9 ways college is different for millennials than it was for previous generations

With more students applying to colleges, it's harder to get in. In 1988, the acceptance rate for Columbia University was 65%; as of 2014, it's 7%, according to US News & World Report. Likewise, the University of Michigan's acceptance rate dropped from 52% to 33% in the same time period.

But Jacoba Urist of The Atlantic says that there is truth and untruth to the myth of college admissions getting harder each year. "As it turns out, getting into college actually isn't any harder than it was a decade ago," she wrote. "It's just that the odds of admission to your particular college may have decreased."

Whatever the case, the facts show that acceptance rates are on the decline.

College tuition has more than doubled since the 1980s. From the late 1980s to the 2017-18 school year, the cost of an undergraduate degree rose by 213% at public schools, adjusting for inflation.

Back then, the average annual tuition for public college was just $1,490, or $3,190 in today's dollars, compared with today's price tag of $9,970, according to Student Loan Hero.

Private college tuitions witnessed a cost increase in the period of 129% when adjusted for inflation. In the late 1980s, it cost $7,050, or $15,160 in today's dollars, for a private undergraduate degree. Today, the average cost is $34,740.

Along with tuition, the price of college textbooks has increased, reports The Huffington Post, citing the Government Accountability Office. Compared to 30 years ago, they're 812% costlier. A single textbook can cost up to $300, and the average college student is expected to spend more than $1,200 on textbooks annually.

As a result, electronic textbooks are on the rise — and they could save students as much as $1.42 billion collectively a year, according to Huffington Post. That's not an option parents had back in the day.

College millennials have greater technology benefits than their parents did before the advent of the Internet. Mobile devices and laptops dominate classrooms, but they can also distract students from lessons.

Students can now receive lectures via PowerPoint if they miss a class, and many universities offer access to recorded faculty lectures, according to NBC News.

Instead of typewriters or desktops, students now have laptops — which they can bring to class to take notes instead of handwriting lectures. They can also rate their professors online and use social media to stay in touch with classmates.

With such technological advancements, more and more students are enrolling in online courses — options that weren't quite available for their parents.

Online course enrollment increased between the fall 2015 and 2016 school years more than it had in the past three years, reported US News & World Report, citing the Babson Survey Research Group. Public colleges and universities, specifically, saw a 7% increase in growth.

Business Insider previously reported on a survey that revealed 69% of millennials thought they learned better from technology than from people — only 50% of respondents older than 45 felt the same.

Student populations at colleges has evolved demographically since 1970. According to the 2018 State of the Student research project conducted by education technology company Chegg, which sampled more than 1,000 college students in the US, current minority enrollment is 42% — a sharp contrast from 15% in 1970.

Currently, females make up more than half of the student population; in 1970, they made up less than half. Students are also older — 40% of college students are older than 25 years old, compared to 28% in years prior.

The number of freshmen who don't identify with a religion increased from around 16% to 25% from 2005 to 2014, according to The Huffington Post, citing UCLA's Cooperative Institutional Research program, which surveyed more than 150,000 full-time freshmen students across more than 200 colleges and universities.

Students at Catholic colleges who don't identify with a religion increased by more than 4% in the same time span. The percentage of students not identifying with a religion at other religious colleges also increased.

From 2005 to 2015, the proportion of freshmen saying they "occasionally or frequently feel overwhelmed" increased by 10%, according to the Huffington Post. Denise Hayes, president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors in 2011, told the publication that this could be linked to financial pressures and stress to succeed.

Perhaps this is because millennials are balancing more in addition to their school work. According to a study by the Center for Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, 70% to 80% of students have a job while attending school — 40% of them work more than 30 hours a week, exceeding the 15 hours a week cap they should maintain without hurting their academics.