It's the changing college demographic. First, more non-traditional students that want to be able to work at home, at "work", on their own time, etc.

Second, more demanding traditional students that expect colleges to come with more amenities like better dorm rooms than what used to be the norm, private bathrooms, etc. The ability to work in the dorm room or "plug in" wirelessly anywhere on campus and do their homework is becoming an expectation.

We have computer-aided teaching studios now with no computers in them. Doesn't make sense when every student has a laptop. Soon we will not need any computer labs.

LTSpice for simulation, Eagle for schematic/PCB design.

In my experience, any tool that does both simulation and schematics is a) crap, or b) really expensive.

LTSpice is free, well supported and actively developed, high quality, and works well under Wine.

Eagle has native versions for Mac/Linux/Windows, has a great educational site license program (reasonable price, no yearly fees, no license server), does schematics+PCB+autorouting, is well supported with its own newsgroups (which are regularly attended by Eagle representatives), is scriptable, and in general is Not Evil.

I'm a big fan of FOSS but I hate to admit that best-effort programs like gEDA and KiCad just don't match up to Eagle.

If you want to see even more Win madness, take a look at these instructions (in three phases) for dealing with the DST problem on a Novell GroupWise e-mail system.

What a nightmare! And that's just for one (closed source, painful to use) application.

Now if my university were running an open-source mail server with proven software (*cough* Slackware *cough*) the upgrade would have gone something like this:

wget 'ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-1 0.2/patches/packages/glibc-zoneinfo-2.3.5-noarch-7 _slack10.2.tgz' upgradepkg glibc-zoneinfo-2.3.5-noarch-7_slack10.2.tgz