This is not particularly uncommon for universities, as their networks tended to evolve as large and open "flat LANs" traditionally. Almost all campus type VPNs

This is not particularly uncommon for universities, as their networks tended to evolve as large and open "flat LANs" traditionally. Almost all campus type VPNs are based on "standard-ish" VPN protocols, and have an open source and widely used client available for them. Note that you might need to delve a little into the configuration file to work out what it is. Common ones are Cisco vpnc, ipsec, etc. At least on Linux, with Network Manager, one of the options when configuring a network interface (including a VPN) is to set the subnets that are reached via it. Most universities will have a /8 or /16 subnet, within which their internal services sit (assuming the services are on-premises). You can do a split route, so this subnet is reachable via the tunnel, but everything else is routed through your regular WAN connection. Many universities are shifting towards cloud services like 365, where IP/VPNs are less necessary, so I guess that this is primarily for on-prem services, where they feel requiring VPN adds a layer of security beyond the (usually not spectacular) login form on the application itself. If you need to use internal DNS to resolve IPs for campus-based resources (as public WAN DNS isn't good enough), you might need to go a little further in setting this up (run your own local resolver and use their DNS server, which is through the VPN tunnel, for resolving subdomains of their main domain), or use a VM (for an easy option).