So this may well be true; certainly there are places where IT is incompetent and admin is... unhelpful. However, as someone who has been IT and who went to a school that had a... "fun" time with wifi[0], I can assure you that letting just anyone run a wifi network can have some fairly nasty fallout when they all fight over the same 3 channels and nobody can actually use wifi at all. Further, unless the students in question are actually doing a computing program that includes wireless network as part of the curriculum, it's not part of "the education they paid for", it's a service that the school should be providing (and yes, in the case of finite shared spectrum, imposing a monopoly on). If it's a computing masters program that includes networking, then yes of course the school should arrange a lab environment where the students can mess around, and the above only applies outside of that environment.

EDIT: [0] Although actually thinking about it now, I think the primary reason that policy was enforced had more to do with that letting people set up their own WAPs would undermine the 802.1x user<->IP mapping and the security folks had opinions about that. Dorm wifi was a mess because the sheer number/density of clients was awful regardless, but allowing just anyone to fight over channels would have made it even worse.