I'm going to be living on campus for the next few years so I don't have to worry about electricity, and I was wondering if anyone could recommend a cheap and efficient miner that I can purchases. I can spend around $100-$200 starting off. I'm not planning on hardcore mining just something productive going on while studying. I was also wondering if anyone could recommended what type of currency I should try to mine? I'm still studying a little about Bitcoins, but have yet to set up a rig or even mine any type of cyber currency.
You can try with an S1 (is a little more expensive for a budget of 200$, but you can easily achieve ROI with free power)
Actually scrypt mining is very risky cause scrypt asics are very expensive but especially they have frequent price cut, that make even harder the choice of invest on it or not