After three years of working and community college, I transferred to a four year school in another state. I didn’t have to live in the dorm (otherwise required for 2 years with a few exceptions*) since I was older than 21 years old at the time but I did for the first year. It was a pretty fun experience. I was assigned another 21+ roommate and we got along great, though we haven’t kept in touch. Private drinking was allowed in our room but not in common areas or other rooms, though our RA played ball and accepted my many, many pint glasses of ‘sparkling apple juice.’ Ours was not a party school (engineering), though, and while one of the frats would throw a few off-campus parties a year, it wasn’t nearly a, say, weekly thing. Those parties never got too wild, anyway.
There were also very few women enrolled/housed so not too much relationship drama.
After that first year, I stayed in different apartments each year with both friends and strangers. The dorms were fun and probably a good idea for my first year on my own. I sure missed the high speed internet in the dorm, too. There were downsides, of course. False fire alarms, I suspected but couldn’t prove my packages were often opened by the mail office, the hours of alarm clock blaring up the hall from a kid that went home for the weekend, the bathroom flood. It was expensive. I really missed having a kitchen.
*If your parents lived within a certain distance, married students, over 21.