College software question

For the college students (and recent graduates out there)

How much have you paid for software? Including stuff that maybe wasn't for academic reasons but might be available on a computer lab on campus (e.g. a photo editing program), but not games. Excluding the operating system but including your word processing software.

I'd be interested to see your general area of study and a rough break down of what software you bought.

As for why I am asking, I attend a school with a program that distributes laptops to all students, and access to software (that I think in most cases would otherwise be available at a lab) through said laptops. There is currently a review of the program going on; some argue that it actually works out to be cheaper, largely on account of software. I don't really think that's the case unless you assume that everyone goes out and buys a significant chunk of all of the software that's available. There certainly is a convenience factor to not having to deal with computer labs, but I don't think assuming that students would buy every piece of software they use for one class is really a fair comparison.

 

I am a university student studying CompSci. I am currently in my 2nd year, and so far have spent a total of £0 on non-entertainment software.
I think the reason for that is because my university is member of the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance, which means I can get most Microsoft software for free. Other than Microsoft applications, my university uses Linux, whose applications are open source anyway.

 

I think the argument shouldn't be about whether the software is cost-effective. Rather, the argument is whether the cost of the laptop "given" to the student is cheaper than having facilities in the institution with PC terminals. Having a laptop with the student doesn't require the overhead and capital investment an institution needs to house a computer lab (it's a lot cheaper to run wires through the campus, or even make it wireless). At a timem where space is a premium, a large computer lab can easily make room for another lecture room. Plus, it's an advetising bonus for the institution.

Most of the costs of the laptops are included in the tuition fees, at least in the institutions I see in Ontario. Sometimes, these computers are more expensive than things you'd see in your newspaper or internet flyers. One of my coworkers brought in her son's tuition statement, and the cost of the laptop appeared equivalent to a commercial lease term (usually 3 or 4 years) that a manufacturer offers to the public. Software here is usually pre-loaded and/or require the students to request their IT department to have them installed (whether there are additional licensing costs is another story).

The other "advantage" with this setup is that there is less risk to the institution's system if that student decides to use pirated software, download malicious items, and/or loses data.

 

Same as Budding. (Except I'm on my 4th year)

The only non-free software I use for college-related stuff is Visual Studio, and I get that from MSDNAA for free.

 

I'm also computer science, but my school doens't have the microsoft thing. Only thing I've paid for was some IDE software, i think it was about $90. I worked in the campus computer store for a couple years, got alot of free stuff through there.

 

I'm also a computer science person

Programs I might have considered buying:
Maple - $115 (CDN)
Matlab - $99 (US)
I might have paid $29 to rent Minitab for a semester; then again, the way it was used in the course I took would be identical to using it in a computer lab environment.

Plus I would have gotten some office suite - Office Student/Teacher edition, at $200 or so CDN. Although I may well have gone for WordPerfect (4 years ago I wouldn't have gone for OpenOffice) So that's a total of about $500 CDN.

All of the programming environments where a class had an "official" one to use were free (e.g. Eclipse, Linux stuff), although I did use Visual C++ for one course. I could have used anything and it wasn't the most up to date version of it. Also used DB2 for databases class, but so far as I can tell that's free for the asking for academic use from IBM.

The only expensive software I've used in a CS course was for a special topics course on XML - basically most of the Altova products. The suite is about $740 US. At the time I took the course they did have a lobotomized free non-commercial version that did most but not all of what we did in class, although they don't seem to be offering it any more.

 

Electrical Engineering:

Matlab- $0
Quartus II- $0
Crimson Editor- $0

I came close to buying Matlab for my laptop but i decided on using the school pcs instead. I honestly don't think Matlab is worth the $99.

 

I'm a freshman, undecided on my major still. I got Office 2003 Pro for $80 through my school, its $500 retail.

 

Same here, I signed up for first year computer science and got just about every Microsoft product for free including Office Suite + Visio, Windows XP Pro, with the MSDN Alliance subscription, also provides Ubuntu (its free anyways, SuSe & Mandriva) . Very worth it in my opinion.