US college students are young adults, 4 months removed from Highschool in most cases. They're also for the most part unsupervised in their dorms. I can recount countless cooking horror stories of dormmates that nearly burned the kitchen down. My personal favorite was cooking dry pasta without water.
Re: bad actors, it isn't just destructive tendencies. It's mostly just being a mess and not doing dishes/ not cleaning up after you're done.