If you're studying games journalism, then you have a need to be able to play online. That's... not even something that should be debated. It's blindingly obvious.
I go to Abertay university, and while I'm studying ethical hacking, I have lots of friends (and a flatmate) doing gaming-related courses. I know that a lot of the student accommodation limits you to one MAC address, or blocks specific things. Xbox Live never worked for me, come to think of it, although Steam was fine.
I'm now in my own flat, though it's not so bad (I don't actually /have/ broadband yet, but when I do everything should be rosy), but there are a few options.
What university are you actually at, if you don't mind me asking? Is your accommodation uni-provided? If it's done through the uni, you should be able to get the people running your course to intervene. Talk to them about the problem, they're likely to understand. If it's /not/ uni-run, then you'll have a more difficult time, since private halls have no incentive to fix problems (In mine, the internet went down completely at least once a week, and if it happened on Friday night then it didn't get fixed till Monday. They just kept saying "you haven't paid for 24 hour support", despite having people staying there who could have fixed it, and despite the fact that it could have been permanently fixed quite easily)
you've got tunnelling as an option, too; I tunnel all my traffic when I'm using the uni wifi on my laptop, to let me get on IRC and to let me get on blocked sites (I'm also tunneling now on this phone connection, for similar reasons). I pay about £5 a month for a VPS, you could probably get them cheaper, and it gives me file hosting, tunneling, an IRC bouncer, a minecraft server... The problem then is that it becomes tricky to use something like a games console over it, but if you can tunnel on your PC and then use ad-hoc wifi networks to get the connection to your consoles, it should work. Damned hassle, though.
As to UK fees, whoever mentioned the university of Cardiff; if they were actually Welsh, then the welsh government paid their fees. If the one at Oxford was welsh, then the Welsh government paid there fees there too, even for an English university. I'm Scottish, so I get mine paid for a Scottish university (and I get a pretty small living costs loan that I have to pay back). That's where a lot of the confusion may have come from, because the UK actually has four different university payment systems.
One more thing, actually; from my own experience with Steam, the only way to /always/ get offline mode working is to go offline when you have an internet connection and are signed in. That's the way it's really meant to be done; you go to offline mode before leaving for a trip or something, and then even when you have an internet connection, you can still start it properly into offline mode.
