I recently graduated and moved out on my own. I moved to a decently large city in the Midwest, where my apartment company had signed an exclusive with AT&T. To get cable is quite expensive, but the AT&T contract here means they don't do any sort of packaging. I've got neighbors who are paying 50-60 a month for basic cable... Which would be fine, except that you can buy a $50 antenna from Amazon and get channels with much, MUCH better quality than what you can get with cable. Plus, it's free.

I also thing a major part of this might be that colleges don't really have cable... So students spend a year without cable, realize that they don't really need it and that it's expensive. I definitely think that not having cable at Universities causes some of "I can live without" attitude you're seeing here.