You can tell the developers for University Life are just a bit older than me, because streaking was a fad (particularly but not exclusively at colleges) when I was in junior high or high school. We lived a few blocks from the local university's dorms (small university; only two dorms, high rises on the edge of campus) and during the height of it we could hear the cheering every night as the streakers dashed across the plaza between the buildings, dodging campus security, who were singularly inept at catching them. (Probably because campus security had no desire to spoil the fun.) Streakers were almost always male students, at least at ASU. You could tell when a female student ran the gauntlet because the cheering was much louder.

This was a lot less obnoxious than the frat house (a very tiny frat house; a single story ranch house!) that was much nearer to my home. They somehow got hold of an old steam whistle and would fire it up and let it off during parties in the wee hours of the morning.

Although I have heard of reassembling small cars in rooms, a much more common (or at least commonly referenced) traditional prank is to perch a faculty member's car on the highest available roof. Long before my time, the Model T Ford was the pranked car of choice, because they were so common, and so many young men were shade tree mechanics and intimately familiar with them, that the expertise required to conduct any necessary disassembly/reassembly in order to convey the car to the desired location quietly and in the dark was easy to come by. Many hands made light work of mechanical pranks in those days, before car companies decided to make their cars too hard for laymen to work on.

The selection of pranks in this game is far too limited.

I've set some soft limits on who can attend the campus even when it's a public school as I don't think that any kids who just barely passed in the local schoolhouse as a child or kid would be able to handle high school and they used to have high school enterance exams in the earlier part of the 20th century to detemine who was even qualified to attend high school and that was determined by if you passed that exam or failed which meant school was over for you and it was time to start looking for a job.

The TS2 university does not look at all like the university I attended, but I like it anyway - it's "Amerika", after all. I love life in dormitories because it is fun, pesky mascots and streakers (good old times) included; houses less so, unless you have at least three (or possibly more) people living in them. I did try out sororities and frat houses but never really played them; I've never had any interest in Secret Society.
My two main peeves:
- getting better grades by sleeping with professors: it's realistic but unethical. I tried to find a mod for it a while ago but could not.
- stinking students. Every now and then I get a nervous breakdown, make them playable and pack them off to the nearest showers.

There's nothing autonomous about romancing professors for grades. What would you need a mod for?
I don't think woohooing a professor outside of one's subject does your grade any good, anyhow, and the only professors it's really easy to cultivate a relationship with are the drama professors. So outside of drama students it's not going to happen without the player's conscious collusion. Or, I suppose, ACR, which is so complex and variable a mod, I would think that if a setting doesn't already exist for blocking professor/student woohoo, it should be possible to create one.

I do have options to have students living in the town and doing high schooling from home as well though a Mod I've had in my game for a long time that opens up those options in case any kids want to coninue their education beyond middle school level when the town isn't quite ready for adding a high school campus as the population is still too small.I haven't seen much romance betweeen students and the teaching staff and not much of that happens between the students themselves if they're not already close friends though two best friends might eventually start to get into romance though it might be after graduating or in their break time.

Wasn't there some glitch that made Drama Professors fall in love with everybody? Maybe they mean that?

No, that's not a glitch I believe it was an intentional choice. If you look at a drama professor's character file there is an additional BHAV that causes this relationship "feature." Seems it was a joke about drama professors being, well, dramatic. Any time a drama professor meets a sim it sets their relationship to said sim to 100/100 with the love, crush, and best friends flag. There are various mods that change this BHAV such as "no lecherous drama profs" by BO, "drama prof fix add on" by MidgeTheTree, "drama professor/met self fix" by pescado, "met self fix" by cyjon, etc for example. I believe the 4t2 traits project also modifies this same BHAV, so be careful using multiple mods that deal with professor behavior.

Right, you can bang a drama professor at the drop of a hat - chat the relationship up to BF on the student's side, one flirt to set the flags, the drama professor will always accept romantic interactions. None of which does you a damn bit of of good if you're not a drama student. Bad News Beverly once woohooed a handy professor and all she got out of it was her expected C and a cheap stove date reward, because she was studying Art and it wasn't an Art professor.

I've recently figured out an excellent mix of mods with which I am really enjoying Sims 2 University.
- LazyDuchess' mod that allows you to configure the chances of whether a Sim will pass or fail their exam, which is customizable by degree
- 8-day college
- Mod that stops time from passing when YAs are on community lots
**These two mods combined work really well for me in terms of how long Sims do or don't spend at university**
- Lamare's mods that allow pregnancy/marriage at university

If I could redesign from scratch:
- YA, Adult & Elders could go to college
- Degrees would each be unique and require specific things to be accomplished by sims, rather than just skilling and getting the grade metre up.
- I would like them to go to class. Not all classes are lectures. I'd love to see labs & experiments, theatre classes, group projects. Instead of assignments essentially being homework, they would have to do presentations, etc.
- I wish there were sports matches. There are mascots and cheerleaders, but wouldn't you love to see actual competitions and stuff.
-

If you went to University of Texas, that was my dad and his buddies in the co-op they lived in (so not exactly a dorm room) in the 1960s. (I expect they weren't the only ones: if it seemed like a good idea to one bunch of college men, it probably seemed like a good idea to lots of them.) Can't do that nowadays: cars don't come apart and go back together with a wrench and WD-40 so easily anymore.

For me, college is the place to put a whole generation of teens for them to experiment with "romance", find out if they are gay/bi, generally mess around with everyone, and (especially for Family Sims) find True Love. It's still only tolerable due to mods: shorter semesters, banning professors, etc. And the cow head wall hanging that has a funny effect. But for my jerk Sims, I have to really work at making them NOT get great grades, or flunk out. But who wants to play "reality" college, with all the stress of real study and projects. ALSO: before college they can get "scholarships" but don't take the money to college. And when they leave college they don't take the money they earned with them. But then, college shouldn't pay them for good grades, they should be racking up a huge bill for college. But I think there are mods that do that

@grammapat Teens going to college should have their scholarship money. When you use the tool at university to age up teens, teens without scholarships get $500. Teens with scholarships get $500 plus any scholarships they were awarded when they appliws.

If that isn't happening, you have have a mod conflict of some kind.

Mods to being home the money, or to have money from their parents, are required.

Perhaps let the sims the time to study and to have a private life and a social life on the side, as going to the coffee shop or practise a sport. All they do is studying, starving and sleeping on floors, and most of them go to the final on Pyjama or on Undies.
Go to the lessons, interacts on lessons time, and let a young adult stay a young adult if they don't want to go to university .
Well all I want is to be a young adult in this game, make friends, having drama, love affair, University is not only a place to study.

Studying, starving and sleeping on floors - none of my sims do these You need to change the way you play uni imho if this happens.

Most people complain that college is too slow and shorten the time, so I don't think giving them more time vanilla would have gone over well. One of the reasons University is my favorite expansion is that the pace does slow down and I do get to splash out and do a lot of deep character exploration, lots of social life, experimentation, self-discovery, lay a real foundation for the opportunity to change aspirations mid-way: is this sim, on maturation, really a Pleasure sim, and if not, what are they really? Has this sim dated around enough to satisfy those Romance urges and channel that libido into a Family aspiration? Has this Fortune sim learned to loosen up and earned a Pleasure secondary? Has this sim, who thought she was locked into her family's political legacy, found herself to be, at heart, an artist and chosen to pursue that dream? Does this sim have new things to discover about their gender expression and sexuality, their self-worth, their responsibilities, or any of the other stuff that people only really have a chance to discover once they leave home and are out on their own, free of pressures and expectations they never even noticed before? University is the ideal place to ask such questions and set up future development, establish new patterns, make new friends and enemies, and generally do a lot of stuff that the pace of the main hood is too rushed to do satisfactorily. Once their grade bar is white, and particularly after it's full up, I can (and will!) block them from going to class if there's more important stuff to do, which there almost always is.

And if it's too slow for you: improve/build new community lots and take your sims there to do things, only bringing them home to sleep. LucieSims is the only person I've ever heard complain that it went too fast!

Guess I just wasn't paying enough attention to see that their scholarship money went to the college. Still, they "want" to leave thousands of dollars at college when the graduate. So I do some "stealing"; putting expensive stuff in their inventory before they graduate. "Oh, that piano? How did that get in my pants.."

If you mouse over the teen in the family bin, you can see how much money they brought with them. They will have it on them when they move in, minus whatever it may have cost them to get into the residence. If you take a sim with $2500 in scholarships and move them into a dorm, they arrive at the dorm with $2500; if you move them into an existing household, $2500 are added to the household expenses; if you move them into a $2000 unoccupied residence, they arrive with $500.

When they move out, vanilla, if they are the only sim in the household their accumulated money vanishes (and buying stuff to store in inventory to sell on arrival is the accepted way to deal with this), unless it's more than the $20K handout. If they move and leave someone else in the household, however, their money remains with the household. This is how Alma Mater House in Drama Acres SSU became wealthy, and how you get your Greek houses to be extra fancy. Over time, those scholarships and accumulated grants add up! With a mod, sims in multi-sim households can have the option to take a designated share of accumulated cash at graduation or leave it behind and accept a $20K handout, which allows the player to declare certain sims "trust fund babies" and produce money from assumed wealthy families, while other sims graduate with only what they have scrimped and saved out of their college expenses.

There is a mod that allows Sims to get scholarships at 5 skill points (it was made for me by Gummilutt! Link to the post on my tumblr below)

If you don't want your sims to max out all their skills before adulthood, this still allows them to get some scholarships. I also have a mod that doubles the amount of time it takes to earn skills to go with my longer lifespans.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/d132344...abf5b9e525d.pnj

There is no right or wrong way of playing University in sims 2, you don't play with crowded dorms if your sims is always in green mood. In mine it was boring to death. I wanted to avoid to isolate my sims , to enjoy the dorm atmosphere, crowded, full of life. I also forgot their obsession of playing on computer SSX3.
This EP is a catastrophy, now I avoid to play it.
But I don't critize the way people plays, people do what they want with their game. just criticize how cheap this EP is because the topic of the conversation is what we want differently for the Univ EP in ts2. (this conversation could help modders to have inspiration perhaps?)

There's no "wrong" way to play but there is variation in skill levels. I know I play better now than I did when I started!

I do in fact play with crowded dorms (I love big households! Always something going on, and when one sim needs to spend a lot of time skilling or sleeping there's always someone else to get up to Drama with) and my sims are always in green moods or better. It's always been very rare for my sims to go into the red for anything but the death of a love one. But I started with the original The Sims, where meeting needs is much harder, and many of the basic mechanics were already familiar to me, so my learning curve on this game may not have been as steep as yours. Also I went through a deliberate learning period, adding one disc at a time and playing experimental "nothing that happens matters" games to try out the new mechanics, whereas most people who start nowadays start with the UC because that's what's available to them, and that must be overwhelming!

Perhaps someday when you have more experience you will decide to return to University and discover ways to play it that are more rewarding to you. Or you may find mods that make it fun - many people run community colleges in the main hood, which might suit your current playstyle better. The longer you play, the more you discover, and people often change how they enjoy the game over time. Its endless flexibility is one of its greatest strengths. But even many experienced people do find University a drag, which I am convinced is usually a matter as treating it as a grind, something to get through in order to get back to the "important" stuff in the main hood. I think grinding is always the wrong way to play anything, because it's no fun, and if you're not having fun in a game, you should be doing something else! University, like vacations and owned businesses, are best enjoyed as their own thing rather than as a means to an end.

One thing the developers did mess up on - they did not dress the students at LFT properly at all! ALT and SSU are implied to be temperate zones, so I can live with how they're dressed, but LFT is implied to be in the American Southwestern desert, where it is hot and dry constantly, apart from about six non-continuous weeks between October and February. They should be wearing shorts, flip flops, tank tops, and sundresses! The cows and llamas on that campus must be in constant danger of heat stroke.

When I first started to play Veronaville, my intention was to play it as a "nothing that happens matters" game till I gained some experience. After that I thought Pleasantview would probably become my main game. In practice it took about one Sim hour for me to fall head over heels in love with both Andrew and Gloria. Those Sims I had made and the game they were in just blew me away. The pleasure of of playing the game they were in far, far exceeded all my expectations. I expected a bit of fun with some animated pixels. I found myself totally immersed in a new world full of fascinating and adorable characters. I find it hard to imagine a future for myself that doesn't include the Sims I love. My life would be much impoverished without them.

I love having Mod options that allow me to pause the semester clock to give them a break so they can spend time catching up on skills or gaining friends if that's their preference and they have time to attend parties if they want that or to hang out and just have fun and still not flunk out unless they get too careless.I love having the choice to make semesters longer or shorter as you wish.

I struggle with vanilla University gameplay and rotational play. You play your main hood families, then you send your teens to university and you have to play all YAs in a separate bubble, for 27 days!! If you actually played in proper day to day rotation, all their parents would be dead before they returned to the main hood and none would be married or have kids or anything.
I'm much happier now that I have mine spending up to 6 years away, but no more, with the option of making their time longer or shorter.
Also, the mod that makes time on community lots not affect the time to the exam actually allows time to make sense to me there, which is the opposite of in normal lots where I need community time count so a Sim on a date doesn't get home until they are supposed to

I send them camping to take a break

@LucieSims - of course there is no right or wrong way to play Sims - but there are plenty of ways to play it without having your sims - whether they are at Uni or not - do the same things over and over again. And, as a person who has played this game without ANY mods for years, and still only use less than most, it has been simply a question of finding out the various options the game itself has to offer.

One can just send a sim to Uni, leave him in a dorm full of dormies and get through every day by watching him and make him study. Which is what I did when I first played - and it was boring. But then I found that I can put all my students in one dorm I found that they can skill on community lots I found that I could send them on vacation - cheap, camping, - in order to take a break. I found that it is fun to have their family members in the main hood inviting them home for lunch or dinner. I also found that i really don't like Greek houses (many other players do) - so now, there aren't any Greek houses in my Uni hoods.

I use a Mod to give them frequent breaks and they can go for a vacation or just have a break from classes for a while to catch up on skills and on their studies while still having time to explore other things about high school.I still remember having to race the clock to get their grades up having no time for anything else with having to play it vanilla on my olc computer.