To play devil's advocate's advocate:

• I get 5 weeks off that I can use whenever I want, I don't have to wait for specific preordained holidays (although I, as well as most North Americans start with only 2 weeks)
• Make friends with coworkers, now you see them every day, like you did with school friends!
• Can't argue this one, it definitely is harder to meet new people.
• My job allows me to call in sick without repercussion so long as I have at least 8 hours of wellness (paid time off) remaining. If I'm out of wellness time, I can use my vacation time and again not be reprimanded. Obviously this varies from job to job.
• Probably true of a lot of jobs, though it varies greatly. I bet there are a lot of people who could mess up pretty severely at work and it basically mean nothing at all.
• Depending on the school/programming/grade it was pretty hard to swap classes/professors as well.
• Some jobs allow work-from-home options, so you probably could do it from a coffee shop. For instance our IT contractor rarely ever comes into our office at my work. He either tells me how to fix the problem via phone, or remotes into the affected system, he can do this via his laptop; so could do it anywhere where he has an internet connection.