When I was taking an IT degree no one in a class had an apple computer, most of them used HP, Asus and Toshiba computers, me and a friend had (and I still have) a Dell laptop. None of them used Linux except for me.

It's really hard to fight against the school using proprietary file formats when you are the only one who cares about freedom. If your school has a lot of people using Linux or simple care about free software simply go to the "Students Association" and request them to push the open standards by default, but it's not gonna be easy.