I think the thing about ASU - and this is pure speculation, as always - is that it represented such a paradigm shift for Sweet at the time. He'd gone from the indignities of high school to community college (or so I thought), where no one would've known him enough to make fun of him or bully him, nor would they have cared. Then, upon moving to ASU, Sweet found himself inside a community. Sure, it was a community that likely wanted nothing to do with him, but people had to interact with him by dint of being in college.
In the dorms, Jon may have walked into what he perceived to be a rockin' party atmosphere, with hot 'n' cold running babes passing out after barfing, to be dragged off for a night of hot (and apparently consequence free) boinking. Did he get any of it? No. Jon seemingly had no friends. But he could go to the various public events that others went to, and see that as something that "we" did in his day. Jon wasn't invited to parties, he was in the area that a party was happening, thus, in the strictest sense, Jon was "at a party." Jon worked around others in the office of The Herald, thus he had "friends at The Herald." It's the same kind of mental pressganging into his personal army that Chris does.
I feel that it's likely because of his mental issues that Jon saw ASU as this sudden, delightful buffet of pleasures - the coveted "perks," if you will - instead of what was actually being offered, which was the standard byproduct of going to a state university. These kinds of joys were unprecedented in his life, and when they were gone, poof - they were gone for good, with Sweet utterly non-plussed as to how to get them back.
That, I think, is why he wants to go to ASU. He's trying to reproduce the circumstances under which this amazing thing happened, not realizing that a lot of it was due to the long-suffering patience and efforts of others, and not just some magical thing that fell around him from the æther.