even live on campus.
The ragers that you see on screen definitely do happen, but they were not (in my experience) the norm.
Your childhood frame-of-reference for party colleges is the 2013 movie *Monsters University*?
You are young and exclusively around people your own age with some peers who can buy alcohol. Yes, it can be quite the party on weekend, whether house party or bar. Super fun part of my life for sure.
Everything in movies is exaggerated.
Yes, there are colleges, and places within colleges, that have a big party scene. . .it’s rarely, if ever, as extreme as you see in movies however.
Yes. You can party every single night for years on end if you want. It’s not smart, but as long as you keep your grades up it’s possible.
Depends on the school. A lot of American universities have a reputation as a “party school,” with lots of drinking and debauchery, but we also have a lot of “nerd schools” where that sort of thing is considered rare. Most schools fall somewhere in between.
Some of them are, yes. Some are not. Schools that have that element have many fewer students participate in it than you would be led to believe. It just tends to be loud and closely tied to sporting events which are closely tied to media portrayals and marketing material, so it is overrepresented.
idk only time i went to college i stayed in my room during my free time playing runescape. They had parties, but i never went. Too many people.
State school? Absolutely. Private schools not so much.
Mine sure wasn’t. I went to a cheap commuter school which was dead by 2pm every day.
Grad school was an engineering-focused university, and there were definitely more parties, but those were driven by frats and sororities. I had two kids and a mortgage by then and would not have gone even if invited.
Went to a school with a lot of off campus parties, the best part was watching girls in high heels trudge through 2 feet of snow every winter.
Depends on the school. Lot of them arent but theres a handful of well known party schools that party pretty much all weekend.
I went to one college party.
A street light got pulled down, there was a non fire involving a sofa and picnic table and the SWAT team was called.
Just another Hobart Hoedown, though.
There’s plenty of partying, but most media is full of shit. I think a lot of it is written by people that had way too much time on their hands in school, or got paid to make college look more fun than it really was.
At least for me, college was 4 years of constant stress with a few parties sprinkled in 😂
They were, I have no reason to believe they generally still are.
If you’re looking for that, then yes.
MU is a parody of parodies like Old School and Animal House. There’s a TINY nugget of truth at the core though. Very much depends on the school and the school’s Greek System. Some absolutely have high volume dance parties, some are nerds grinding away in the library on Saturday night. It’s a big country with vast differences between schools. “Party Schools” tend to be academically mediocre, modestly selective, and expensive to attend. The kids who can party like are generally quite privileged, so Daddy can help out if they fail classes or get picked up by the cops. Plenty of students never have experiences like that though, they’re too busy working, studying, or taking care of family.
There is such a thing as a ‘party school’…
There are also colleges with no sports teams, no party scene & where all the buildings are sponsored by the companies that students wish to work for when they graduate…
You pick which world you want to go to school in (or for the really elite/selective ones, they pick you)…
Not all colleges have fraternities or sororities.
I’m jealous now :(. Wished I was in an American so I could to go to college there because mine is so boring. Everyone just goes to school and go home. Plus, still stuck at parents home with no freedom or late night hang outs. Canadian colleges suck
College is considered a safe place for the training wheels to come off as kids transition to adulthood. Of course there’s a lot of irresponsibility.
But, like everything in America, we are not a monolith. Some large schools are out of control, some small elite schools are even worse. Some campus libraries are packed on Friday nights, some don’t have libraries! There are religious schools where alcohol is banned, and there are religious schools that are essentially alcoholism training grounds (since they aren’t going to a bowl game this year). Its just all over the place.
FWIW – my University had a Greek system but it is the Pacific Northwest and it was considered very very uncool. And, the party scene thrived without that “element”.
Yes, American colleges are filled with cartoon monsters.
They don’t even accept us humans anymore.
Honestly it really depends on the college and your degree/who you hang out with
Oh, they’re even better. I had a 0.6 GPA my first semester in the dorms and it was totally worth it.
It really depends on the school. I went to a small liberal arts college, about 3,000 undergraduates and a handful of graduate students in a suburb of a mid-sized city. It was mostly a self contained community, and those of us that didn’t or couldn’t go home every weekend would mostly make our own fun, which was sometimes things like staying up late in our dorm watching movies, sometimes someone would have a car (freshmen and sophomores (so 1st & 2nd yr students) were not allowed to keep cars on campus at the time) and we’d go off campus to a pizza joint or something, or walk to the main street and go to a restaurant, or go to a party at one of the fraternity or sorority houses. I’m an alumna of one of the sororities, and I’m here to tell you that the sorority experience varies WILDLY both campus to campus and chapter to chapter. My sorority is not located anywhere else, it only exists on this campus, and it is very small. The largest sorority on campus when I was a student was maybe 150 members at its biggest? Mine was 30 at the biggest, and the others were somewhere in the middle. Fraternities were likewise distributed, but mostly smaller than the sororities. We were a dry campus in a dry town, so no alcohol was allowed anywhere on campus (meaning if you got caught, there were penalties, not that no one ever drank, because let’s be real) and you could not buy alcohol in the little town where we were located (now you could go 10 min down the road and buy alcohol in the grocery store, but that’s setting the stage).
So for the most part, “parties” were some drinking, sitting around, dancing, playing card games, playing video games, and hanging out. Just standard young people things. Did people occasionally get smashed? Yes. Did they get caught? Sometimes. Was it awesome? Yes it was. Because 99% of the time you’re hanging out with your best friends, you have to learn to get along and make your own way, there’s tons of things to do (gym, theater, clubs, studying, yadda yadda), it was a very safe environment with teachers who cared very much about their students.
But this is a VERY different experience from going to the main university in my state which is 50,000+ students and fraternity and sorority chapters are 500+. It’s just…different.
I went to graduate school at a large university in the UK, and that experience was VASTLY different from my undergrad in the US. The student union culture was very different, students could buy alcohol in the union (lower drinking age, obvs), and the culture of “life happens on campus” is different. In the US, I lived in a dorm a 3 minute walk from my classroom. Living was centered around the university and the university provides food, shelter, etc. In the UK, life mostly happened off campus and in the city, and food/shelter/activity happened sort of campus adjacent? Still got an excellent education, but I don’t know that I would have done as well as an 18 yr old there.
Yes and no.
If you’re going to college as part of the “traditional” university experience (you are 18-22, you are from a middle class family and your parents are supporting you financially while you’re in school, you live on campus at a 4-year university where most students also live on campus, etc), movies are somewhat accurate in that you have a lot of free time outside of class to hang out with your fellow college students. And it’s a bunch of dumb young kids who’ve never been away from their parents before, so people do silly stuff and party too much.
That said, that’s not the reality for plenty of college students. Lots of people go to commuter schools, are working and going to school at the same time, etc. and don’t have that kind of free time dominated by same-age peers.
Also, movies obviously crank up the fun and party aspects of college to make things more interesting. A movie about people studying wouldn’t be that interesting.
I have now studied at 3 different universities, and none of them have been the archetypal Big Campus Student Life type of school that is portrayed in these types of movies. I can count on one hand the number of my peers who were ever in a fraternity or sorority.
The first year of college is one of the best times in your life arguably. Unlimited free time, no supervision, plentiful alcohol and other stuff, and routine social activity like concerts, parties, and events.
I have no idea how your frame of reference is monsters university tbh lmao.
I miss freshman year. Good times.
College can be really fun. Here’s a link to the top party schools in the United States
https://www.niche.com/colleges/search/top-party-schools/
*Monsters University* aside, the US college party-life is REALLY exaggerated in the media. “Regular students being responsible and rarely getting in trouble” is not nearly as fun to watch as “fraternity/sorority parties throwing a rager every week and getting everyone high/drunk.” The British analog for “wild parties that are vastly outside of the norm” is Skins, which takes place in high school.
In real life, you’d most likely develop an addiction and the nonstop parties would wreck your studying.
Nah it’s just an indicator of social class. If you come from a family that can afford to pay for your tuition, housing, supplies, an allowance, and your future isn’t dependant on getting the degree then yes it can be a party every day and purely an exercise in personal growth or self discovery. If you need to study to keep a scholarship or work to pay rent with no safety net you’ll spend a lot more time doing those things. Doesn’t mean you can’t have fun, but the “college experience” seen in movies is an additional premium.
It’s entirely possible to not go to a single large party at a public university. In fact, I’d say that as a college graduate, I almost entirely eschewed them during my time at the University of Michigan. I might have gone to only 2 or three during my four years there.
Your reference for what college life is like is a Pixar movie?