I can answer 3. Off campus housing consists of literally two categories. A) Greek housing (fraternities/sororities), and B) Off-campus housing (apartments, duplexes, rentals, home ownership, etc.) Some colleges may have a special "off-campus, on-campus" housing option for upper classmen (sophomores and above) where students can enjoy the benefits of living on campus (location, security, events, etc.), but be able to live more freely as if they were off-campus. My college had a place called Hilltop Apartments. It's technically on campus, and there are Resident Assistants responsible for a group of apartment buildings, but the students are less constrained by rules (quiet hours after 11PM weekdays, 2AM weekends), and bathrooms are shared with a smaller group of people (4-8 depending on the building versus an on-campus resident hall floor, where there are about 48 men or women sharing the floor bathrooms).
Degrees you really need to look up and take a look for yourself. Salaries range for degrees depending on a variety of factors; what college you got your degree from, what was your GPA in college, what company will you work for, where will you work, etc. etc.. Petroleum engineering right is the highest starting salary degree that I've read, typically around $80,000/yr. Engineering in general have higher hiring rates than other majors, such as Liberal Arts majors (history, english, foreign languages, etc). It all depends on what you really like to do. There's literally a ton of information about what each degree entails, and what you can expect in your future as a graduate with that degree.
Remember, the average college student changes their major field of study eight times in the 4-5 years they're in school. And speaking of years, depending on how hard you want to work, and the requirements of the degree you selected (and if you can afford it), I see students graduating almost equally either within 4 or 5 years. Why 5 years? Well, say you need to graduate with 150 credit hours to qualify for a certain certification upon graduation. So you need to complete 30 credit hours/yr for 5 years, or 37.5 credit hours/yr for 4 years. That's 15/18.25 credit hours to complete per semester. Assuming a regular class equals 3 credit hours, that means you'll have either 5 or 6 classes per semester. And one of the rules of studying is for every credit hour you have, you'll need to study 3 hours/wk to get a good grade. 5 year students ideally study 45 hours with an additional 13-15 hours of classwork, whereas 4 year students would be doing about 55 hours of studying + 16-18 hours of classwork. Of course, what I really see is about 10-20 hours of procrastination studying with 12-18 hours of classwork (slackers and perfect attendance students) and the grades range from F to A+. It all depends honestly.
Hope this gives you some basic idea about college. Feel free to PM me or find me in ventrilo if you want to know more. I did 4.5 yrs of college, graduated with 2 majors and 2 minors, was an RA for a year, residence hall president 1 year (ran student government for my dorm), and did freshmen orientation for 4 incoming classes (as a sophomore-super senior).
P.S. Athletic scholarship vary as well to just housing or books scholarships to full tuition+room and board. It depends on the university, and though the scholarship may not be athletic, coaches can sometimes help you secure other scholarships to help pay (can't give you a full athletic scholarship, but I can guarantee you a service scholarship to cover room and board for example).
