If you need the Cisco client, you are probably out of luck for the time being. Have you asked your university IT for help? It might be worth trying to set up the VPN on your iPhone with them, just to see. Looks like EDGE will be it for you, though.
Cisco's IPsec doesn't work with the iPhone L2TP protocol, so until Cisco creates a 3rd party VPN app for the iPhone, I'm afraid you're out of luck. You can always request the feature of apple: http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html