If you live in university, you can do almost everything you can do in the primary neighborhood, throw parties, go out to another neighborhood, woohoo. And those things that you can't do like getting married, becoming pregnant or turning into a plantman, can be easily hacked to make the clothes of those events work. You have a lot of time if you had built basic skills during early life and don't need to do it now. You are paid decently for 2 hours of daily class "work" which is optional because you can research at home too, and don't see any school activity.

Perhaps the prospect of being kicked out of the house without mods at the end of university is not nice. Other than that I don't see other important differences.

I think it's just that it's way too long. For me, each semester takes, like, years to end. If you don't go to community lots and all, it can get repetitive. Go to class, do assignment, write term paper, do assignment, spam "do assignment" interaction, do skills, do skills, do assignment, go to class, etc.
I feel like it's more objective-oriented. It's still TS2, but you obviously have "chores". Basically, I often find myself on speed 3 all the time when playing a university student household. Unless I follow some kind of storyline, it's boring.
Then there are stuff like dormies acting like flies, creepy perverted professors and the list goes on, all of which can be fixed with mods but if you play vanilla then it will not be that fun.

Back when I played big families, I used to take all (or at least most of) my sims through Uni. I quite enjoyed it. Had one of my first long-running families with a couple of the premades from one of the Uni lot. Also after a while added the challenge of sims being able to have kids while at Uni, so that added a bit of interest, too.

I usually sent a bunch of sims to Uni at the same time, and usually to the same house, so I could manage all at the same time (4-8 sims) - I had a slow computer at the time, so I wanted as few loading screns as possible. I never had any mods to make it harder or easier, but I can't remember I had anyone failing Uni, at least not without me trying to make them fail. They also tended to have their skill bars full by the time they finished Uni, so I could concentrate on their kids, and if I could I tried to make them some friends, so I didn't have that too as an issue for when they were going out to get work.

Anyway, these days my playstyle is less around managing life, skills or work, and more around storymaking, photos, etc., and I'm not fond of the extra loading screens for Uni or forth and back to community lots and all that (even if my game does loading screens a lot faster than it used to).

If I did a full generational play session thing again, I likely would incorporate Uni, too.

(When all of this is said, I was playing through Uni back in 06/07-ish, when there weren't other versions of Uni EPs to compare to, and when even TS2 wasn't completed - I'm not sure if I'd have the same experience now as then).

idk man the university ep is my favorite. To me you absolutely have to have some sort of storyline in your mind, you can't play ts2 without imagination else you'll get bored very quickly. The objectives are just the right amount to let you enough free space to develop a story around, you know, making a lot of friends, becoming popular maybe, joining or starting a frat. I understand the lots are kinda boring but hey it's ts2 so you can totally make your own lots or even rebuild the entire campus. It complements very well with the freetime ep objects and activities.

Three problems I can think of (for me, anyway):

1. It's too long. If there was one semester per year it would be okay, but with two the university experience just overstays its welcome. It's especially tedious if you're playing rotationally, and want a group of students to finish uni at roughly the same time. It just goes on forever.

2. Lack of variety with majors. I always liked how the majors in TS3 had unique objects and activities to make them feel distinct. In TS2 there's no material difference in how a major plays out while you're at uni (except for the creepy Drama professors lol). They're all exactly the same, and are not very interesting in the first place IMO.

3. It's too easy. I like to have some students stay average, and actually find it harder in practice to avoid having everyone graduate top of the class than to get them there! Now I'm not saying that they should have gone for the TS4 approach, which is a grindy and difficult slog that's not remotely enjoyable, but I think Maxis could have made it less trivially easy to gain performance in TS2.

I had forgotten about the lecherous Drama professors because I disabled them. But you could meet them on hobby lots even if you don't go to university. That feature wasn't well thought out because you can't completely reject a romantic action without a penalty. Jealousy still runs and your girl makes a real drama.

If you live in a house, you don't face "dormies" or many other new mechanics. Although you still have the mascots that yell outside your gate. And without mods, pets don't come to visit. Which I guess might be either good or bad depending on how you feel about pets.

I can agree that it is perhaps about twice as long as it should be. But outside life goes on forever too, and you never fully complete a career until you quit it.

Using Cyjon's semester changes, I find university to be the perfect length now. I really like it because it offers an opportunity for the Sims to develop deep relationships with their cohort that can carry on into the adult world. I don't even go to community lots while there because I find that it causes issues with the community time project and besides, with shorter terms there's not really time.

I don't really care that there's not a lot of variety among the majors, but sometimes my Sims will have to change their major junior year if they also change their LTW and get a new aspiration. That can be challenging. It might also be interesting to require that certain majors can only skill in certain ways. For instance, literature majors have to write novels to gain creativity, while art majors have to paint, and maybe drama majors have to play an instrument. Mathematics majors have to play chess, but physics majors can use the telescope. Maybe bring in the career rewards objects. Different majors could also be required to live in different dorms. These are just ideas to change it up a bit. And then you have those Sims who clearly only want to party or socialize and so are in danger of failing out. With mods, that could really affect their future career prospects.

I see people's main complaint that it is too long but I still play full vanilla semesters. I can't just not have a sim be a young adult.

University is too rise and repeat, no matter the length of the semesters. As a whole, it needs more variety and challenges.

I like that it's a static window to skill build and have fun with friends before they age to adulthood and get caught up in the day in, day out of careers and family, and the inevitable countdown towards death.

Maybe if you're someone who plays with aging off or sends all your sims to university, it can be tedious to spend 24 extra days doing assignments and term papers just for the sake of a few extra wants slots, but if it's used selectively, it can be its own separate soap opera.

If people are looking for ideas on how to not fall into a rinse and repeat for Uni play here are some things I've done to keep my own interest in playing:

- Part Time Jobs mod by Lamare: juggle classes and a job! oh no your final is at the time you work? better choose one! Hope you don't get fired or get put on academic probation!

- Spring Break! Take your Young Adult and some of their friends to one on the vacation hoods, they deserve a break! Use this free time to skill-build as well with the skilling on community lots mod , get a leg up on the next semester! in 2023 I took my dorm guys on a backpacking camping trip through Three Lakes hiking trail lots that I made a few years ago and it was a blast!

- Pub Crawls! Since Uni came out before Nightlife there's a sad lack of pubs to crawl to on campus, so creating some or downloading some for the campus would be fun and have a rollicking night of dancing and drinking from pub to pub. Throw in a beer mod and things might even get chaotic. Random proposals and fights your student might forget come morning.

- Funderwear parties! This one is for all the youth that have underwear as a turn-on and an especially popular event my Greek society throws every year. Use whatever god-mod/tool you have to force everyone at the door into their skivvies, order a pizza and watch the hearts start to flutter. (inspired by this Jimmy Eat World music video ) Add a keg for extra spice.

- Self Serve community lot cafeterias: with the pick n' mix menu board

Sometimes I find I get bored playing because of the setting/surroundings my sims are in so I have done the following to enjoy playing Uni a whole lot more
- Turned apartment buildings into dorms (using the Boiling Oil dorm door key mod , they can have roommates in one dorm unit (lofted bunk beds))
- Remodeled the entire campus
- Gussied up all the professors
- Added things like late night diners, dating spots, and new activity centers for YAs to enjoy
- Gussy up dormies to wear accessory backpacks so they look like they are always walking to and coming back from class
- added autonomous reading mod so the libraries are full of reading sims
- created community colleges in the main hood with Squinge's mega college pack and then used the Sim Wardobe vocational trainer for the deans of the college to teach business badges to aspiring business owners! I also use the mod if sims need to still live and help their parents while taking 'community college' classes.


Not to mention things I have seen other players do like add mods for harder grades or impose self-play rules on their sims like requiring a term paper every semester, following a student and doing only wants-based Uni play. Playing with the secret societies, greek houses, that cool mod by Gummi for autonomous crafting on community lots so if you have craft halls or something students can be doing that.

The uni world is your oyster!

University is truly what you make it both in real life and in-game. I used to spend University micromanaging my sim's academic career. What they wanted did not matter. They were going to be a 4.0 scholar who did every term paper and passed every exam. That routine got extremely dull and repetitive. When I got the Ultimate Collection, I drastically cut back on that play style, and it's been so much fun. I'm playing University based on my sim's aspirations, wants, and fears. This means no more spending days on a lame term paper, but influencing the cow mascot to do it or forgoing it altogether if I sim doesn't roll the want. Their college experience is truly in their hands. Branching out from my old play style also opened my mind to Greek Life and taking the popularity aspiration seriously. Also, it's a joy to watch toga parties turn into a funeral for the unfortunate death of a sim. Now there's a memorial for a frat bro in the frat house garden. Bro lived and died to party

I've played without University for many years now, and sure, there are some things I miss. Namely the different types of instruments and workout equipments, and the hang out-interaction. (And some careers, but mostly for variety and the fact that "rogue botanist" is an awesome job title. For the former, there are many custom careers I'm eager to try out, and the latter I can live without.)

Absolutely nothing about the university experience itself, however. I've taken sims through university, had some good times, but nothing I care to repeat. In short, there's nothing it can offer me that it hasn't already and the things a sim can do at university that they can't do in the primary hood don't appeal to me at this point.

I was someone who didn't enjoy university, and I had a couple of main complaints:

- it is too long compared to the default length of sim lifespans. If you want to keep ages in sync you need to play 24 days of university while only playing maybe 4 days back in the main hood, and that's a lot more uni than everyone else. Also the way the semester progressed whether at a community lot or home meant it was hard to keep a household at the same speed unless everyone was always in the same place - which discouraged community lot visiting.

- the way I played it, it was too repetitive. Especially for a sim who has grown up in game, the skill requirements are easy (my sims often had all the skills they needed before they started), so all they had to do was show up to class a couple of times and maybe write an assignment, or just write a term paper and be done. I also had a dreadful habit of setting everyone up romantically as teenagers, so there wasn't even any exploring romances to do.

I now enjoy uni much more, thanks to various mods and a change in play style.

- I have a mod that reduces semesters to 48 hours, and another one that stops final exams from happening in the middle of the night (and has the nice side effect that the household can spend different amount of time on community lots over the semester but all end up with a 9am final together). So university passes a bit faster and a bit more in sync.

- I have a mod that lengthens the age span so that every 2 sim days is a year. So university gets twice the play time as everywhere else rather than 6 times, and that fits better.

- I have various mods to make university harder and skills harder, and play wants-based more. So my sims usually need to learn skills while there, and don't always get perfect grades. I also have a rule that sims with a GPA of less than 3.0 at the start of senior year have to drop out, and not all sims go at all, which helps give different experiences for different sims.

- I aim to use university as an opportunity for sims to explore different romantic relationships. Some sims don't date as teenagers, and those that do don't necessarily stick with their teenage partner. And I try not to always have sims marrying the first person they date - it's more fun if many do some exploring.

- I made a mod that stops sims progressing up certain careers depending on their education level, which helps give a bit more of a point to getting their degree.

I pretty much have been feeling like I missed out on various aspects of the university experience literally since I graduated (going back a second time for grad school helped some, but not enough lol) so when I do actually play the game, honestly I live vicariously through my Sims to some extent- pretty much every Sim I've ever sent to university has either relived a part of my own university experience that I miss, or has gotten to do something with their college years that I either couldn't or didn't do myself. I think university might actually be the part of the game where it's the most genuine wish fulfillment for me, even beyond the crazy riches and huge mansions that you'd usually think of for that!

I do this too, albeit manually with Job Stopinator. You can't become a surgeon or teacher without a degree IRL, and not every sim needs to spend their life achieving the top of their career path.

This was such a good post, lots of great suggestions of how to spice up Uni to make it fun. I'm about to take my current Uni household to Twikki for spring break, bringing a bunch of dormies along for the ride. I love Uni, it's so much fun. I treat it the way a lot of real humans treat their uni experience, as the time to be wild and figure out who you are and what you enjoy. It's a great place to further explore the personality of the Sim, outside of their family back home. I change it up, do different things with different Sims. If one student is someone I perceive as the type to study a lot and be serious, I make sure they are in a household with other YAs so there's someone more fun to focus on when that Sim is being studious and not very interesting. It's up to us to make our game fun, there's always a way.

Thank you for the mention and link to my mod I am really proud of that one, and I love that you brought it up in a Uni context since that is exactly where the mod originated from, and where most of the play-testing happened. If anyone uses it, I'll take this opportunity to mention that I posted a bug fix today, so go get it if you use the mod



Also great post. If you play the same story, always go for 4.0 then it gets repetitive. Play Uni like humans do their Uni, and it's hard to be bored Iconic that you had a frat bro death in your game. Tragic in real life, funny in Sims. I haven't played a frat yet, because I have yet to have a male Sim that I perceive as the type to go to a frat, but I have one that is a teen currently that I think may go that path. It'll be a fun counter-balance to his cousin who will be at uni at the same time, who is a teen dad and will have his kid and also YA-wife with him. I'll have to make a note in my papers to see if I can accidentally-slightly-on-purpose have one of the other frat members die at a party

My most recent Uni playing has been with a CAS YA, so no past and totally blank slate, that I made to be the future partner of an existing Sim of mine. It's been a lot of fun, I'm really enjoying it. I decided that she is the type to work her way through college being a barista, so I downloaded Mocha Pot Cafe which has great college campus café vibes to me (though I remove the bookcase, to encourage socializing instead of endless studying) and jonasn's barista improvements mod and every day she goes there to barista for 5 hours. Sounds boring in theory, watching your Sim man the barista bar for 5 hours, but it's so much fun because of the mod. She can socialize, she cleans plates from the exnem cart I added. I get to watch the dormies interact, a lot of background romances has formed from ACR and barista mod letting Sims buy each other espresso. It gives me lots of ideas for what to do with her once she goes back home from her work session. I ended up installing a culinary arts major and now she's got the ambition to run her own café down the road. I really wish we could run businesses on campus, but ah well, you can't have it all. At least YA's can own businesses in the main hood, if we want them to

All that said, I do get that if you play with vanilla life spans the length is an issue. It's pretty unbalanced, my Sims live something like 500 days so not an issue for me. I made mine longer, it's 4 days per semester in my game. I think the best advice to people who find it too long is mods are your friends. You don't have to keep it at 3 days, you can make it 1 day if you want to. That'd be a real challenge, trying to get enough of a grade to pass with only 24 hours total. Lots of mods out there you can get to make it more interesting. I love Lamare's pets on uni, and the ability to have non-YA Sims on campus too (inteen or Lamare's mod). A lot of my YAs live in apartments on campus, which you can do as long as you wait to zone it to apartment after placing it as residential lot on campus. A lot can be done with a little imagination and mod use

I drink the elixir of life a lot and go to commlots where time doesn't pass so I don't really notice the discrepancy with time passage in university. I've also hacked young adults so that they can move in and out as normal people and can have pets visiting. They move in as teens and enter college upon growing up. But even without this, living in a house is not that different. If class performance is so easy, you don't need to "spam" it a lot.

If people need to learn skills because they start with 0, then the game is a bit challenging. I think the Elixir became unbalanced with Nightlife because you could get aspiration too easily.

I'm glad you found my mod useful. It's not perfect, and it's attractiveness needs to be toned down after I hastily rebalanced it for Apartments where they "fixed" the shopping motive. Yes they can do nested actions while on barista's duty: talk to other people, sell on owned business, use the telephone, clean, react to the weather. She is called out from that by customers.

Maybe some not all people do not like playing university because it remind them of their school days, and how they hate it.
I for one have never play university because even me in certain classes or courses I did not do well in, but most I did pretty well enough to pass. lmao lol

I would say people who dislike uni often don't mod it and they tend to play it the same way for every sim. They aim for full class meters, writing term papers and being on the Dean's list.
They often don't look at the other things uni or that life stage (as I play it) offers. I don't know many others who play YA outside of Uni as business owners, with jobs, families, or even struggling artists, buskers or casual bartenders while not doing uni type things at all. Everyone seems to just age them to adult. Yes i have to count the 10 days I have them as YA but that isn't that long. Or if they do play uni they don't look into things like hacking, influencing and romancing professor's for grades, starting their own Greek houses, going on a holiday or having babies at uni. Many just don't think outside the box enough.

Not to pick on @FuryCat but that is why it's boring.

I have jobs for a few people and those make time management challenging where the schedules overlap, and they can get into big trouble if they can't get to the exam because they didn't know exactly at which hour it took place. Like someone said, the early jobs don't pay enough to be worth it, but some characters feel like the should work, or they were already working before entering university.

I think the approach may be wrong from some players.

If you are going to send 1 sim to Uni and try to play that sim until graduation - I don't think it can remain interesting that way.

My advice (short and sweet today, because I am still getting settled in my new home):
1. Have a lot of playables.
2. Remember that your uni still forms part of the main hood. Have the family over; let the family invite them over, let them go on vacation with their relatives.
3. If you play rotationally, get a measure. For me, 3 days at uni and then back to the families in the main hood (that will be around 2 days each, although I am terrible here, but it still works for me).
4. Send the playables to community lots to study, to do things, etc. Time will fly. If you let them sit in their dorm, except for going to class, it will probably be boring.
5. Use some mods - I don't like to shorten my uni at all, but I do find a lot of fun in Sophie-David's mods (OOOh, the Dance of the Flamingo is a special favourite of mine)! (Right here on MTS).
6. Use the career objects, unlocked by Sophie-David too and right here on MTS too)
7. I like my dorms to be full of playables, and they can do things together, like going to play pool, go swimming, go hiking, whatever - use the things the game offers you.

I hope it helps - I love playing Uni.

I have shorter semesters, and mods that let you study everything from books (and on community lots). I always make my own colleges (and dorms,& secret societies) ..except when I want to torture myself; then I use Quadington University. Try it!
I don't have uni in every hood, and don't send all teens to college. And they use college for the same reason REAL people do: to find true love, to find LOTS of love, to make friends and party, to learn skills needed for serious careers. And I have mods so don't need friends to advance in jobs, don't NEED college to have ANY job (but my scientists DO have to graduate with good grades). I allow townies/dormies - and when play them let them do whatever. Surprisingly, some Sims flunk even if they were born in game and got to college with lots of skills, and I try to get them to graduate with honors! And some of the useless frat boys, left to their own devices, actually pass.
AND.. everyone goes from college to a big "barracks" in the main hood. Here they start a job while they wait for their True Love to graduate. Or they become a useless townie brawler. Or they have babies and die stupid deaths. How else do you get toddlers to adopt?

Seeing how adjustable Sims 3 and 4 college is - I'm talking about deciding the classes they'll be taking, how many credits they sign up for, etc, I miss that in Sims 2 Uni which in essence is: here's tons of time, use your imagination and mod the shit out of it! Btw pick a major once. However, I still play universities, because I relate to young adults so much. And I definitely do mod the class meter - there's always a slight chance a Sim may fail their final even though their class meter is full to the brim. Kind of like real life too.