When I suggested the group meeting thing, it was because the social aspect of college is very desired. I think it is also not as good at today's universities as we would wish. The students seem very perceptive to social status, and a lot of energy seems to go into reassuring people about social status, and preparing for job searches.
I would suspect it is easier to find a group of like-minded people than you think. If you do this right, you will start with some subject and 5 or 6 interested people, maybe half of whom make it to the weekly meeting in a coffee shop or somewhere. You will pick up a few more interested people who happen to listen in to the group's discussions. Keep careful track of eveyone's emails, and at some point pick a new subject and send an email around to everyone, and see who shows up. This is can be done even in small, out of the way, non-college towns.
It's kind of like running a "salon" in ancient Greece or 1700s Paris, or a coffee shop in 1600s/1700s London. Someone has to keep track of the social network, so that people who drift out of the meeting group are eventually brought back in when a more interesting topic comes up.
You might occasionally pick a topic just to bring in more people. I think I good one would be to read a chapter of Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle every week, google / wikipedia every character so you know all the inside historical jokes, and then meet and discuss.
On campus, the students are too busy to do the type of social interaction that supposedly makes college valuable -- we think of getting tossed at random into a roommate situation with someone from a different culture and social class, meeting life long friends at random in the library and future business partners in lab groups, etc. But a lot of the college social scene seems to be devoted to making sure you don't accidently meet up with anyone of a different social class, or at least assuring the parents that the student won't; clubs are strongly tied to a student affairs bureaucracy and create positions like secretary and treasurer for people to put on their resumes, as much as do stuff; and the students are busier than those of us that work full time, and have even fewer independent activities and hobbies.