It's a whole new ballgame.

• Author: Jacobs, Lynn F.
• Position: Education - College life

IF YOU HAVE NOT been to college in the last 25 years or so, you are in for a surprise. When you drive your offspring (and a truckload of dorm furnishings) up to the big U this fall, you will find that things are much different than they were when you left. If you are thinking that your son or daughter's experiences at college will be just like the one you had as an undergraduate, think again. Just like every other aspect of society, colleges are evolving constantly.

It would be wise to familiarize yourself with those changes now so that you are not constantly making "Back in my day ..." observations (and being rewarded with "You're so lame" eye-rolls) when you visit later in the semester.

To help parents ward off the shock of seeing how much college has changed, here are some of the new realities of higher education:

Enrollment is booming. Today, more than 21,000,000 students are enrolled in college--that is one out of every 15 people nationwide. Universities that used to have 15,000 students now have 30,000, and classes that used to have 100 students now have 500. The net effect is that there are wait lists to get into classes and lecture halls that could double as stadiums.

Online learning is increasingly popular.

At many colleges--especially in introductory courses--in-person learning with a real professor has been replaced by web courses with a virtual professor. This setup saves colleges money and, it is claimed, allows students to listen to the lectures at their convenience. Then there are MOOCs--massive open online courses--in which hundreds of thousands of students can listen to rock star professors strutting their stuff. However, less than 10% of students complete these courses, and grading sometimes is done by fellow undergraduates--and mostly is based on multiple-choice tests, anyway.

There are more female than male students. With women comprising 58% of American college students, there is an increasing push to integrate women into all areas of study, most notably the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. Moreover, in many departments now, female faculty outnumber males.

Career focus starts on day one. Once upon a time, many students were humanities majors, and every student had the luxury of picking a major after a couple of years of study. Today, at many schools, students are pressured to declare their major at freshman registration (some students just pick what they know from high school), and humanities concentrations are down by half. On the other hand, business, marketing, and health care majors are up, and, in most cases, students can change their majors if they regret their initial choice. Be warned, though, that change might mean extra classes, which will translate into more time and money spent.

There is a new focus on multiculturalism and globalization. Many "core" or "general education" courses now dispense with old, dead European men in favor of cultures as varied (and hitherto unknown to students) as Mongol India, Edo Japan, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Tang China--and when it comes time to pick the required foreign (or, as it now is called, world) language, many students opt for Mandarin, Arabic, or Japanese. Gone are the days of simply choosing among French, Spanish, Italian, and German.

New classroom technologies have changed the way students learn. Today's lecture hall looks more like a...