Hi Dusty D,
I’m sorry to hear that you are having trouble. Are you attempting to connect to the servers through your own network or through the university network?
Just to verify, please make sure you’ve tried all the troubleshooting steps here.
If you have a firewall in place, please allow the following exception:
xmpp-service-prod.ol.epicgames.com port 5222
In addition, you may want to review this post as well.
If nothing works, follow the steps here to generate your Debug Logs. Post them here, along with your Dxdiag/system specs.