Because maybe you had to pay to access the network and part of that involved binding your mac address.
For example, calling the hotel desk to get your device to work.
For example, calling the hotel desk to get your device to work.
I only know about mac whitelisting in protected networks managed by wary administrators.
Wouldn't make any sense for properly securing a network. As an attacker you could just create an evil twin (same ESSID), let some students connect to it and just use their mac addresses (and even drop their connections when they try to use the university wifi).
Edit: You don't even necessarily need an evil twin to get their mac addresses. You only have to listen to the wifi traffic and get some - even encrypted data packets still contain the raw mac address as far as I know. airodump-ng is the perfect tool to do that.