<p>We lived in university family housing, located on campus among the dorms, from 2004-2008 while I was working on my degrees at U of Colorado, Boulder. My sons both spent most of their teenage years living among college students, eating at the cafeterias, attending student concerts, even (sometimes) attending classes and special lecture events with me, and generally living the college life while in middle school and high school. They even did their high school homework research in the university library because it was far closer than the public library. They’ve basically done everything but enroll.</p>
<p>Since there were no other high-schoolers around, their friends were mostly freshmen from the nearby dorms. They experienced first-hand college parties (we kept an eye on them and the “hosts” were careful to keep alcohol/drugs away from them), shut the windows at home as marijuana smoke poured out of the next-door neighbors windows, cleaned up the after-party barf from our garden and occasionally rousting a hung-over frosh from our back porch (which opens to a shared student area) in the morning.</p>
<p>The only lifestyle they really know is campus life, and they’re already pretty jaded about it. Parties are no longer exciting to them, they’re annoying.</p>
<p>I also grew up on a college campus, my step-father worked at a California college and from the age of 7, though we didn’t live on-campus, I spent huge amounts of time on-campus. That’s where I learned to ride a bike, and where I explored the world mostly unfettered.</p>
<p>By the time they enter college, college life is old-hat to them. They could be the tour lecturers about college life, rather than the recipients. They’re not so much going off to college, as going <em>back</em> to college.</p>
<p>Have you or your children had this pre-college college experience? If you did, do you think it helped you or your children get through their first year at college with fewer pitfalls?</p>