

It’s definitely not legal, especially if your school is funded by the public. That “free internet and power” is paid by someone, and if it’s the public, it’s kind of a dick move.
They can’t see what’s in your ssh or VPN tunnels necessarily, but they can usually see where the packets are originating from and going to. So if you’re say, accessing it from home directly to the server via VPN or SSH, if you’re not doing so using a full VPN service like Mull, they’ll be able to see the origin IP of your SSH or VPN handshakes, and thus your home IP.
Once again, this is why I didn’t generalize and said that the PNW is well aware of that fact, and red states have their heads in the sand. I’m not sure how many times I need to say that to make it clear to you that I answered the question appropriately. I specified how Americans are feeling to back my statement of them being aware or not. Do you think the PNW, in general, gets their news from right wing news sources?