University life has changed. Gone are the unhurried days when it was as much about social learning as it was about the academic kind. Modern students still crave interaction, but have arrived at uni at a time when that is much harder to achieve. A challenging job market, online learning options, more intense courses, high cost of living and huge student populations have created an environment in which they are more likely to feel isolated than connected. Today's students still go to campus, but they use their time purposefully. Manning Bar might be empty, and club fees might have been scrapped to prop up membership of the clubs such as the Society for Creative Anachronism (medieval re-enactment), the dramatic society, and the Quidditch Club, but Sydney Uni's Courtyard Cafe is thriving during the lunch timeslot that used to be dominated by theatre sports. "It's about catching up for lunch with friends, rather than just a place to hang out, which I understand Manning was," Franki says. "People tend to only stay on campus if they have a reason, they just don't take for granted the idea of hanging out." On campus at the University of Sydney. That's partly because they don't have to. There's no need for students to kill time until an afternoon lecture, when they can watch lectures online at home and potentially get more out of them. "You can pause lectures, rewind them, and then come to university for the tutorial," says one senior UNSW academic. "In the future, [old-style] lectures will disappear." A longer commute to campus is another disincentive to spending time there. Suburbs around Sydney's top universities - such as Chippendale, Newtown, and Coogee - have become gentrified, and self-funded students can no longer find an affordable, rundown terrace within walking distance.

University life has also become more stressful. As degrees become more common (in 1996, only 16 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds had a university qualification; in 2018, that had jumped to 40 per cent) their value in the job market has decreased, so students have to work harder to stand out. "In the old days, you only needed to worry about your grades in third year," says the UNSW academic. "These days, the fact you got into uni doesn't mean that you are going to get a job." University of Sydney vice-chancellor Michael Spence. Credit:James Brickwood When Sydney University was developing its new curriculum a few years ago, it discovered that employment rates for students with three-year degrees were, in the words of Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence, "tanking". "Even students who had distinction averages were doing worse in employment outcomes than students who were here for four years," says Dr Spence. "We talked to some employers who said they didn't even look at the CVs of people who'd only been to university for three years." When he asked why, they said it was about maturity. "You seem to get a more mature finished product after four years than you get after three years," he says. "There's a lot of growing up you do between 17 and 21." In a tough job market, extra-curricular activities are less about socialising than CV curation. "[Students are] much more purposeful in their engagement with extra-curricular activities," says Spence. He cites the case of a student who graduated with first-class honours in aeronautical engineering and a prize for his thesis, and had also run an online business that involved manufacturing in China, helped raise $1 million as part of a philanthropy project, and worked for 18 months as a fully-fledged finance analyst.

"He'd apply for graduate programs, and would get some interviews but not all of them," said Dr Spence. "There were lots he didn't get. You'd say, 'what do you need to do to get a job these days?' He said, 'every kid at uni has their own online business, everyone has founded a charity'. That's part of the reason people are being much more purposeful." Loading Spence believes on-campus experience is key to a university's competitiveness in a tough global market. But creating a so-called "sticky campus" is going to be a challenge for Australian institutions. When student numbers were smaller, it was easier to mix with people from different backgrounds. But enrolments at Sydney Uni, for example, have ballooned from about 38,000 in 1999 to more than 60,000 this year. "Increased social stratification and big institutions mean people tend to come to university and mix with people they went to high school with," Spence says. Recent focus groups with 700 students found many reported both social isolation and an unfulfilled desire to meet people at university who are different to them. "Learning how to disagree with [others], how to navigate difference, that's not happening as much on Australian university campuses as we think it should be," says Spence. "So we've got a whole strategy that started this year for thinking about, 'how do you more deliberately ensure people encounter 'the other', for want of a better word, at university?"