Can I send a teen to Uni but still play the base family?

"ignominiusrex;c-18076701" wrote:
Wow, thank you all! So I was nervous to allow even the oldest teen to go to college because I thought my game would switch to him and I wouldn't be able to do anything else but play him in uni. So I can enroll one teen after another in Uni, and let them just play themselves there, maybe checking in periodically to ensure they don't flunk out, playing the dads at home as my main interest? AWESOME.

Well, I here run a tutorial channel from where I sometimes share videos on these forums. I'll put the one about University here under spoilers:


But I'll tackle two topics here: enrolling and other families/households.

There are two ways to enroll teens:
1. Use a phone to enroll them. This only allows you to enroll one sim at a time. The name of the household the teen will be in is the last name of the teen.
2. There is a special enrolling button in the family bin you can use to enroll any teen that is in the neighborhood (marked with a PlumBob) or is a townie. This way allows you to put together a household of students and even name the household.
Afterwards, they'll appear in the family bin in the college neighborhoods. You move them in like you move any other sim.

Now the second topic: other families and households.
I see you're used to The Sims 3's and 4's system of other households aging, progressing in college etc. That is not so in The Sims 2. Don't worry, I had difficulty getting used to The Sims 3's system...
Sims outside the active household won't age, won't progress in pregnancy, won't progress in college etc. This means that if your sim has 10 days left before they become an elder, you switch households and play there for 5 days, and then return to the previous household, the sim is still 10 days away. Not only that, but it will still be that time you left them. The same story is here with college, though there, the aging bar is replaced with semester bar which shows how many hours until the exam.
So yes, this means this:
1. If you only play with the sim in the college and have them move back after graduation, the family back home remains totally unchanged.
2. If you only play with the sim when their children are in college, they'll never graduate or get expelled.

It's a different system which provides rotational play. The only way for other families to progress and age is rotational play.
In short, you progress, others stay static.