How hard is it to install Sage on a server that is local to a college? Especially if a person knows a fair bit of Linux?
Any reasonably skilled server administrator can install Sage. But setting up user accounts and preventing server abuse are more important:
sage: N(pi,1e3)
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196442881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564856692346034861045432664821339360726024914127
sage: N(pi,1e12)
(smoke starts pouring out of the server ...)
Wolfram Alpha solves this problem by timing out any transaction after a few seconds. I don't know how difficult that would be to set up in the Sage server.