Heh. This is exactly what Google was doing with the StreetView vans, and a bunch of home users with open WiFi networks are successfully suing them for collecting their packets.
It's not college. It's "hacker school". Lots of these out there advertising that they'll take you from zero skill to web/mobile developer in 3-4 months.
Exactly. There's so much work for people with those kinds of skills in the US and Europe that the "dialup daytrippers" end up in the corporate world right out of college. Even people who participate in illegal activities often have day jobs where they do white hat things.