PIF: "These days the odds are some graduates will go from one to the other"
If you're familiar with the area, you know the two are separated by just a few miles on College Ave (SR-26).
And, given the somewhat similar architectures, someone could, I'd suppose, genuinely mistake one for the other, at first.
As for whether the inmates or students are the higher quality individuals... well, that might be debated...
Some years ago one of my neighbors had emotional problems and was put on meds to control his anger.
They worked well and he lead a normal life, but he didn't like the meds and so eventually quit taking them, ended up attacking his family & others and was sent to the State Pen -- yes, that State Pen.
So, for sake of discussion, let's suppose that instead of going to the State Pen, he'd been sent to Penn State -- given his anger-management issues, would he have been discernable from some of their other students?
I don't know... he was certainly neither liberal nor snowflake...
In my day there were radicals on campus, a few, but nothing like some other schools, and the vast majority of students were as solid as their parents, who voted for Johnson over Goldwater in '64 but then Nixon over McGovern in '72 and, of course, Trump over Hillary in 2016.
What about 2020?
Anybody's guess, Bite-me has some advantages, but so does Donald Trump.