This sort of thing is why I prefer it when my children join the military. Someone would notice if they died.
At a university, it’s entirely possible to disappear as long as the bills have been paid.
That can happen. In my dorm, somebody left school pretty abruptly and abandoned their small Nissan truck in the parking lot. It had a pretty impressive collection of parking tickets under both windshield wipers. Then one day coming back from my last class of the day, that truck (which was sitting on 4 flat tires) was being winched up onto a flat-bed truck and being hauled off. The guy wasn’t dead or missing, he just left school. What was weird is that he left most of his possessions in his dorm room and abandoned his truck in the parking lot. I was good friends with the floor RA. He told me that he and several staff members boxed up his stuff (with the campus cops there) and shipped it to his parents’ known address and the now-impounded truck would be handled through the cops and the court system. He was still responsible for months’ worth of parking tickets, impound fees, and storage fees of the truck. It was already into the hundreds of dollars range and only going up. No idea what eventually happened. Weird things like that do happen.