The day was marketing heaven. The university's clubs and societies were drowned out by gimmicks such as Lipton Ice Tea's lie-detector test and Nova radio's competition offering $5000 towards HECS fees. Agents selling inner-city apartments and nightclub promoters competed for students' attention. The lines for free food snaked around the lane, but there was a suspicious absence of a warm can of VB as a reward for patience. Maybe it is just baby boomer - or now generation X - nostalgia for a romanticised past where the beer and good times flowed, but in 2005, the volume has been well and truly turned down on orientation week.

As universities and their student unions secure principal sponsors for the week, the corporate logos have definitely sanitised the "O-week" experience. From his office in the Eastern bloc-like Menzies building, Monash University academic Mark Peel has watched the reinvention of orientation week over the past decade. "There was a lot of savage drinking going on in the last 10, 20 or 30 years," Peel says. "And there has also been a recognition that some students were being put off by the perhaps undeserved representation of orientation week as a drunken bacchanal."

Peel, an expert in the transition to university, says that with orientation week a key point of engagement for students with campus life, universities have responded to changes in the types of students enrolling. The makeover of orientation week has largely been driven from the perspective of student welfare, sending the message that university is about socialising and fun but also succeeding.

Today's universities are now home to a diverse range of students, with differing approaches to campus life, Peel says. The stereotypical middle-class homogeny of decades past has given way to increasing numbers of international students and students from "non-university" families. In the lead-up to this week's orientation program, a press release selling the events at Melbourne University declared: "The student services carnival, like most of orientation, is alcohol-free, with the emphasis for new student experience being steered away from alcohol-infused tribal initiations." The only free beer to be found on the opening day of Melbourne's week belonged to a group of third-year rugby mates camped on the edge of the south lawn with a brown Esky full of stubbies; "spectating" as they called it. Among them, Stuart Lueff sensed the arrival of a more conservative atmosphere at university since he started his commerce degree three years ago. "There's a lot more emphasis on getting good marks because the workplace is a lot more competitive," the 21-year-old ventured from behind his aviator sunglasses. "Students are more focused on doing well to make themselves more attractive to employers."

It's not that drinking doesn't go on, but it has largely been taken off-campus to party nights, orientation camps and colleges and halls of residence. RMIT takes out a liquor licence for the laneway where its activities are held, with proof of identification giving students the fluorescent wristband needed to buy alcohol. This week, second-year RMIT students Alex Oakes and Andrew Pearson were reprimanded for drinking beer at the university hockey club stall, although the alcohol was quickly disguised in sports drink bottles. (Their other complaint was that the VB was 50 cents cheaper at the TAFE orientation last week.)

Paul Donegan, president of the Melbourne University Student Union, says less alcohol has taken away some of the cliched "wacky and zany" elements of university life. But many students are uncomfortable with alcohol, he says, and orientation should be about involving everyone equally. "You want to make it fun, but you've got to protect people as well." Melbourne University academic Kerry-Lee Krause argues not only are campuses more culturally diverse - "it's not just about sport and ocker culture" - but students are much more strategic about how they use their time. "Students are choosing to spend their time on part-time work, rather than spend time on campus," she says. If you ask most academics, they'll say their students are much more conservative than when they were students, Krause says. While there may be a belief that this generation is more conservative than the baby boomers, she says today's students are forced to make life decisions earlier than their parents had to.

"The job market is not as simple as it used to be. Choosing a career is not as simple as it used to be; students again are faced with making decisions that are going to have to stand them in good stead for multiple career paths." If the volume of orientation week has been lowered, as Monash's Mark Peel says, then it's because the iPod click-wheel on students' lives has also turned down. University isn't as important as it was 10 years ago as a social stage or a place where you invest a lot of your time.

"There is an increasing disengagement from university because especially younger people are more connected with other social networks," he says. "If university is less important to you socially, then orientation week is going to get ramped down as well." In a Truman Show moment of product placement, on the first day of orientation at Monash's Clayton campus students gathered for a Subway sandwich-eating competition. At RMIT, one-third of the $120,000 orientation budget comes from sponsorship, with Optus the exclusive partner. Sponsors pay $925 for a stall.

Advertising executive Jane Caro says companies would be crazy to ignore the discerning and upwardly mobile university student market. But corporate intentions are not about orientation week at all, she says. Rather, the marketing machine is about building relationships with people who will have money. "On campus, the pickings are good and with a university education they're only going to get better," says Caro, a senior writer with advertising firm Foote, Cone & Belding. "Most university students now all have jobs, don't have dependants, and more are living at home until their mid-to-late 20s. And they're prepared to spend money on themselves."

With soaring numbers of Victorians willing to pay full fees for their children's degree, if students aren't prepared to spend money, then their parents are, Caro says. In her view, the result is the "bland leading the bland" as the university environment has been invaded by the homogenised corporate voice. "If you go into any shopping centre now in Australia, the Esprit shop is identical, Portmans, Ikea, every shop is exactly like the shop that is down the road from you," she says. "And they're just moving their shopfront onto campus."

There's an acute sense of resignation when student president Paul Donegan talks of the corporate presence at Melbourne University's orientation week. His concern is that first-year students are so overwhelmed by information and advertising that the orientation messages of inclusion and engagement are being swamped.

But Mark Peel sees benefits in a quieter week: "To the extent that it's quieter, softer and more sanitised, there are probably a greater proportion of students there, and it's probably better for them anyway."