In Australia, maybe I hung out with the peasants but parties and pre-drinks was the normal thing as most of us were budget limited.

Pre-drinks being drinks at a friends house. Sit around having cheap drinks bought at the bottle shop. Then head out to the bar/club and either dont drink or nurse a beer or 2 over the rest of the night. Pre-drinks were usually the most fun part of the evening anyway.

We call that pregaming (to pre-game) in America.

Australia and America are different in this regard. In the US, social life is optimized around making money. That's not because we're individually more materialistic than anyone else--I don't know if that's true--but because we have to think and operate that way to survive.

Long before 21, genuine serendipity and mutual interest fall away and cynical "networking" takes over. I'd say the transition happens, on average, around sophomore year. Once people get their first experiences with the working world, they realize how much social class really matters and will do everything they can not to lose ground in the shuffle.

The higher (or lower, since it's the middle class that has the longest period of class naivete) you go in social class, the earlier this transition happens. It's why you don't actually as many connections, if you don't come from wealth, at an elite college as people think you do. The legacy mediocrities (e.g., final club brats) and the middle-class smart kids who actually earned their way in don't mix. If you're going to make connections in the US, you have to do so before class/caste identity really hardens and they learn to see you as an enemy; that's in prep school.

That may have been your experience but don't expand it out to an Australia vs America thing. I'm from the US and the "Australian experience" describes my college and early 20s experience. Pre-gaming with friends, milking a few cheap drinks at bars, preferably going to a party where the drinks were either free or everyone threw a few $ in a hat to buy cheap kegs and then possibly back to someone's house for a drink or smoke to close out the night. Most people I have met since had similar experiences with the ratio of bar vs party changing depending upon the size of the city/town their school was located in.

There are class differences and some level of class separation everywhere. It isn't a distinctly or even more more pronounced American trait. As for class differences in college my experience was that I made and have had enduring friendships with people from all different social classes that I made in college. Some of my friends from college came from extremely wealthy families, made for some great mostly free for me spring break trips, and some were working multiple jobs to get through school. Those working the multiple jobs and those from wealth were also friends. Are some wealthy people snobs and jerks? Yes, but I have also met just as many reverse-snobs and jerks. My experience is being a jerk is a distinct trait with no direct connection to your social class. I'm mentioning this only because you say elite college in your comment and I don't want to have someone say the experience is different for elite colleges. I went to a university which is consistently ranked by those publications which rank such things as being in the top 10 and in specific areas of study in the top 3 programs in the country.

As for the original premise of whether college is needed to make life long friendships, I actually don't agree. I have life long friends from before, during and after college.

I mean, it probably helps that we don’t graduate with obscene student debts in Australia either

That too. The debts basically ensure that people have no choice but to "move where the jobs are" (which the reptilians tell us is a virtue) and work 65+ hours per week. Everything that took so long to build gets destroyed in a year or two and it doesn't come back.

Eventually, people realize they were cattle being raised for slaughter, and that "the corporate ladder" isn't going to lead anywhere decent for them because they weren't born into the right connections for that, but by this time they've had all their energies wrung out of them and it seems to be too late.

I felt that. I'm still trying to rebuild that sense of wonder and purpose I had before college. I usually find it most when not having to worry about money so much.

I don’t know where you live where a bar tab would be $50-100. I went to two universities (one in Israel and the other in Austria, neither particularly cheap countries) and cheap student bars had beers for €3-5. Might be a bit more today but not much.

I live in Norway. A beer costs around 85-90nok (around $9.50USD or 9.02€). It would be really easy to spend $50. That's 5 beers, and I'm not entirely certain that the student houses are really that cheap here. [1]

Folks counter this by pre-drinking at home and then going home to continue drinking. It really wouldn't be that difficult in the US either, and some folks would certainly leave you behind if you can't keep up financially.

Fun fact: Austria is cheap in comparison, at about 2,50€ to 3,50€ per beer, and it seems like a comparative deal. [2]

[1]https://norwaytoday.info/travel/is-beer-in-norway-really-tha.... [2]https://www.flatio.com/blog/typical-prices-of-goods-in-austr....

It wouldn’t be difficult if you set out to do so but as a broke student you devise strategies to not spend that much money…For example would often also meet at someone’s house and drink beers bought at the supermarket. It all depends on if there’s a culture of spending a lot of money and where I went to school at least, there was definitely a culture of not spending a lot of money (at least not as college students).

9 euro for a beer is downright criminal - most likely your government is taxing alcohol because they don't trust your personal judgement.

The UK also heavily taxes alcohol but you'll find cheap beers (sure, some London pubs will still charge you 5£ or more for some beers).

It’s a difference in attitude and thus a difference in magnitude. Alcohol tax in Norway is about $100 a litre while in the UK it is about $25 a litre - so $2 per US pint vs $0.50 per pint.

Even the latter reduces hard core binge drinking and the former really seems to help with the rampant alcoholism in winter at high latitudes. Paternalistic, but that is the price of living in a society (with free healthcare systems and A&E that get overtaxed by drunks…)

Beer is notoriously inexpensive in a fair number of european countries. When I first visited from Canada, I was shocked at how much beer I could get in Germany for $5 euro or something

Israel is a lot more expensive (alcohol very highly taxed) but we knew the cheap student pub in a basement where you could get good deals on the cheapest beer pitchers to share around the table. Even if the beer was $8 per unit I wouldn't rack a $50-100 tab every weekend as a poor student.

And to Europeans, the price of our beer (especially in major cities) is also often shocking. They wanted $5 for a pint! ;)

For $5 you could get well drinks in Chicago on a weeknight. (The $50-100 bar tab came from drinking 10 of them...)

Cost depends a lot on who you find and want to hang out with. I found a group of friends where we spent most of our social time hanging out at the dorm: playing German board games, making music, or just talking. I'm still friends with most of them fifteen years later.

I personally went to way more house parties than I did bars. Perhaps the link you're trying to make is that some social ability, and mobility, is required.