I live in the Boston area where there's something like 250,000 college students. Not all are riding bikes, but for those who do, they're generally on just about everything you can imagine though old mountain bikes do seem to dominate. In the last couple of years, I've seen a lot of entry level Trek road bikes with disc brakes locked at the bike rack. So it really comes down to if you want to carry stuff on your bike (and thus will need provisions for racks and bags), how far you have to go, how fast you have to go, what the weather conditions are like where you live, if you'll be riding in the dark, etc. Hard to make any recommendations without knowing more about the OP's context.