Check around. I've graduated now (since December), but when I was at Clemson we had all sorts of discounted software at the student bookstore (I got an academic copy of Borland C++ Builder 5.0 for $12, and Borland Delphi for $8 :Q). However, given that I was in the Computer Science dept., I could get any software I wanted for free (some campus agreement with MSDN. I'm guessing they were just trying to get the upcoming students more used to MS stuff b/c our department ran all Solaris machines). Anyways, MS Windows XP Pro. Visual Studio.NET, whatever. All of it was free. Might want to check into some stuff like that.
And if worse comes to worse Linux is always available 😉.
Of course, I'm personally starting to become interested in SkyOS. It's starting to look VERY nice. It is closed source and it isn't free 🙁, but if it turns out decent then $30 is well worth it for a good OS.