Hello, my next question is do you ever graduate your sims from college?

I used to but I found out that it's vary time consuming. AND? your graduated sim's job does not get a boost, anymore then teen sim, in the Sims 2 that has the required skills needed for a career boost, before they age up to adults. Also? I read somewhere that you can actually create dorms and have a college inside your primary Sim Neighborhood. and do not need to create a University Sub-hood at all.

in which can create hundreds of un-necessary sim character files onto your sims neighborhood folder. "in my own opinion" Not much of an issue, but from my own experience it is better to have less NPC's in your neighborhood so you can have your neighborhood last longer.

plus I use the "christainluv counterfeit diploma on MTS downloads "no link to avoid spamming this outt" to gain access to the University Careers in The Sims 2 University Life Expansion pack or The University Life Collection DVD also.)

Also I found out that if my teen sim has a job in The Sims 2, when they are a teen, and when they age up to adults. They sometimes will get promotion in the career they already was in as a teen sim. Anyway.

Thoughts?

College is my favorite part! The pace slows down and you can really get in-depth with the sims. Except in neighborhoods with special rules (historical neighborhoods, for example), every single one of my teens goes to college, where they develop skills and hobbies, make solid and diverse networks of friends, experiment, fall in love, discover new goals, have sometimes very complex character arcs and interpersonal dramas, and generally show me a good time. One thing i like to do is give teens a higher proportion of the "immature" aspirations (Popularity, Romance, and Pleasure) on growing up than I think is reasonable among the adult population, and pause at the beginning of Junior year to consider whether they've matured, or perhaps developed without maturing, in such a way as to justify a change to a more "mature" (Knowledge, Family, Fortune) aspiration, a different "immature" one, or the addition of a secondary without changing the primary. The junior-year aspiration change be part of long-term character arcs, which I love, or create knock-on drama. Carole, a Romance sim, rolled wants to get engaged to all her dates, and did go so far as to get engaged to one of them. Therefore, at junior year she changed to Family, with a Romance secondary; but I couldn't see any justification for changing her fiance Ty's Popularity aspiration. Family/Popularity is not a high-chemistry couple, and Popularity is the least ardent aspiration, in my experience. Will Carole's Romance secondary lead to her cheating on him? Should she break up with him? Should she marry him, let him go on his party-throwing way, and fill her six children want with six different lovers? You see how the possibilities gleam and glitter?

College graduates do get a bit of a career boost - at least they don't start at Level 1 in the career. I don't know how it compares to the starting levels of teens who continue a teen career, because the thing I think is a waste of time is teen careers. Teens have important dating and hanging out with their friends and party throwing and sibling-wrangling to do; teen careers just wear them out for a measly amount of money. Born-in-game sims who had free access to a xylophone as toddlers could make more busking and I'd get to watch them do it. I'm not much into adult careers, either, though I do use them when the sim's story calls for it. I prefer running businesses, freelancing, and farming as sources of income. It's not as if making a living is hard in the game. I have more important things for them to do - and University gives me plenty of time to do them.

I don't mind things taking a long time. What's the hurry? And it's not really all that long, anyway, once you've worked out a proportional rotation with the rest of the hood, and learned how to use community lots to your advantage. You can get through a semester lickety-split and see all kinds of good drama by editing the community lots to be worth visiting. (I agree that most of the maxis lots are not worth going to, much too large and without enough going on, but this is fixable.) Build some good date venues on campus, and your Romance and Pleasure sims will blast through those semester hours!

A lot of people don't like college, though, or don't like it enough to play it without mods, and as long as they're having fun, more power to them.

I used to find college to be such a slog until I made it possible for sims to get married and have kids on campus, and for adults to live on campus with their YA partners and still get jobs and have normal adult lives while the YAs continued to do college (as well as marriage, pregnancy, baby care, and all the other parts of adult life). Without those restrictions, college is just as fun as the main hood. Also, I like having a lot of townies available. It gives my sims more romantic options, and actually makes it possible for gay sims to satisfy the Eleventy Billion First Dates LTW without having to date people they aren't interested in. Dormies generated by universities are useful for that.

LOVE YOUR POST @Peni Griffin it's good to see you back on the forum

I've been gone away from here for about 6 or maybe 7 years a least.
I see exactly what you are saying. I actually used to love the college drama when I first got University Expansion back in 2005 for my birthday, it was fun

I now usually try to accomplish Sims Goals, and usually live an industrious lifestyle with the first generation than when the family gains more income I usually then go into business lifestyle, vacationing exploring lots and stuff like that, but I have not sent my sims to college in so many years though because I've lost so many neighborhoods due to all different kinds of issues in the past. I just don't want to put all that time into my sims and my neighborhoods only to lose another one,

I used to like to do that too but maybe again someday, when I am more confident about having a longer lasting neighborhood.

I appreciate that many players really enjoy university, but I most enjoy the generational aspect of the game and seeing how the families and the neighborhood develop over time, and I find that university slows me down and gets a bit repetitive. However, I like the "realistic" aspect of it in that it builds skills toward a career. In my more recent playthroughs, I have been experimenting with Lazy Duchess's Story Progression mod to have university without having to play it (you'll have to Google it--it's in beta right now, so use at your own risk). The mod has different folders for different aspects of story progression (pregnancy, relationships, jobs, etc.), and I took them all out but uni--I found the others to be too buggy or not what I wanted, tbh. But the mod is really cleverly designed to make it "modular" like that, so you can just keep the features you want.

When I'm ready to send my teens to university, I just put them in a dorm and play my regular families, and while I'm playing, they progress through a major, build skills, and eventually graduate without me having to do anything. Or sometimes the mod moves them to university for me--fair warning. They come back with all the skills they needed to get whatever degree they earned, which is chosen by the mod based on their interests. So far, this is working well for me. My teens "disappear" for a couple of rotations, and when they come back, they are adults that can be integrated into the neighborhood. I also use this to generate "townies" for my clean neighborhoods, as the playables in the university eventually graduate too, or teens from Bon Voyage or service teens will, if I add them. You can also toggle an option called generate YAs on and off, and this will graduate dormies, I think. You can turn it off whenever you want, so it's under your control how many you get. I turn anyone not from my main families into townies and sometimes they marry in and become part of my hood's story.

So that's one option if you don't like to play university but you still want your Sims to fulfill the want of going and build skills as if they had gone. But I would test it out in a hood that you don't care about first. It took me many iterations before I got the mod working how I wanted it to. Try it in a new Pleasantview. If you attach a university, it will send Dustin and Dirk within the first few days of playing that neighborhood, so you can see how it works.

One thing I did discover about this mod: You have to have playables living in dorms or houses in university for the mod to automatically send your teens to uni. So if your university is empty, teens will not be sent until you send them. But if you attach one of the three universities that comes with the game, it will just put your teens in one of the houses where there are already playables living. When they graduate, I think they move back in with the family member who they have the highest relationship with, usually their parents. If they don't have a relationship with anyone, they show up in the Sim bin.

I don't like taking the kids out of the neighborhood for college, so I started with John Swanson of TT to go to college from home. That way he keeps in touch with his mother and her new husband, and friends as well. He can study and skill at home-with no need to do anything with a college campus. Because he was the only Young Adult in the entire neighborhood, I was able to play him as much as the other households, using Squinge's hack for college at home.
I finally figured out how to graduate him and make him into an adult, so the process will be much easier with the next batch of TT kids, coming up in another 3/4 years.

I don't understand why people think moving to a college subhood detaches them from the main hood. They can still visit their families, go on dates, go shopping, and join outings in the main hood, and they can invite their families and friends to campus. They can make a casual group of teen friends and take them on a campus tour! Their little siblings call them all the time! Sometimes family members drop in unannounced, though that mostly happened in Drama Acres, so who knows? They can go to Twikkii for spring break! Of course they mostly want to hang on campus because it's designed around their needs (if you've adapted the lots, especially), but think about it - did you spend all your time on campus when you were in college? You did not! If you don't have a downtown, when date friends call for a follow-up outing, you can pick which hood or subhood you want to go to, so you can take random outings of adults, teens, children, and YA to campus hotspots, which is often very amusing. There's even a mod which allows non-YAs to show up on college lots, but when I added it once I found that main hoodlums swamped dormies on community lots, which spoiled the point of having a campus for me, so I took it out. Some people like it, though, and of course it's possible it would have worked better if I'd fiddled with it somehow.

Playing University is not like playing the main hood - but that's a feature, not a bug. You have to shift gears to make the most of it. I don't like playing the same thing on every lot, often having completely different rulesets from household to household, so having University do it for me is a nice break.

My college rules vary from hood to hood, and over time within hoods, but generally speaking there is a college subhood that Sims can attend if they meet the requirements (that is, if they have good enough grades, are from the right families, and/or can afford the fees). I use Cyjon's Semester Changes, so college is 8 days rather than 24. In some hoods, though, Independent Teens move to a barracks to do their national service, so those who go to university do so just before they become adult, giving them 8 extra days.

Personally, I think the main benefit of college is that it gives young Sims time to work on their relationships. Sometimes I will play a large co-ed dorm and run it on triple speed most of the time (except for instructing Sims to study when they roll wants for it), so my Sims can work on whatever relationships seem good to them. I've had some unexpected but very successful pairings that way.

College in the vanilla game does give a huge career boost, with Sims sometimes entering their chosen career at Level 7 or 8. I have one of Pescado's mods to stop that, though, because at one point I had everyone going to college and making the Dean's List every semester, and it got a bit boring. Teen Sims generally only seem to go up to Level 3 when they become adults; certainly in Sedona they all become Foremen and I have to use the SimBlender to demote them, or I'd have nobody mixing concrete and laying bricks to build the town.

I just wish Maxis had thought through which careers, and even which levels of careres, should need a degree and which wouldn't, though.

Sometimes it's hard to tell when is a teen sim, compared to a young adult, because the voice is the exact same, only difference is, you can develop of physical relationship with an adult sim and a young adult sim, if you want and sometimes even marry them or move them into a regular household, with the consequences having that sim skipping graduation.

I also don't like how YA NPC in the sims 2 all start off as Freshmen when you add them to your college household and you can only graduate one sim at a time in The Sims 2.

Some may take this a whining but it's just one of my main complaints about the Sims 2 University. I only have University Installed for the buyable Cell Phones an the buyable band instruments.

Yes You Can buy cell Phones only on community lots in The Sims 2 ONLY IF you have The Sims 2 University or The full The Sims 2 University Life Collection Installed..




But If your teen sim has the needed career skills when they age up you can get a level 7 job anyway, don't forget children and toddlers can also build skill points to pre-plan ahead, no need for college unless you want to unlock those 5 careers, but that is why I use that cheat object because I just don't want to do 24 days of YA Sims 2 life at the moment. You NEED both the SKILLS AND the household FRIENDS in order to do the for an aging teen to adult sim though.

because my own real life will also not last forever either

Like Peni I am a college lover. So much so that I've modded university to be longer than vanilla cause I want more time there. I can see why some people don't like it, but for my playstyle college is wonderful. In my younger days my playing was pretty goal focused, reach top of career, max skills, do all BV memories etc, which I imagine is why I also got extremely bored with a household after a week or two and never touched it again. Then one day I started a Sim family that actually managed to keep my interest, and from that one family I learned to enjoy the game in different ways than before. Now goals are pretty non-existent. It's all about story-telling. When I was a kid I would tell people I wanted to be an author when I grew up, and now as an adult I channel that side of me into Sims. It's therapy and creative release all baked into one wonderful package. I play out different stories from my life, and explore the roads I did not go down, or re-write the history in a more satisfying way to get closure. Or do stories completely unrelated to me, that I just think are interesting. But all of it is based in our world and the human experience, and college is a part of a lot of peoples lives.

College is such a great place for Sims to experiment and for me to get to know them better and focus on figuring out who they are. Because back at home most of them are living with parents or other Sims in some constellation so my focus is split between all the different Sims in the household. In college I am able to give them more focused attention, which is a lot of fun. I do college in all kinds of ways. Some go to campus, some stay in the main hood. Some will go adult first, and then decide to do college later in life (yay mods making it possible to do such things). It all depends on what makes sense for that particular Sim and their life experience and personality. Some are the type that would absolutely want to live in a dorm and have social things going on around them at all times, some I think are like me and want their own space. I have dorms, private houses and apartments on my campuses. Some Sims will stay with siblings, some will stay with friends, some will get roomies, some will go solo. Some will have jobs while at uni, while others just focus on having fun. Some will join a greek house or pursue the secret society, and others will date around. The possibilities are endless!

Sims that stay on campus will frequently visit main hood or other subhoods, I don't keep them on campus all the time, because that would get boring. I have added a fair amount of custom community lots on campus, but main hood is a lot more developed in terms of what's available so they go there for some things. And so much of their social life is in the main hood, it's fun to change things up and see different faces as well. I also like sending them on vacation, because I love BV-hoods and it's fun to simulate spring break type things like Peni suggested.

My advice for anyone that wants to get into college more is don't care so much about grades. They don't really matter in the Sims-verse. Experiment with housing options and what your Sims do. If you went to college yourself take inspiration from the kinds of people you met, or that you've seen in books or movies. I also think it's worth investing in some fun dormies, to be the background extras that add life to your campus.

I started out with BG+Uni (and NL), and one of the first more long-term families I played was one I started up with two of the playables from one of the University sims, who hooked up while at Uni. I used to send my sims to Uni back in the days when I played more family-style, but haven't in several years because I had other things to focus on. Kinda miss it a little bit, though. It was quite fun.

My sims used to be very focused on schoolwork (and dating ). I mostly saw it as an opportunity to build some extra skill points, because then they'd jump up on the career ladder a bit faster (my sims would have more than enough juggling kids and other responsibilities after Uni, so skilling up wouldn't be as prioritized unless it was skilling they could do while cooking or doing other useful stuff).

And they can still go on a family vacation together

Often. Some go to uni, some do college from their parents home and others move to their own tiny flat or share a home.



No need for that, there are plenty of ways to mod college.
Mine is 8 days + two days extra either for enjoying themselves or for academic probation. All my young adults get 10 days whether they do uni or not.




I'm confused by what you mean. The vanilla game set up is to start college grads at a very high-level in their career, something I find very unrealistic. Sadly for them, my sims must start at level 1, college or no college. No free rides.



Yes if you want. But you don't have to create dorms. I mean you can if you want and use Lions Gold record but I don't, I use squinge's college pack. I leave dorm experience for the actual uni sub hood.



Not in my game they won't. Some NPC's are fine, they are not going to do anything to your neighbourhood, but less is always good. No one needs 2 profs per class.
I much prefer to use a custom uni. I use Brainiana by matilda for Coral Bay, it made 8 dormies, hardly a killer dose. If you really want you can make empty ones, but that is kind of dead.

What will help your hood live longer is not doing any VBT and running Hood Checker often.



That is one way of gaining access to them.



Vanilla gameplay they should, level 3 I think? I still make them start at level 1.

I also play young adults who do no uni at all, that is also an option. This is why I love this game, its very modaable.

HERE IS A DETAILED EXPLANATION ON CHILD AND TEEEN SIM PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SCHOOL EDUCATION:

PUBLIC FOR TEEN AND CHILDREN:

It is not realistic but you can do it, I have all expansion stuff and patches, and I can, and I do whenever possible, every sim is programmed differently, some sims require more care than others, (for example) some Sim Children AND EVEN TEENS SOMETIMES cannot do any homework on their own, and require their parents to help them more often then others, depending on the sim in question.

It's always a good idea to make sure ALL Child Sims learn to study from their parents to avoid a educational disaster, in the neighborhoods future. And to ensure your sims, can get the best out of the public schools, I never use Private Schools because that headmaster is too darn picky and sometime "when I invited him over to my home" he would just come to "the front" my sims home and a car and then drive off, right away it happen before to me.

If you don't use the 1st generations to educate your child sims on their homework at least once. ALL THE SIM CHILDREN AND TEENS will then need help "on their homework EVERY SINGLE TIME Every Single Weekday or non snow day.


All Babies Toddler and ALL CHILDREN if ANY child brings a F report card home due to this homework thing not getting done in full. That Social worker will come by and take all three youngest types of Sims away from your current household, but you can plea if you have your asperation settings set up properly though. IF they come home from school with F on report card take your ALL you kids away. Also Sims mood effects how well a sim does on both homework and schooling hours

But the game lets your teens fail, with the only consequence as far as I know you will get instantly fired from your teens job.

PRIVATE SCHOOLS:

All I know is rumor's in the air, about sims in The Sims 2 gaining skills for acing in private schools instead of money prizes your sims can earn from the public school educational system. and you can get an extra cushion if in case your sims fail in private school your teen or child will only get kicked back into the public school system if they fail in private school I think.

I don't think I ever had any issues with that. Could be some mods interfering, maybe? Make sure you don't invite him over too late or early in the day. You have to run him through some spesific tasks until you've collected enough points - Some tips here: https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Game_g..._private_school

Some info about pros/cons of private school: https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/SimCity_Academy

I used to do the headmaster scenario a lot. It's easy enough to get a high score once you do the right things, and sometimes you don't even need to do everything on the list.

Maybe Pescado's mod that prevents graduates from starting at higher levels prevents that too, then, because my teen-to-adult Sims are never promoted higher than Level 3. Some of them have the skills and family friends to get promoted every time they go to work for the first few days, but they have to go to work to move up one level at a time.

With Cyjon's Semester Changes, my Sims only do 8 days of YA, and I usually send them immediately they become independent teens, so they have the same lifespan whether they go to college or not. Those who do go to college have more time to skill and make friends, so they rise through the ranks faster than those who don't.

Cyjon also has one called Educayshun Iz Gud (something like that; it's misspelled on purpose), which limits how high a Sim can go in their career according to how well they did in school - so a Sim who left school with an F is kept in the lower levels while those who do better can rise higher. I don't use it, though, because it applies to all careers, and I feel success in athletics, music and one or two others should not depend on academic achievement.

I am even more confused as to what this has to do with my post. I thought we were talking about young adults and uni.

As to children and school I use the games public school and I use Simlogical school. Mostly flexi and prep school although I have tried boarding school (didn't like it) as well.

Baby and toddlers are not going to school. Poor baby with an F report card!

There are homework mods, I use homework sometimes which as it says means they only get homework sometimes. I also use summer holidays so they have summer off. You can also change the grade on a variety of mods like the sim manipulator. If you use flexi school your child never needs to go to school or do one lick of homework-very useful for medieval time or if you want to play sims on a deserted island.

This is why I said this game is highly moddable, you never have to feel boxed into a decision that the game tries to make for you -change it.

No way do I send babies and toddlers to school LOL, I was talking about when IF even One Child has an F the social worker take ALL the kids away in the entire household, sorry for the confusion, i was editing that post over and over again I could not get the words out right or stay exactly pinpointed on the topic sorry,

Only if you let them. Like I said, mod, mod, mod.

Use the college adjuster or sim manipulator to change their grade.
and or use a mod to stop the social worker.

I make this game play how I want it to play, not how it wants to play.

I have plenty of subhoods, but I rarely send sims there.

Speaking of the social worker you CAN adopt your sims basically unto another family in the neighborhood one by one. "According To What I Read Somewhere" BUT IF? they ever do get taken away from one family by the social worker, I am uncertain IF, re-adopting that sim would cause neighborhood corruption or not though. because technically speaking an adopted NPC from the adoption agency by default becomes, the new parents child whoever adopts them. AND this to me would sound like an un-tested portion of the game

Will re-adapting a child toddler or baby in another household, leave the birth parents the same or will the game attempt to re-write the entire relationship panel once you bring them into another household that has enough money in order to give the orphans a new home in the neighborhood.. This might be dangerous though thoughts?

Ok so after doing some DEEP research it turnes out that all adopted children toddlers have all their memories wiped clean, now wouldn't THAT cause some serious Neighborhood Corruption Errors?
https://modthesims.info/t/517707

No, no corruption from adoption.

I mostly adopt kids from my own playable orphanage but vanilla game adoption is fine.

I can help you with that one It annoyed me too, so I made a mod which limits promotions depending on the sim's education level. Link.

University used to irritate me too, mostly because I always did the same thing. I'm now experimenting a bit more, and really enjoying it. I have a 48 hour semester mod, which I find shortens the time nicely without making it too short, and play twice as many days on campus as in the rest of the neighbourhood each rotation (I also have a 2days = 1 year age mod). I don't send every sim, though I have sent most - Ginger Thanasia-Newson didn't go, because she had a townie boyfriend who wasn't going and she wanted to stay with him (I don't send townies). Amanda Thanasia (aka Alien Subject) won't be going, because she's more interested in cheese than anything else right now.

On the whole, whether a sim goes to university depends on their aspiration - Knowledge and Fortune sims always go, Popularity and Romance sims usually go (but might not if there's something to keep them away), Family and Pleasure sims usually don't go (but might if there's something - or someone - to take them there), and Cheese sims have to be seriously persuaded to go.

I graduate a fair number of my students, though less than I'd like because I strongly prefer 24-hour sessions for the same household (which means on vanilla I'd need 24 sessions to graduate one Sim). The solution, for me, is that I make the length of semester dependent on what grades the student has - which in turn depends on their priorities for their time at university. 4.0 students get the whole 72 hours per semester, whereas students who have less than 1.0 cumulative GPA get only 24 hours (you can imagine how much drama that injects into a student who's on academic probation!) This is all facilitated by a Semester Clock mod (an old one from MATY), which allows me to set different per-student semester lengths. I consider this to be perceived amount of time rather than a strict reflection of the Sim's aging changing.

There's a variety of goals Sims may have at SimHampton University. Apart from the obvious studying, dating and going out to have fun, there's also something of a tradition of founding Greek Houses. The Newson fraternity is the only one with any consistency, although at the moment no fraternities are open because the University only recently reopened after being on hiatus for a while (long story). However, nobody's allowed to join a fraternity until they've finished Freshman year. There is, however, a faith training centre on campus which can be joined at any time for people doing appropriate majors. A few students continue commercial businesses they started as teens.

Some students don't go. This is because SimHampton University (the only option) is selective. It's currently in a more "accessible" mode by my standards... ...meaning you have to have an A- to get in, and then be randomly selected*. It's made tougher because if an A student is selected, the non-playable teenager they like best also gets to go to university, and an A+ student can bring the two teenage non-playables they like best (assuming, in both cases, that they have a daily relationship of at least 1 with any teenage townies). Partly it's a reward for teens who study (they get to keep more of their social circle intact) and partly it's to counterbalance potential grade inflation for particular exam sessions. Only 8 teens can attend per recruitment round. This means that even some scholarly teens are invariably disappointed, let alone the ones who don't chase high marks.

There is no set age when students go to university - if SimHampton University thinks you're ready, you can be 11 or 25 (which is what I imagine the boundaries of the Teen age to be). There are special rules for adults/elders to get degrees, but they don't go to university - they just get (some of) the associated rewards. There are 2 careers which I treat as scholarships to study full-time at SimHampton University (for arts or science subjects depending on which career) and partway through that, they are treated as graduates (the top level treats them as professors with Masters degrees, which at SimHampton University are conflated with PhDs and entitle holders to the "Prof." prenominal). Some jobs (e.g. being a doctor) should require degrees but aren't coded as such; in-game, I consider such a Sim to have successfully obtained the relevant degree with their employer's backing while working at the previous level(s) of work. Also, anyone who is friends with a Criminal with a history as a Forger can pay $5000 to have a fake degree and have all systems updated to prevent all but the savviest police from detecting the crime. (If it is detected, the forger carries all the risk of prison - requesting fake official documents is not a crime, but producing them is).

* - In-game, the random selection is to simulate performance on the university-entrance SUET exam, that every teen takes once a recruitment round (whether they care about going to university or not, because it also doubles as the only school exam). It's a 4-hour exam, with 11 small sections each set by a different university department. There's a compulsory 1-hour supervised outdoor play break 90 minutes into the exam session. Teenagers who aren't interested in the exam, have run out of questions they feel they can attempt or just plain finish early are encouraged to doodle, write or otherwise find something fun to do with the (blank) backs of the exam pages without breaking exam regulations (leaving early isn't allowed). All children and any teachers not needed to invigilate the exam go on a field trip, so that the exam isn't disturbed and to ensure everyone gets a school day off formal lessons. In-game, the A- boundary is because a student not getting such grades is unlikely to understand the material well enough to pass so many subjects, but out-of-game it's to make sure students were actually in school on the day they were due to take the exam!