It was the same at my university. I attended a state university, and the flight department was in-house. That means when you looked up the N numbers, it was registered to the university. Being a state entity, there were all sorts of liability issues. Which is a shame, because they used to rent them out. But then one PPL and his instructor had a high-profile crash, they played the "reshuffle administration and fire some people" game, and it became a very not-so-fun place. So we had to go pay lotsa money to rent from nearby FBOs, none of which were especially close by, and the planes/maintenance weren't as great as our part 145 guys.