I have stayed at Warren Wilson College near Ashville, NC a couple of times while with a mission group that included friends from a local church. We worked on a build with Habitat for Humanity and other charities. Warren Wison is one of only 5 work colleges left in the USA where students actually run the college, grow, raise, and cook their own food, do all of the maintenance, and they a have forestry program where they harvest their own wood from their own forest with horses. They have a fine arts program, and they dig their own clay for pottery, and raise their own sheep for the wool for fabric art. The campus is set in a forest, and the dorms are utilitarian and not air-conditioned. But it is quite lovely and every dorm quad has a large stone pizza oven. All of the students I met there were beautiful, smart, and friendly. I wish I could have gone to school there.
So this school is consciously all about sustainability. There aren't a bunch of bars, coffee shops, or other attractions near campus, so there is no reason to leave. A friend who is on the board of trustees said they are having the best freshman enrollments they have ever had, but the problem is retention because sustainable living is hard, more so than most people realize until they are doing it.
The vast majority of college students aren't ready to roll out of bed to deal with pigs or operate irrigation lines before they go to class, not now anyway. Did I mention that they don't have air conditioning? Wanting to be tough enough to voluntarily deal with privation and more work is different than actually being that tough. Most people aren't.
