Well, there used to be Corel products with the Bitstream portfolio; older versions were sometimes available quite cheap in some stores. But I suspect that's worse, not better, from your point of view - and getting a pile of fonts for $10 instead of $149 won't stop people from pirating them afterwards anyways.

I think epidemic pirating is not precisely the issue here – if Adobe give out a special discount of, say, the Font Folio for $14.9, I’m sure all students would rather buy it. They will need to take a picture of the current student ID, or scan a transcript, &c. and send it to some verification department. I’ve seen software companies doing this. For example, Papers (citation managing software) asks you to take a picture of your student ID card to offer you a half discount.

At $149 for 500 fonts, the Adobe Font Folio Education Essentials is incredibly inexpensive compared to most font bundles, even compared to most educational pricing. I assembled that collection in consultation with AIGA when I was at Adobe, and we literally made it as cheap as we could possibly manage, given the royalty obligations on some of the fonts. I can't comment in detail, but I will say that I am pretty sure Adobe has a lower profit margin on that product than on anything else they sell.

Most quality fonts sell individually for $25-35. Some of the families included in full in that package sell for several times the cost of the bundle!

Assuming your profile is still up to date... it's not like you are in some third world country, where both incomes and cultural norms are different. Y'all are in Seattle, for crying out loud. Is their tuition free? Do they pirate all their software when possible?

Yes, I’m in Seattle. Students here can spend hundreds of bucks on new iPhones or new computers, but do not want to spend that $149 on a font bundle. They can definitely afford it; it’s just they haven’t realized the value of good type in comparison to the apparent utility of iPhones and computers. To start things off, typography education (at my program at least) shouldn’t teach “ascenders” or “x-height” before telling the students why these things matter and why we should pay for it.

But when I say students can’t afford good typefaces, my point still stands. Yes, spending $149 on Font Folio is totally affordable, but there’s only one Adobe, only one AIGA decision, and only one font bundle; you can’t simply demand every foundry to do the same. What if you want a family of, say, FF Kievit, to set your final project in a class? And you seriously go give $1000 to Fontfont, just to buy a family that you’ll probably not use again? (And your instructor may also say, “Kievit is so well designed, let’s make the purchase of Kievit mandatory”...)

P.S. Tuition is not free of course (even much higher for int’l students like me), but people do pirate (or try to pirate) Adobe CC for sure.

Obviously, tuition has to cost something, because professors have to eat. Actually, this isn't obvious, since schoolteachers also have to eat, and professors could be paid the same way (of course, they partly are; tuition or the post-secondary institutions themselves are subsidized by the government in most places).

But a society in which everyone who isn't labelled as mentally retarded is expected to stay in school until he or she gets a Ph.D. (or an M.D. or an LL.D.) is not likely to come about - one where all those with the ability to go to university can do so is already a radical and Utopian dream; assuming that nearly everyone has that ability is probably wrong, although given economic demand in different labor categories, our society has really not made the effort to develop everyone's potential so as to find out.

Still, this is an unanticipated extra expenditure. It's bad enough that students have to pay high prices for textbooks, which are in some cases revised periodically when changes in the subject matter do not warrant doing so, in order to limit access to books on the used market. Who has heard of a university using books from Dover for suitable subjects like first-year physics or first-year calculus?

After they finish paying their tuition and for their textbooks, after all, students usually aren't rich. Unless they're among the few fortunate enough to have wealthy parents.

A few thoughts:
1. the price of these fonts is a bargain any way you look at it.
2. prices too low risk to send the wrong message about the value of quality fonts, thus worsening the problem.
3. there always will be people who feel entitled to free stuff, in principle.

All that said, all costs should be made clear before the start: if I want to attend, I need to know beforehand what (if anything) is provided by the school in exchange of tuition, and how much more I will need to spend in addition (be it for books, pencils or fonts).

Some of those students probably pirate music, movies, etc., so it's not that much of a leap to do it for fonts too.

But I agree that $149 can seem like a lot if it comes as a surprise. If you're working part-time making minimum wage, that might be a week's salary.

Given the lengths that Adobe went to in order to discount those fonts as they did, of course it's sad. I think that it should be possible to acknowledge that font piracy is wrong without being unable to also note that you don't have to be living in a Third World country for even $149 to be a lot of money to you.

Different question — why is a professor "demanding" that their students buy anything? Shouldn't the school purchase the fonts for their computers? Yes, classes require purchasing books and art classes sometimes require purchasing supplies or have fees for art supplies, but this seems an unreasonable expense to ask students to undertake themselves. If the professor thinks they need it, the professor (or their department) should buy it.

If they're still grumbling, I advised on writing a blog post on good free fonts for education use a while back - basically the plan was to round up ones that don't look like default system fonts PCs normally come with. (It's biased towards fonts that are good for teaching use though.)

I do find that requirement to pay $149 for doing a specific college course rather steep, though. (No offence to Mr. Phinney meant there-it's just not how most universities I've heard of work.) I know you can't borrow software from the college library like books, but can't they buy licenses for their lab computers and let you use them for work?

But they aren't just "for a specific college course." They are fully licensed fonts, that you can use for all of your student work across classes, and for the rest of your life. They aren't time limited or only for student work.