I started in 95 and we all had email - at first you needed it for some classes, but not many. About 2 years or so later, you really needed it across the board. So, things definitely evolved quickly in the late 90s, at least for me.
I was at Illinois Institute of Technology in '93. You had to sign up for an email/network account on the VAX/VMS system. Computers in dorm rooms were pretty rare (i got my first one in '94), but if you had one there was dial-up access, no wired network access in the dorm rooms until '95. There were dumb terminals scattered about across campus and in the dorm basements, and 2-3 computer labs. In addition to email I had access to IRC (wasted a lot of time on that), Archie, Usenet, and Gopher. IIRC, we didn’t get actual web access until '94, with MOSAIC and later Netscape Navigator. i remember we had one NeXT terminal in the lab, which was a pretty big deal.
Good times, good times.
In the late nineties, we all had e-mail addresses in their modern from, accessed from Xterms in the various computer labs with PINE.
I remember two “internet cafes” in succession opening up near campus to much fanfare offering to let the hip, young, tech savvy kids experience this new “internet” fad everyone is talking about, not realizing that nearly everyone in the area had much better access on campus. They folded very quickly.
I went to Uni in '91 and studied a degree in IT and was not issued with an email address. I don’t recall any of the computers on a network except for the project we had to develop our own protocol using the RS232 port to network them together.
UW-Platteville 1985-90
Anyone who took Engineering or most Computer Science classes had a VAX account (initially it was your student ID minus the 1st digit).
I worked at the computer services and also had UCSBPM (I could turn on / off printer queues)
We were not initially hooked up to networks, but we did later get Bitnet and internet (I remember at the start you had to do something funky to do nonlocal email)
Brianl
I started college in 1993. I went to a specialized high school for sciences, so I knew lots of people who had computer stuff at home and knew about the internet, but even in that group, having an email address was rare for a teen. “Public” email addresses, like yahoo.com, hotmail.com, weren’t widespread. I remember when we got our yearbooks, some people were reminding others “don’t forget to get an email address when you go to college.”
I had a computer in my dormroom which was… neither common or uncommon. At that point it was 50/50. My college (a smaller state college) had a fair number of computer labs, some of which were almost never used. So getting a computer and using it as long as you needed was not an issue.
My college used ADIs which, until ethernet came round, was by far the best thing going. I had a Mac Classic (that’ll bring you back) and had to install Eudora, and manually handshake by typing +++++_+ until it connected. lolz. soooooo exciting if you got an email from another friend in college.
ETA: By my junior year email was ubiquitous and competition for labs meant more and more people found it useful to have a computer. They were not in any way required. Computer based testing was not yet a thing. All finals were handwritten in bluebooks (or the professors handouts.)
Liberal arts college '85-'89 and we didn’t have email that I know of (although I was in the social sciences and it’s possible comp sci or engineering folks had it). I had a computer for word processing and the most I did on campus was sign in to be able to print on a College laser printer. (One version of my student nightmare has me never having logged in and all sorts of information is piling up unread.)