By “old”, I mean they were probably in college in the 1950s or earlier. Generally in the USA.
I went to college in what today they would call the late 1900s, and I definitely did not have that. What I experienced was a heavy workload, an interesting computer to mess around with, this new thing called the internet, and what I saw around for those who weren’t coping well was heavy drinking to get drunk and addictions to MUDs. No intellectualism.
Maybe what happened was that, in those biographies, they were probably generally culturally Jewish, from New York, scientists, writers, from a certain milieu. And the GI Bill happened in the 1940s and the flavor of college may have changed in the wake of that.
They may have been raised hearing the grown-ups talk over issues, increasingly participating as they grew up, whereas we were raised staring dumbly at sitcoms (“Hey, remember the time on Three’s Company when someone overheard something and there was a misunderstanding?”).
State College in the late 00s. For sure we stayed up late, solving the world’s problems (theoretically) as only young, not-yet-jaded people can. There were also people who couldn’t go three days without getting blackout drunk and I tended not to be good friends with them due to lack of common interests.
I also didn’t meet a single Jewish person until after I graduated college, there just isn’t much of a Jewish population where I grew up, so I’m deeply skeptical of that theory.