I'm rather curious were you went to school, this sounds kinda nice. It's the direct opposite situation here (very little on campus housing, cook all my own food, don't do too may extracurricular activities because it's all rather expensive) but I come to the same conclusion. Except that our school servers don't let us host git repos, so I need an external place to store code.
Amherst College. It's pretty common at top private colleges, and it also seems more common at rural schools than urban ones. If every college student in Amherst needed to get an apartment, I think the townspeople would panic, since there were 7000 of them and 35,000 of us. (Okay, this is misleading, since about 32,000 of those college students are at UMass, which occasionally does house students off-campus. Amherst and Hampshire don't, though.)
(Irony: many of these same students who go through 4 years never having to manage money are then hired on Wall Street to...you guessed it...manage money. Maybe that explains the current crisis.)
