Meet the Millennials

The Division of Student Affairs keeps pace with BU's newest generation.

Alumni who passed through Binghamton 20 or 30 years ago might be startled at some of the changes the University has made to meet the needs of today's college student. Food cooked to order in the dining halls? Coffeehouse programs that run until 2 a.m.? Wireless Internet hot spots? Walk-up depression screening?

It's all part of creating an atmosphere where the "millennial" student can thrive.

In their book Millennials Rising, Neil Howe and William Strauss describe the newest generation to come of age -- people born in 1982 and later. Rodger Summers, vice president of Student Affairs, said the portrait they paint bears a strong likeness to the current crop of students at Binghamton.

Take the question of privilege. "Seventy-five percent of the students coming to school today come from families where they have their own bedrooms," Summers said. "And in those bedrooms they have their DVDs, their cell phones, their regular phones, their air conditioner if the house isn't central air conditioned." Parents indulge these students "because parents have more to give than in previous years," he said.

The University doesn't maintain figures one could use to track family wealth over the years, said Daniel Jardine, research analyst for the Office of Institutional Research and Planning. But last April, The New York Times reported that top public and private universities across the U.S., including Binghamton, are drawing an increasing percentage of their students from the higher income brackets.

The Times cited research by the Higher Education Research Institute, whose work included a survey of 42 of the nation's most selective state universities. At those schools, the study found, 40 percent of the freshman class of 2003 came from families earning more than $100,000 a year. In 1999, that figure was 32 percent.
While today's student body is wealthier, it's also more ethnically varied. A survey conducted in 1975 found that 93 percent of incoming Binghamton freshmen classified themselves as Caucasian, Jardine said. In 2000, the last year the school participated in that national survey, 65 percent applied that term to themselves. In 1987, the first year the survey asked this question, 92 percent of Binghamton freshmen said their native language was English; in 2000, the number was 82 percent.

Custom-tailored experience
This more privileged and diverse student body seeks a college experience tailored to individual tastes and needs. Students today expect to have the things they want at their fingertips, Summers said. That includes not just their favorite consumer electronics, but a wide variety of resources as well. "They want places they can get information, things they can do, things that will enrich their lives beyond just the degree," he said.

One way Binghamton meets those requirements is to offer an ever-more-flexible living environment. For example, like other colleges and universities across the country, the University has stopped building traditional residence halls with rooms arranged along a single corridor. "Now they have suites and apartments," Summers said. "These offer students a little more privacy and give them a chance to get to know four or six people really well."

Flexibility rules at meal time too, extending even to the very definition of "meal time." Today's students like to "munch all day," according to Summers. "Our dining halls are now open 12 hours continuously." And meal selections aren't confined to a couple of entrees dished up from a steam table. "We have a master chef and what we call real-time cooking," he said. "A student goes to the chef and says, ‘I would like some stir fry,' or ‘I'd like to have vegan,' and right in front of the student they make that dish."

Activities with purpose
Binghamton students also crave choice in social activities. "In this day and age, activities are a little more intentional," said David Hagerbaumer, director of the Office of Campus Activities and Orientation. Students have always looked for ways to meet people outside the classroom and gain new experiences, he said. But these days, they are more likely to seek an organized event with a definite purpose, rather than a chance to simply kick
back and relax.

Some of this evolution traces back to the way Americans grow up nowadays, rushing from school to sports to music lessons with scant time for unstructured play. Some of it started with the rise in the legal drinking age from 18 to 21 in the 1980s. "It used to be that programming was simply a band and some beer," Hagerbaumer said. Now, developing programs that students enjoy is more of a challenge. The resulting activities are "much more sophisticated."

For example, greater ethnic diversity at the school has brought a continuous variety of cultural celebrations. "There are so many different cultures on the campus that by the time we work in a celebration of each of those cultures, we've probably filled in every weekend of the year," Hagerbaumer said. Some of these festivals have deep roots: "Caribbean Carnival started 25 years ago," he pointed out. "But as the demographics have changed, and the student population represents more cultures, there's certainly more of a significant need for students to celebrate their own cultures, and also gain exposure to others."

Sports fans have been enjoying more sophisticated entertainment as well since Binghamton's athletics program moved from Division III to Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The University's teams are now "competing at a much higher level, and it's a much better show," said Joel Thirer, director of Health, Physical Education and Athletics. "Men's basketball now draws several thousand supporters to every home game, as compared to, at most, a few hundred 15 years ago."

Binghamton's millennials not only want better-quality activities; they also want to pursue them deep into the night. Three years ago, Campus Activities obliged them with the launch of Late Nite Binghamton, a program offering movies, music and more on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. "We're seeing about 2,000 kids a weekend now" at programs that run as late as 2 a.m., Hagerbaumer said. "There are crafts programs. We've opened a coffee house. We've opened the gyms until two o'clock in the morning. We have incredible video game systems with huge screens."

Technology spurs social change
Game systems, of course, make up just part of the portfolio of electronic devices millennials take for granted. At Binghamton, more than 90 percent of resident students bring personal computers to campus, probably 70 to 80 percent of those computers are laptops and many of those laptops incorporate wireless communications, said Mark Reed, associate vice president of computing and educational technology.

In residence halls, "for some time, we and other schools have offered a network connection for every pillow," Reed said. For the past five years, those have been broadband connections, and in several residences the University has boosted connection speed from 10 megabits per second to 100 megabits per second.

The University also has been expanding its wireless coverage. "There's wireless on campus in most of the core area, and in the common areas in dorms," Reed said. In addition, the school provides about 450 of its own computers for student access. "Use of those hasn't really dropped, because so many classes have specialized software that the students won't necessarily have or want to buy on their own," he said.

While computers offer no end of advantages, they are a bit of a mixed blessing. "Our students do not communicate the same way they used to," Hagerbaumer said. Many would rather send instant messages to friends than walk next door to chat in person. "That's had an incredible impact on social development, because it's much safer to communicate with people electronically than it is face to face."

Hagerbaumer said his staff discusses this issue with new students during Orientation, and his office encourages campus activities that get students talking to one another.

If the Internet has changed the way students socialize, it has also influenced the way some of them indulge in anti-social behavior. Twenty years ago, "electronic harassment" meant dialing a dorm room phone to annoy or threaten the occupant, said Timothy Faughnan, deputy chief of the Binghamton University Police. Today, "because technology has provided people with a sense of anonymity, we see more online threats and harassment than we've seen in the past."

Campus police have had to boost their own computer expertise, not just to track down students who send malicious e-mails, but to find evidence of fraudulent purchases and other crimes committed online. "I don't want it to sound like this is a technology crime-ridden society; it's not. It's just that a lot of the pedestrian-style crimes are now electronically committed," Faughnan said.

The Internet has also changed the way students plan for life beyond the degree. Those who visit the Career Development Center (CDC) can go online and summon a flood of information with a few mouse clicks. Many feel they are drowning in this data. "I've heard students say, ‘There's so much information, I'm not quite sure where to start,'" said Nancy Paul, the center's director.

Years ago, students researching careers understood they would have to comb through printed directories and write away for information that might take weeks to arrive. Online research moves much faster. Today's students, however, are so accustomed to instant results, they don't always have the patience to analyze the fruits of an online search for the most pertinent information. "I'll have to sit with them and say, ‘Let's look at this one,'" Paul said. "They want maybe just one thing to come up -- the best thing."

More seek to serve
Like their predecessors, millennial students plan to pursue a broad variety of careers. But, especially since the September 11 terrorist attacks, more of them are showing interest in public service, Paul said. The CDC is helping them with more events focused on careers in the not-for profit sector, such as the "Tap Your Passion" program held on campus in February 2004.

At the same time, many students are pursuing business careers, and "a lot of this generation want to be their own boss," Paul said. She pointed to a Job Shadow/Harris Interactive poll which found that 70 percent of young people want someday to own their own businesses. A seminar on entrepreneurship the Career Development Center sponsored last October drew a standing-room-only crowd, she said.

Whatever their career goals, today's students "are very anxious about the future," especially about finding employment, said Elizabeth Droz, director of the University's Counseling Center. One recent trend is an influx of students who chose their majors for practical reasons and are having second thoughts. "They know they're going to be employable in, for instance, something very applied, like nursing or engineering, but they're not happy in it. They took it because it's a job," she said. Students have always come to the center for help with those kinds of conflicts, "but not in the large numbers we have now."

Since it's impractical to change majors late in one's college career, Droz encourages such students to explore all aspects of their chosen fields, looking for ways they can find both employment and fulfillment.

Droz observed that today's students "are very trusting of their parents. They call them for advice." They're heavily focused on academics, they have a strong moral sense and they're devoted to causes, she said. They're also more open about their personal problems than the generation just before them.

"When I was in school, it was unheard of to have a depression screening day," Droz said. But last October saw the Counseling Center preparing for its first "Check Out Your Mood" event, when students could walk up to a table and complete a brief questionnaire to help determine if they were depressed. While students in the '80s or '90s would have shunned such events, they have recently proven popular at other schools, she said. "Tons of people have come up and said, ‘It's like checking your blood pressure -- what's the big deal?'"

As they help students manage the stress that's an inevitable feature of life in the 21st century, Droz and her staff also urge them to take advantage of all the other services the University's Division of Student Affairs provides. "We'll say, we're going to see you once a week or every other week, but you've got to make use of Outdoor Pursuits, you've got to make use of the gym," she said. "Use the whole campus. Use your resident advisers. Use everything you've got going."

--Merrill Oliver Douglas, MA '82