Before we get rid of colleges we need to find an alternative to this.
I went to college and lived there. I was far enough away from home that I could not return home with any frequency. I was a nerd at a college full of nerds and other like-minded people. I intentionally put more effort into making friends by participating in various clubs, social groups, and activities. I put more effort into that than I did into my studies. I did just enough schoolwork to graduate. Indeed, I did form lifelong friends during this time.
Now compare that to the story of another person I know. They went to community college while still living at home. After a year or two of that, they did leave home to go to college. However, they were at a state school with people studying various things and having various interests. There was not a group of like-minded people there. Lots of the students there were commuters and not living in dorms. This person focused on their studies, not on socializing. This person's social group today is largely still comprised of their friends from high school.
This scenario that OP describes happened for me, and presumably for OP as well. It doesn't happen for all, or even most, people attending college. It only happens for the right people who attend the right college in exactly the right circumstances.
Pre-drinks being drinks at a friends house. Sit around having cheap drinks bought at the bottle shop. Then head out to the bar/club and either dont drink or nurse a beer or 2 over the rest of the night. Pre-drinks were usually the most fun part of the evening anyway.
Long before 21, genuine serendipity and mutual interest fall away and cynical "networking" takes over. I'd say the transition happens, on average, around sophomore year. Once people get their first experiences with the working world, they realize how much social class really matters and will do everything they can not to lose ground in the shuffle.
The higher (or lower, since it's the middle class that has the longest period of class naivete) you go in social class, the earlier this transition happens. It's why you don't actually as many connections, if you don't come from wealth, at an elite college as people think you do. The legacy mediocrities (e.g., final club brats) and the middle-class smart kids who actually earned their way in don't mix. If you're going to make connections in the US, you have to do so before class/caste identity really hardens and they learn to see you as an enemy; that's in prep school.
There are class differences and some level of class separation everywhere. It isn't a distinctly or even more more pronounced American trait. As for class differences in college my experience was that I made and have had enduring friendships with people from all different social classes that I made in college. Some of my friends from college came from extremely wealthy families, made for some great mostly free for me spring break trips, and some were working multiple jobs to get through school. Those working the multiple jobs and those from wealth were also friends. Are some wealthy people snobs and jerks? Yes, but I have also met just as many reverse-snobs and jerks. My experience is being a jerk is a distinct trait with no direct connection to your social class. I'm mentioning this only because you say elite college in your comment and I don't want to have someone say the experience is different for elite colleges. I went to a university which is consistently ranked by those publications which rank such things as being in the top 10 and in specific areas of study in the top 3 programs in the country.
As for the original premise of whether college is needed to make life long friendships, I actually don't agree. I have life long friends from before, during and after college.
Eventually, people realize they were cattle being raised for slaughter, and that "the corporate ladder" isn't going to lead anywhere decent for them because they weren't born into the right connections for that, but by this time they've had all their energies wrung out of them and it seems to be too late.
Folks counter this by pre-drinking at home and then going home to continue drinking. It really wouldn't be that difficult in the US either, and some folks would certainly leave you behind if you can't keep up financially.
Fun fact: Austria is cheap in comparison, at about 2,50€ to 3,50€ per beer, and it seems like a comparative deal. [2]
[1]https://norwaytoday.info/travel/is-beer-in-norway-really-tha.... [2]https://www.flatio.com/blog/typical-prices-of-goods-in-austr....
The UK also heavily taxes alcohol but you'll find cheap beers (sure, some London pubs will still charge you 5£ or more for some beers).
Even the latter reduces hard core binge drinking and the former really seems to help with the rampant alcoholism in winter at high latitudes. Paternalistic, but that is the price of living in a society (with free healthcare systems and A&E that get overtaxed by drunks…)
This describes me (well, 3 years at CC, but close.) However, I also managed to find the nerds by getting a low-level job at the state school's computing services center, and they're still my friends 30+ years later.
My read is that there are a lot of confounding variables here, but I'm inclined to think that college tends to makes it easier to build a friend network of upwardly mobile people (in the US in the last four+ decades.)
That's quite a number of college attendees (graduates?) standing on the shoulders of a single personal anecdote.
I'd estimate an equal number received prank phone calls their Freshman year from inebriated idiots fascinated by the length of their Sri Lankan roomate's name as it appeared in the student directory. (Yes, a physical fucking student directory!)
A young person wrote this.
FWIW I'm 45, and pretty much all of the close friendships I have today are people I met after graduating from university, simply because now my uni friends are scattered around the world and I hardly see them.
Today my friends are mostly people I used to work with and we have more in common, although we're still pretty different since we came together by accident of employer
So maybe just a different person than you wrote this.
For some of us, hitting one's forties marks a somewhat lonely life. Wife, children, coworkers, but no actual friends.
The problem with college is that many people go off to some city they’re not from, then go take a job in some other city that’s not their college. I’m still best friends with my college buddies, but I see them pretty infrequently given how much we’ve all moved chasing careers.
IMO for most people it goes the same way as earlier schooling periods; as people venture out to do their own thing, they make new circles of friends and generally you no longer fit into those circles. That's not to say nobody continues lifelong relationships, as you describe, but from my experience it can be like that.
It seems that everyone these days is aware that friendship is on the decline, but so few actually seem willing to do anything about it. Maybe people really do love their Disney+, their Oculus, their Doordash, and their Cheeto-dust more than they do their relationships with other people. If so, that seems to be the way of the world from which there is no turning back.
The reason that college works in forming friendships and romantic relationships is the artificial environment it creates where people are obligated to show up and mingle with people who are from different backgrounds, and for at least 2 years. My experience was that as soon as college ended, most of my peer group effectively dropped out of existence. The excuse is always business, yet when I did meet friends it seems they had plenty of time to binge watch the Netflix show du jour.
I'm sure someone is going to respond with something along the lines of "maybe they're avoiding you". Umm... I can't really argue against that other than by stating that said people do in fact initiate getting together with me, albeit rarely.
Some people truly desire strong bonds, but it seems that most people decide that the strong bond with their spouse is good enough. Can't it be?
Since we moved to my current neighborhood in the suburbs, however, I socialize several times a week. It's impossible not to. There's a dozen kids within 100 feet on our street. Whether we feel like binge watching Netflix or not, the kids want to play--thus providing their own child care--and it's very easy to just grab a beer with the neighbors. Then there's church where I'm on committees that mandate face-to-face interactions several times a month on top of going weekly. I also live 10 minutes from my parents, so there's dinners over there several times a week. I don't work any less than I did when my social life was less active, and I have two more kids than I did back then. But I watch a lot less Netflix.
I moved to an inner city apartment and suddenly my social life exploded. I have a few friends very close by and some are in the same building as me. A social event is now as simple as sending a message asking if any of them want to grab dinner with me in an hour. We meet up at the lobby and walk to a pub/restaurant. Cars and commuting are this huge barrier to socialization these days.
It's not artificial. This is the tribal culture humans used to live in in prehistoric times. We are evolved to live like that.
Modern society is what is artificial.
Basically making friends is about proximity. If you want to make friends you need to live in an a tribal type community and environment.
Binge watching Netflix on the other hand is easy. I can do it whenever I want.
But mostly it's a matter of priorities. In school, my priorities were: Academics, Friends, distantly followed by Family, Personal Health, and Home (meaning dorm, flat, apartment, w/e). Now Family, Personal Health, Home, and Career are at the top and Friends are at the bottom. When I was in undergrad I could text my friend "Hey wanna grab food" and we walked to the nearest calzone place. Now I make sure my partner and I have spent time together, that I've done my chores around the house, and then I text a friends to meet. One friend is trying to lose weight and can't eat at a place with too many carbs, the other is trying to cut back alcohol and doesn't want to go to a place with lots of drinks, and I need something gentle on my stomach. Then we agree on the place and meet up. Walking to the nearest calzone place is just not a plan my friends and I would trivially agree on anymore and that's okay. Priorities change with age.
I don't think this has anything to do with the macro trend of decreasing socializing.
Humans are attuned to have happiness that's deeply connected to interacting and mutual appreciation of other.
Despite the best efforts of Twitch.com, television and other activities do not fill this void for deep appreciation.
Deep relationships are truly essential.
I'm not saying that I relate to this at all, despite that I am particularly solitary. I would like to have more deep and frequent connections with others, but my impression isn't that people actually want that. They might like the fantasy of having lots of deep friendships that don't interfere with their technological somnolescence or romantic satisfaction.
I cant help ... college is when the peer group is the most uniform. They are all the same age and in the same life stage. They all study the same or similar thing, have similar interests. And are all being college educated. You meet trades people there. If you study CS, you will meet very few artists.
I liked college experience, but both high school, employment and sports clubs were more diverse in terms of who I met there.
How many little boys in my neighborhood swear they want to grow up to be a pro football player, but this is the main activity they see gaining adult approval in the cafe. I wanted to be either an orchestra conductor or a luthier based upon two experiential impressions that aesthetically influenced me.
I also moved to London from NZ, and have made great friends here and socialise a lot, so it’s certainly not just a major city effect. I’m not really one to preach, but to me I think your perspective is not one that I recognise at all.
For some of us, we can read all the Dale Carnegie or Leil Lowndes available, and still go absolutely nowhere with actual, applicable social skills.
The only option is enormous quantities of alcohol, GHB, or phenibut, but the risks are often too great there.
The "metaverse" is already beginning to set in, and it's like a drug--no issue in moderation, but destructive if you get addicted, which is extremely easy to do. Do people love drugs more than relationships with other people? Well, drug addicts do, but we understand that as a neurological twitch (an illness, even) more than a high-minded desire.
> The reason that college works in forming friendships and romantic relationships is the artificial environment it creates where people are obligated to show up and mingle with people who are from different backgrounds, and for at least 2 years.
I'm not sure I agree. College doesn't "obligate" this, and it doesn't always happen. People of low social classes feel isolated and excluded (often without the excluders knowing what they are doing that alienates them) and people of high social classes have already set up their barriers. The middle classes are latest to form social class identity--around 19-21 in the US, as opposed to 15-18 for the lower and upper [1] social classes.
However, college is the closest thing we have in the US to an attempt at communism [2] (even if it is artificial and expensive, therefore indicative of what David Graeber calls the communism of the rich). The influences of pre-existing social class and personal wealth (which most college students don't have yet) are not completely blocked, but at a minimum--those things matter less than they did before college in terms of a person's living standard, and less than they will after college.
> Some people truly desire strong bonds, but it seems that most people decide that the strong bond with their spouse is good enough.
Sadly, I don't think most people in America have even that. They might think they do, but what's going to happen if they're unemployed for 12 months? Ultimately, even the family, as an institution, succumbs to corrosion in a bourgeois society. Unlike Marx, I don't seek to abolish the family--as somewhat of a tradleft, I'd rather protect it--but I agree with the Marxists that this form of capitalism creates a society in which all bonds are negotiable when living under a socioeconomic system that has no moral restraint when it comes to applying financial pressure.
You can still find a ride-or-die spouse in parts of the country, but in Silicon Valley? If you met her at a tech company, then as soon as you lose your Jira job, she's going to find a crypto bro.
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[1] I'm not the first to observe that the lower and upper class have more in common with each other than either does with the middle. At the extremes, people tend to be class realists who understand how much money matters in daily life. It's those in the middle who can afford to indulge in naivete.
[2] No, not USSR or CCP "communism", which neither of those systems even managed to approximate; rather, by communism I mean a post-scarcity social arrangement in which people form bonds and pursue interests for non-financial reasons... that is, a society free of economic totalitarianism. Since the USSR and CCP are merely another form of economic totalitarianism, run by the state rather than private employers but otherwise just as oppressive as our society, they don't qualify.
We then move away and live in increasingly isolated housing, typically long distances from our friends.
Modern life doesn’t make much sense in this way. We’re sociable chimps that need a group. I really love the idea of living in a street with friends nearby. Maybe I can make that happen.
The most surefire way to achieve that is to move into a large, new housing project, but these are rare nowadays and usually work-related.
My grandparents moved in their early 20s from their village to a whole damn city district built specifically to accommodate workers(along with their families) employed in a newly built steel mill.
Everyone was roughly the same age and had children at the same time.
To this day I think it's the single thing communism got right.
I spent the first years of my life living in an apartment complex for university employees, because that was my father's line of work back then.
Mental illness plays a big role
My guess is college itself is less important to lifetime friend accumulation than spending any amount of significant time with age peers when you’re a young adult. In my circle, many life-long friendships were formed by young colleagues in their first jobs or among young post-college roommates.
The typical college years just happen to line up neatly with the part of adult life in which people are most interested in new experiences and new people. You tend to make lots of lasting friendships when you’re interested in making friends, and everyone around you is as interested as you are. As an older adult, most people in the same stage of life simply have no interest in friendship with you.
We formed a group of very close friends who all worked together "against the system" to get the best grades possible while somehow staying sane[1]. Long days and nights working together, or just shooting the shit _at college_ because we were bound to stay there working.
I'm 100% sure that in my personal case, I would not share the bond I do with my friends (even if they were other friends) if I had not met them under these circumstances.
[1] I have been extremely lucky to have belonged to a group of "top of the class students" who worked together, shared notes, assignments and helped each other, instead of competing and throwing each other under the bus -- I know of other people who did not have the same luck.
Part of the reason is college lacks structured socializing time and I am really bad at unstructured socializing. So it wasn’t helpful at all for making friends. Work has been much easier given you are spending more hours with the same people and there are frequent “team bonding” type events that make it easy to get to know your coworkers.
Another part of the reason is many people go to a different area for college so afterwards you live apart and stop being friends.
This may have been true of your college, at the time you attended, but I don't think the experience generalizes at all. Lots of colleges and universities feature heavily structured socializing time. They may have extensive orientation activities during the first week on campus, before classes begin. This functions as both an ice breaker and team building event within faculties or departments. As part of this process, first years / freshmen / frosh are typically introduced to a host of formal clubs, student organizations, and fraternities/sororities they can join. They will also often participate in orientation activities and be introduced to groups and events within their residence building (or college within a larger university) which adds another layer of structured socialization.
Frankly, I would say that university has the potential to offer the most structured socialization time a person can experience throughout their entire life. Of course, as with any opportunity, the door may be open but it's up to the individual to walk through. Plenty of people go to school and put 100% focus on their studies. They never socialize with anyone and they largely remember school as a time of stress and isolation. Barring specific programs with insane workloads, that was their choice, however.
That sounds weird. I don't know what the American college experience is like (I just work here), but my experience in Finland was the opposite. I've had difficulties in making friends in adult life, because I'm also bad at unstructured socializing. When I was a student, there were opportunities for structured socializing everywhere. There were something like 250 student organizations in the university, and many of them also had national umbrella organizations, national meetings, and shared activities with similar organizations in other universities.
I have no contact with anybody else from university. I had a few friends at university that I spent a lot of time with studying and partying, but after I graduated I didn't stay in touch with any of them.
https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/familiarity-and-belonging
You can get some of this today simply by committing to being a regular at places, even if it is just a cafe, or a club, or even if its just twitter! (provided you use it in a way that is oriented towards making friends and not political demolition derby)
It takes time and effort, but less than setting you back $200k and 4 years worth
What's called the "third place", and that's sorely missing in modern life and in my opinion the root cause of the epidemic of loneliness.
The third place is the third nucleus where you just hang out: one is family/home, two is school/work.
In college usually you hang out with people after school. Then you graduate and it's just home and work. Meeting people outside for drink isn't a third place. A third place is a place where you just are, for how long you want, with no expectation from anybody, and with some movement of people/fresh faces once in a while.
I've seen that in Africa visiting my family (hanging out on the porch after dinner talking to neighbours and passersby), I've seen it in older people in Southern Europe (hanging out in bars playing cards), but in my 30s there is a complete lack of this space. If you're working 9-5 it's even worse.
What's even sadder is seeing the younger generations losing this space, because hanging out online is more convenient, so they're stuck at home, alone.
Same with time. If it's a high enough priority for someone, they will find the time to do it.
We're still great mates 20 years on, but we've all got jobs and mortgages these days.
Hanging out with people leads to friendships, college is one way to achieve that. I sincerely hope you don't think it's the only way.
(Incidentally, the fact that my country supported me when I was deeply depressed and not even trying in life is why I consider it a privilege to pay the top tax rate now.
When I was kicked out of home at 15, I lived on charity and shoplifting/stealing from cars/cheque fraud. Once I turned 16, I could get social welfare payments as an unsupported youth, and had no real need to commit any more crimes.
That's why they call it social security, it helps keep society secure against poor people.)
Obviously I'm using a figurative `you` and not literally, you.
When I tired 21 the situation improved a bit, but I still feel the lasting effects of that early isolation. Oddly I still don’t meet people are my age group. I go out and I see all sorts of people from teenagers to people well into their 80s-90s but almost never find myself in a conversation with a peer. Most of my current social group is with people who have 5-10 years in me. It’s particularly interesting as since I’ve been five years old, I’ve always made friends with “older kids” with about that gap.
Sadly I’m it doesn’t really work for me. People lose interest nearly immediately when they find out I’m younger and turn to being condescending about instead. It’s also a lot less socially acceptable for a guy to be younger than a woman in a relationship I’ve learned. My parents chastised my stepbrother for dating a girl with a few years on him while my father has over a decade on my stepmother. Platonic relationships are a little easier but you will definitely notice a disconnect eventually.
I'm not saying other cultures are different, more that the modern Dutch youth recognises this and identifies with it overtly and strongly. If you move cities it can be isolating because you will be amongst people in your neighbourhood who have long bonds to others and won't routinely include you.
Non Dutch partners have also reinforced belief in this saying that even as fluent speakers they're often in the "outside" group.
The huge expatriate English language community working in the Netherlands may also emphasise this by being an "outsider" group most non locals are lumped into.
A different culture but parallel experience was some friends of mine who moved to Australia and socialised with a specific circuit of friends, and when those bonds broke they found their neighbours and school relationships were set in "distant" mode and they couldn't connect with their local neighbourhood. They actually moved cities (country really) and established local links deliberately before any other kind second time round. Safer!
You're speaking about a very particular set of colleges. A lot of the colleges people go to these days with 40,000+ students are not like this. You're one of potentially thousands of people in your given major. I've had many classes where I did not have a single overlap of students from previous coursework. It was very common for me to not see the same faces in my classes as I progressed. Yes, some series of classes I saw SOME of the same people but it was little overlap. Add in that my classes had zero social components, grading on a curve with insanely difficult coursework, and no incentive to ever help each other and you've got all the more reason to never get close to anyone.
A lot of students also don't live in dorms, live with other students, etc. I lived alone my entire college experience (6yrs). I have zero friends from college due to little class overlap, extremely competitive and cutthroat major, and very anti-social populous overall. Even the clubs were absolutely terrible. It was always a bunch of socially awkward nerd kids and I never found the clubs where cool kids were (guess they weren't in clubs!). It didn't help that the people who were most open were also people who had no intention of ever leaving the city that the college was in. I was in the mood to leave immediately. And I did and never went back since.
I did end up making lifelong friends outside of college though during those years - but that was because I was quite actively social outside of college too.
In my third year I moved off campus and lived with people I met in the dorm. We were all in different programs.
Personally - I lived alone because I was too poor for the dorms. I got a good deal on an extremely small and niche studio apartment that was cheaper than the rooms in houses I was looking at. Naturally - I took it up because I was incredibly poor.
It’s always the Craigslist ads with no photos and maybe two sentences for a description that always end up being killer deals for the savvy hunter like myself.
I grew up in Italy and lived in Australia for many years, I have the impression that in both of these countries, high school has a bigger role than uni when it comes to life-long friendships. This is attested by the fact that in both countries you see a lot of very expensive private high schools (I attended one of those). But I've heard that in the US, uni (or "college" as it's called there) is the main networking environment for most people. I have friends from many different countries and from what I've heard, in this case the USA are the exception to the rule.
Feels a lot like the kind of relationships you get into in the business world. I wonder if that's a coincidence or by design.
Take Oxford (UK) for example. For some reason Oxford is taken to be the pinnacle of UK Ivory Towers.
As a result people who go there form a social clique and tend to spend the rest of their lives surrounding themselves by people who also went to Oxford.
They also end up being so insecure that there is now that infamous saying, "How do you know if someone went to Oxford ?" ... "Don't worry, they'll tell you".
(for those unfamiliar, it is a reference to inevitable the "When I was at Oxford" bragging that Oxford graduates seem to have an inbred tendency to inject into their discussions at any opportunity).
Indeed.
PPE @ Oxford a.k.a the Westminster seat degree
Because it's the most prestigious and the most-well connected (i.e. the most highly prized network) university in the UK.
No. You are merely stating the mythical status that seems to have developed over the years for some reason.
There's no real reason why it should be more prestigious than other UK Ivory Towers establishments such as Cambridge or Imperial.
But for some reason everyone is brainwashed into "oooh Oxford". And for some reason there is an expectation amongst those who go there that "when I went to Oxford" is supposed to elicit some sort of unbounded admiration.
Yes, and as another poster stated above, it quite clearly should NOT be that way.
Just going to Eton and/or Oxford does not automatically make you a highly intelligent and highly capable individual ... the present UK cabinet is an example of how that route manages just as easily to push out a bunch of incompetent twats.
To the point, seeing as nearly all universities here are not campus universities (and interestingly, if they're a campus university your housing might still be somewhere else in the city and your friends may as well live in another neighborhood) - do continental Europeans have less (intensive/amount) friends than Americans? (Please disregard my first paragraph now :P). I mean that's pretty hard to measure already - some value quality, some value quantity, and for everyone a certain number feels okay.
Anecdote time. I studied at a university in my home town and made very little friends in my 'class' (as in the year I started) but I formed quite a few better bonds with people in our IRC chatroom and the forums, all having 1-2 years later than I did. So while I might in theory regret mostly hanging out with my highschool (and other) friends, I simply didn't get along very well with the people at university. But I actually did make friends (and also people I enjoy seeing again) at the job I worked at during my studies (and a bit longer).
From a practical point of view as well, long distance friendships can work for some time, my most successful made it about 2 decades (with a few interspersed physical 'reunions' in between). But they will all eventually fail as the 'Hey how's it going' messages start to become more formulaic, repetitious, and more of an obligation than a desire. And so unless by happenstance you end up living in the vicinity of college friends, you're going to gradually drift away.
And there's already a solution/alternative: literally sort of of local activity. I enjoy chess and a single trip to a local chess club is often more than enough to go from 'I know nobody' to 'I know lots of people' in a new city, and friendships form easily.
I'd also encourage anybody here who has even a vague interest in chess to consider that. Chessclubs often have a huge diversity of skill levels, always including a few guys who don't know that much more than how the pieces move - but enjoy getting out and going to play against other people. And "chess club" often translates to 'Hey we meet up this time at this restaurant and play a bit - BYOB.' B being board of course, there's always beer a plenty there.
Best part of it all is that chess players tend to be pretty atypical so you'll find all sorts of interesting personalities.
1. KIDs: do you have kids, if so - your friends will enviably before other parents who have kids your age. If no kids, proceed to next step.
2. RELATIONSHIP: are you in a committed relationship, if so - your friends will largely become who your significant others prior friends are. If not in committed relationship, proceed to next step.
3. GRAD SCHOOL: did you go to graduate school? If so, your friends will most likely be people you met in graduate school since your economic and social circumstances are most similar. If not graduate school, proceed to next step.
4. UNDERGRAD: did you go to undergrad? If so, your friends will most likely be people you met in undergrad since your economic and social circumstances are most similar. If not undergrad, proceed to next step.
5. HIGH SCHOOL: did you go to highschool? If so, your friends will most likely be people you met in highschool since your economic and social circumstances are most similar.
The networking system is hard to overestimate. But this is only sufficiently true if you go to a "good" college. You meet people and have the time and proximity to vet them over an extended period. You also have a brand (e.g. in India, being an IITian automatically changes the way people look at you and that's worth something if you're trying to get funding etc.). There are no quick substitutes for this and in my mind, colleges are still very valuable for this.
Nobody is getting rid of colleges.
Also, I don't think this is underrated. It is highly rated and, as you point out, that is for good reason.
It could be that third world hustle in getting on with life did not leave much time or space for making deep bonds. Or may be my cynical nature just see through that superficial nature of deep friendship wows.
So how did people live in communities before modern college phenomenon took over?
Nothing I can do about that. Moving on.
I started working when I was 16, most of my friends and romantic partners have been older than me.
While this helped me adult faster. The downside is I find it generally hard to hangout with gen Z (lacking opportunities & cultural fit); and older folks often dismiss me because of my age (because of some preconceived notion of how age maps to behavior).
I had much better luck meeting people that have stuck around via going to Meetups regularly. Sure, quite a few people I met through Meetup eventually drifted apart, but I still keep in touch and hang out semi-regularly with about 20 people (almost all I first met eight years ago). Most of us like to play board games, so a lot of these are board game gatherings. Also these gatherings aren't organized through Meetup anymore, we're all just friends now.
I also still do things with a local writer's group from time to time, and several of those people I've known for over a decade now.
Finally I have some game designer friends (got up to 8 people at one point, but a couple people moved away) that I've been meeting up with several times a year (except during the pandemic, although we have started meeting up again recently) for the past four years. That started by me just going to game designer conventions and going "Where you from? Oh you're from near me? I host a playtest night roughly once a month, you should come."
So basically all these boil down to having some sort of shared passion. Those have helped maintain those friendships. You can always just invite someone to something related to the passion, although it doesn't have to be limited to just that.
Most of these didn't happen until I was long out of college, btw. Most of my 20s were pretty lonely outside of work until I started going to these things.
It does require that you keep showing up though. Which is a challenge for some.
At least in the parts of the US that I've visited, coffee shops either fill up with people working solo behind laptops, or they're chains that maximize turnover by making furniture scarce and uncomfortable.
The pub is usually a bar with multiple huge televisions and blaring music. In a bar, I'm usually completely unable to follow a conversation at all.
"The club" usually means a fraternal organization like the Elks or the Kiwanis. In most areas, these organizations have long ago aged into being irrelevant. And where they haven't, they're usually very conservative and very insular.
Among the places I've lived, two used to have "community hubs" that died and were never replaced. College Park, MD, used to have a coffee shop called the College Perk in an old rambling house above a highway underpass. It closed down after an electrical fire. Cupertino, CA, used to have another place called Coffee Society. It was the kind of place where regulars met to play chess and have discussions. It closed several years and stands vacant to this day.
I found most of my friendships through the recurring faces/names that made it through to each new online/night class and we'd meetup every so often to talk classes, life, and more. Outside that, I just showed up to the same location on the same day and time and found many people doing similar where friendships formed.
While these are strong bonds as we still chat every other year, it's not an excuse to not have life change for the better. You don't need to find an alternative before moving forward, people will adapt to it just like I did.
Although I wish I had a traditional college experience, I didn't get that opportunity in life. I had to work to pay my tuition, books, and rent. That's because I valued not going into debt and getting a state school education.
In college, people are looking for friends.
Getting a bunch of young people together who pass some threshold for (generally) favourable behavioural and cognitive traits sounds like Huxley's A Brave New World, but this is essentially what University is. Maybe it is net negative for the progress of human civillisation (eg unhappy children of high stress/achieving/spoiling parents, echo chamber conformism, capture of high potential individuals into high status low potential jobs). But it is also plausible that this kind of partner selection leads to outlier intelligence in offspring, compared to selecting partners randomly or from geographic/social pools unenriched for achievement.
Friendships, like community, requires proximity. If you live where you grew up, it is easy to maintain the friendships you made in highschool. If you move to a city to go to school there, then take a job there, it is easy to maintain friendships with your friends that do the same. Work friends are more easily maintained while you work together, or at least work nearby afterwards and frequent the same recreational venues in your free time.
If you move around a lot, jobs and cities, it takes quite the effort to maintain friendships.
However, I have met lots of friends in the state I have lived in for the past 2+ decades. We go camping, play board games, do bbqs, go to movies, etc. together. So… I don’t know what the submitter is talking about.
I eye rollingly note that much of what is allegedly about opening horizons and minds ends up being “good old friend bonding” and sentimental alma-mater patter.
I’m not sure most folks ever leave the circles they make in college, much as folks who didn’t go to college tend to not leave high school groups.
I find this tendency to be an inbreeding factor that encourages “big fish in small pond” mentalities and parochialism.
Would that a lonesome study abroad led to bonding with different nations peoples, for the sake of leaving our nationalist naval gazing bubbles for the sake of world peace and international cooperation, but instead we bond with people ostensibly in the same sócio-economic basket.
Guess which one was better for making friends. That's right, it's the one where people are effectively sequestered for months at a time. At the big city school, so many of the people were just 'passing by' in some way. They're doing a semester here and then going back, or they're working in the city and taking classes p/t, or taking an elective as part of a pre-med program somewhere else...the list goes on.
However I met lots of artists and bohemians compared to the university demographic (art school on other side of the city) but I definitely feel the hit at this point in my career.
No regrets though, I had a lot of fun, learned a lot and am doing well now. Got to party with well known musicians in the city at that time.
I think I was too much of a sperg for dorm life anyway, much prefer the club scene and house/loft parties.
Exile meant loosing your friends and family network and I think we experience a mild form on this in current times (not nearly as bad)
I'd never made strong bounds at work, my friends are the same as I grew up but I'm still living in my hometown (except for brief periods of working outside) and a lot of them are also here, so it's easy to maintain that friendship.
I should also say I finished college a looooong time ago.
Face to face(rather than virtual) and high stress leads to greater reaction - either like or dislike depending on allegiance.
College studies are a stress. College kitchen debate - sometimes trite, sometimes rigorous, sometimes hilarious seeded a lot of friendships. But only seeded.
A fallibility for the sense of "belonging" in modern life is replacing "repeated physical presence at X time" with "virtual anytime".
To "replace" the college experience schedule something that puts people physically in a similar space, at a regular time, with a goal. (See also why some people make friends at work.)
I'm lucky to have the quantity and quality of friends I do have though.
I was lucky enough to have met my two current best friends in elementary/middle school and reconnect with them during high school. My closest friends right now are my high school friend group and my coworkers.
Those who served in the military (particularly conscription), or worked or did voluntary service overseas or in a remote location or just in a tight group of workers often make similar strong bonds.
I'm not sure I understand the reference to "before we get rid of colleges" but they are an expensive way of making friends.
What happens most of the times is that from every place I keep 1-2 people I'm really friends with and the rest stay in my extended network.
My closest friends are currently from my high school, from the startup scene in a place I lived 8 years ago and from a few employers in the past. None of them live near me.
My friends from college kind of disappeared.
They are in different industries, with partners and kids, and just doing their own thing. They've all sort of faded into background noise at this point. Every once and awhile I get a text message around the holidays from one or two of them.
Most of my friends these days are former coworkers and random people I've met gaming online over the years.
Even some non-believers recognize that church (or your religious gathering of choice) carries certain social benefits in terms of providing adults of all ages a regular intentional community with people from (hopefully) different backgrounds that's oriented around community service rather than consumerism.
Though like college, people's experiences vary dramatically.
Historically you were forced to do religion (by law or peer pressure) so it monopolized the role. But anything that you reasonably like doing will do. As long as you don't treat it like work and take it easy enough that you have time to socialize.
In my first 10 years post-college I was way tighter with four or five more college friends. But like so many others have noted here, they all moved to distant corners, got into their careers, and started families. All of our lives got full and we became less connected with time.
I've seen a great female gang from the University. But they were from random classes and the group held because they made quite some effort to maintain it.
I doubt colleges need to be kept for the friendship angle.
Most people in the US didn't go to college until very recently and the vast majority still don't graduate. Is it your belief that the majority of Americans simply didn't make lifelong friends and that college is the default solution?
That might be true, but apart from education, colleges offer lots of opportunities to make friends without explicitly trying to do that. You can make friends being self-taught, but you'll have to be proactive in going to social events because you won't be surrounded by like-minded people by default.
I'd also say that things like coding bootcamps or intensive language schools are fantastic places for making friends—largely due to the greater number of hours per day and the greater intensity of effort involved than in a typical college experience. Intense startups can also have this feature.
We can agree that teaching yourself, by yourself, at home being less likely to widen your social circle, though!
My professional relationships formed AFTER college are far stronger. I honestly don't hang or communicate with anyone I knew in college. I've tried but we simply don't have enough in common - I felt like I was doing all the work and so eventually I just dropped it.
We need more shared experiences. How can we help?
Outside education institutes, there aren't many places like that. Or at least we need to find them.
For IT, I reckon one would be co working spaces.
The 8 of us still talk daily, most of the rest on a monthly if not weekly basis. Still live in the city except for 1 who moved out West, but is still in touch with us at least weekly. Post graduation, we used to meet up 1-2x a week before the pandemic and during the pandemic outdoors, but have Steam nights at the same frequency. We always have a good time, always showing love for each other and each other's work. Always open and honest to each other's constructive criticisms/suggestions (regarding our personal and work projects) and there to support one an another. Which is of huge value, as in most of our cases it's rare to get that honest/altruistic insight in a work environment or situations where money and time is on the line.
The 8 of us alone are a mixed bag, but even more so the broader group. We range from introverts (myself included) to extroverts, male/female, many of us skaters, we look like the UN both in terms of ethnicity, origin, languages, but we're one fam. Some of us partied hard during our school years, some didn't at all but still attended/enjoyed parties, most of us were in moderation (my belief = work hard, then blow off steam but never to party too hard), but all of us were/are dedicated to our work and helping each other along the way.
Our professions range from animators/motionographers, plumbers, illustrators, devs, ux/ui designers, graphic designers, musicians, fashion designers, painters, doormen, game designers, marketers, critical/political theory writers, hospitality workers, photographers. Some work a mix of those by nature of our schooling, some by necessity, some focused on one skillset more than others.
Having this kind of diversity in our group is not only beneficial in the selfish sense of networking, but more so in opening up one's perspectives on life, the world, practices, general thinking, etc. And aside from the diversity, even though we're all different in some way we have this bond where we feel like we've found "our people" and that we've known each other our whole lives.
It all sounds corny, but really it's an incredible thing and something I'm more and more appreciative and grateful for with each passing day. Sure the debt sucks ass, but I wouldn't trade my friends, our love and respect for each other, and our experiences together for the world. We're family.
Surprisingly few, considering I have 20 years in the industry and spent 8 hours a day with some of these people.
You had a very different experience of university than I did.
A number of people I've met in this way (chatrooms, games, etc) I've actually come to work on real projects together with. Though at this point, considering how comfortable we are giving info about ourselves, I suppose the pseudonymity somewhat lifts itself away over time.
IMO, this is a Good Thing because it significantly reduces spam.
It's not like your phone number appears on your profile.