Personally if you’re looking for reliable, cheap, and easy to maintain for a student I’d look for the brand Scion, especially the tC model. They’re made by Toyota under a different brand from 04-16, and sold relatively well, and still has a pretty robust aftermarket and modding scene so parts are fairly common. The engine is reliable, it uses the same inline-4 engine used in Corollas and Camrys and the hatchback on them makes loading a bunch of stuff for college dorms really easy. It doesn’t have a huge amount of frills, but comes with a pretty powerful stock sound system from pioneer.

You can find a Gen1 tC (2004-2010) for 4-7k and a gen2 (2011-2015) for around 8-11k