This article from Vox shows how antiquated some of our ideas about college are. You can read the whole article here.
The movies and the media portray the typical college student as a fresh-faced high-school graduate, living on campus, going to college full-time. They probably ran an admissions gauntlet to get there. They might be taking on a mountain of debt.
Minus the debt, that was the college experience for many upper middle-class Americans a generation ago. And it’s still the experience for most of their kids. But it’s not typical, and hasn’t been for a long time. Those students make up at most 29 percent of the college-going population.