A story from the May 7, 1909 NYT provides one anecdote of how less free we were in many ways one hundred years ago:

BERKELEY, Cal. - Startled by the announcement during the past week of ten engagements among the students of the University of California, the Faculty of that institution has decided to add a course in household economics to the curriculum of the coming Summer session. Several years ago there was an epidemic of engagements and secret marriages among the students of the university, and so serious was the matter considered that President Benjamin Ide Wheeler made a special address to the "co-eds," advising them against encouraging marriage until the men students had become wage earners.

This talk put an end to the secret marriages but the engagements have gone serenely on until the record of this week was made. The announcements have revived the question of the desirability of co-education and the discussion among the Faculty and students has already become animated.

I am not sure if I would characterize any number of engagements an "epidemic." Nor would I, as a faculty member of a reasonably large state school, want the president (actually chancellor, here) to spend time providing a speech concerning the "appropriate" way to go about deciding who and when to marry.

More to the point, what business does a University's faculty and administration have in the area of freely entered contracts and arrangements between students? Indeed, discouraging the social or romantic interaction of students would seem to invite inefficiencies.

The college years provide many opportunities for economies of scale and scope. Obviously one dimension of economies of scale is the spatial agglomeration of a widely diverse faculty from which a student can take four or six courses a semester in a form of one-stop shopping.

One dimension of economies of scope is that an individual can gain an education at the same time that they are introduced to any number of similarly aged, and ostensibly similarly educated, individuals. I have never seen a mission statement that proclaimed a moral judgement concerning whether the introductions lead to romance, love, marriage, or co-habitation. Thus, the perceived or actual cultural pressure to "do something" must have been felt by the Faculty and administration, even if such pressure seems foreign to us today.

While it might be good advice for "co-eds" to hold off until their suitors have jobs, the same could have been said for the suitors, if society hadn't been busy restricting the employment opportunities through formal and informal institutions. Was there an assumption that individuals in their twenties were blindly entering marriage because of hormonal influences?