Never have so many gone to college as today's students, to which, almost to the person, they have their own cell-phone for their instant communication needs and desires. This means that for parents, that their access to their collegiate children is as simple as dialing or texting that phone and thereby, "helicopter parents" can easily keep tabs on their children, as much as they so do desire, as well as children being able to easily contact mom and dad for any financial needs or other pressing concerns. There was a time, however, which would essentially be before the 1970s, in which telephones didn't exist in any of the dorm rooms, whatsoever, and therefore, meant that the usage of a telephone, was reduced to common areas, or at the end of the dormitory hall, or gosh, public pay phones.
In addition, depending upon the physical distance between the parties, the marking of these phone calls was not cheap, it was "long distance" and definitely cost money, which necessitated conversations that stayed on point, rather than meandering, along with the fact that each story of a particular dorm hall had several student rooms in which each student in those rooms was entitled as a courtesy to have equal access to the common hall dorm phone, thereby meaning that conversations, along with being essentially public, could not be conducted forever.
In point of fact, once your child went off to college, most parents except perhaps for the very first week of classes, wouldn't talk to their child any more than once bi-weekly, if even that, and real communication would actually be done utilizing the postal mail, that is actual letter writing, so that pleas for money from parents was often something added to a letter while updating parents on a particular student's progress and as a tax, so to speak, on parents, for receiving information about a student's status.
The upshot of the fact that these young men and women were not available to be hailed by the parents or at the beck and call of their parents, meant, that these young students had to be more adult and more responsible for their behavior. Not only that, back in the 1960s as well as earlier, the legal drinking age, was eighteen, signifying unlike today, that people that turned eighteen were actually treated as adults rather than being put into some sort of purgatory of neither a juvenile, nor a true adult. So too this meant in an era in which your best friend could not be your iphone or your tablet and so forth, that students were more likely to make friends by engaging other students in real conversations, and by virtue of the fact that parents were not able to micromanage their children, students became closer with fellow students, as a sensible substitute or replacement for the lack of parental oversight and monitoring.
Therefore, the collegiate students of the 1960s were probably more mature individuals because unlike today's students they actually had to very quickly adapt and learn to stand up on their own two feet; whereas today's collegiate students are too often spoiled to the max, exist in manufactured "safe zones", coddled, and ultimately stuck with the outrageous educational bill for such babying.