D18 has had an amazing experience at Utah as a liberal atheist from California. She has a great group of friends who are all outdoorsy, they went back to SLC for the summer, all found jobs despite Covid (only a 4.5% unemployment rate in Utah right now), and spent the weekends in the mountains, going climbing etc. In term time, the campus certainly empties out on weekends, but that’s because most students are skiing in the winter and hiking, climbing, swimming etc in the summer (the main exception is home football games in the fall, which are a big deal given the lack of an NFL team in Utah).
Almost all her friends have cars, certainly from sophomore year on, but many even in freshman year, since parking is cheap. She enjoys being in a sorority but it isn’t a dominant part of campus life. But I think that it is probably important to most people that you enjoy the outdoors to make the most of Utah, whether you are a student or not. Over the last year they’ve driven to Mammoth (8-9 hours away in California) for the weekend, to Banff in Canada (15 hours drive) for spring break (again for skiing), and to both Colorado and Oregon (8-10 hours) for week long trips during the summer. Even if they don’t go away for the weekend, their typical Sunday involves a drive and hike to the hot springs, sometimes they will drive 4 hours each way to a National Park like Grand Teton or Capitol Reef just to hike for the day.
Her twin brother is at UCLA so we can compare the two places to some extent (both of them prefer where they are to where the other is - D chose Utah over UCLA and UCB and a bunch of other places, based on wanting to major in dance, though her merit scholarship was wonderful and perhaps underappreciated at the time). The dorms and overall cost of living are both hugely better at Utah (around half the price of LA), though the food is much worse (fortunately it’s cheap to eat out and some of the Honors dorms are apartment style which makes cooking for yourself very easy). The only time the Mormon influence was really obvious in university life was when a classmate got married as a sophomore in college.
I agree it’s not a party school like CU Boulder (which is where the rich partying kids from our high school who can’t get into a UC tend to go). D was the only student in her class of 400 that went to Utah, but since then Utah has become slowly more common, now it’s more like 2-4 per year as people appreciate how much cheaper it is than Colorado for an OOS student. Same reason for the drift away from Oregon in recent years and the increasing popularity of Arizona/ASU.
@mom2adancer may want to chime in too.