Your best chance to loosen their purse strings might be to show tangible proof of the need and have support by other staff as well. If they can see a worthwhile benefit from the expenditure they are more likely take it seriously.

I have found that I learned more through working with poor fonts than ones that look fantastic out of the box.

Here is a piece I wrote a while ago.
The fonts are a bit out of date, but the theory behind the selection is still relevant.
The Perfect Set

We just went through this at one of the universities where I teach. The reason most schools do not have many fonts outside the Adobe educational options is that there is very little else available at prices schools can afford. Aside from Adobe, Sumner Stone is the only type designer I know of who offers fonts to schools at prices most can afford. When schools have to choose between computers or fonts, the computers come first.

And serious students manage to acquire the fonts they want to use in their work without the school doing it for them.

Type trends, and especially display type trends, move very fast. Heck, even Officina look outdated to me. The others, just overused. Honestly: an up-to-date Adobe catalog sounds like an excellent foundation to build upon. Didn't someone here once suggest requiring each student to spend a set amount of money on fonts as part of the course? I like that idea.

Requiring students to pay for fonts seems like a good idea, and might work in some countries. But here in the USA tuition prices are exploding and even part-time jobs can be hard to find. I get students who can barely afford textbooks, they do not have money for fonts, no matter how many times cranky old designers quote statistics about what students spend on beer.

I think this issue could be one of the root causes of the proliferation of font piracy. The students see all these fonts out there that they want to use but lack the funds to purchase them.

It's much easier for them to download a torrent of 10,000 fonts than to save for 1 typeface.

In a way, when students use these pirated fonts, it slightly undermines any sort of ethics in design and can potentially lead to problems in the future (as we have seen recently (Harry Potter & P22 is one example of many)).

However, the limitation in choice can help the students as it prevents them from always having the right font for every project (therefore making them work with what they have and not allowing them to "take the easy way out").

There's a wiki page for 'starter packs' that could perhaps be of some help: http://typophile.com/node/30047

There's plenty of amazing type out that there that can be had on a student's budget. If it's art school, buying art supplies is part of the process. Add to that the great freeware and open source stuff being produced, I don't think students will be suffering that much from a type shortage for their student projects.

I think this issue could be one of the root causes of the proliferation of font piracy.

It is absolutely one of the root causes of font piracy.

There's plenty of amazing type out that there that can be had on a student's budget.

There is, but design teachers and designers hiring students need to consider realistic student budgets. Many students can afford to buy fonts from ExLjibris, especially on a per-font basis. Far fewer can afford to buy a complete family from H&FJ, or even the Canada Type value packs. There is too much pressure on students to purchase the same high-end type that professionals use. Expecting a design major to buy Font Folio Education Essentials for $150 is reasonable. Expecting a design major to spend $200 on a four-weight family from a foundry that does not offer student discounts is not reasonable.

I have found that I learned more through working with poor fonts than ones that look fantastic out of the box.

That should give me some food for thought. What do you feel you've learned better working with poor fonts? Or is it that when you finally got to work with a good font, you were use to work hard to make it look good so it was easier? Or was it that you had to find the good font in a sea of poor fonts?

I don't think our problem is lack of fonts; the font collection is pretty big (not sure it's Adobe's though. Adobe's bundles look clean to me compared to what we have). The quality vs. quantity in my opinion is poor. Lots of decorative stuff and so-so fonts and many fonts that are similar. Especially when students first start, they really get lost into this IMO.

There's plenty of amazing type out that there that can be had on a student's budget.

I understand asking students to buy some fonts would be reasonable considering it's a tool to create, just like they buy markers and rulers and brushes and whatever else we ask. Then again, if their own school isn't able to step up to this, I wonder how they would feel about the quality of their education? Most of them are on a tight budget. I give evening classes so I get older students and it's not as bad in their case but I still have to insist that designing a font takes a lot skill and time.

I actually revised the font bank to see what we had in Mr. Shinn's Perfect Set and glad to see we actually have Officina and I was wrong (but forget about Cartier, Matrix, Scala, Base9 and many others...).

I've spoken to colleagues about the issue and they seem to agree we could use an update but were not so optimistic that we would have the money. Then again, I felt as if they had not given much time to think about it before I mentionned it.

Thank you for everyone who provided links, it might prove useful in a near future.
Emilie

fonts are software. Software always needs to be updated. It's right there in the manual.

Seriously... My company requires consultants to use an OpenType font and to be just a little bit be OpenType savvy. When they learn this, they go "Whaaa...".

It's annoying. Why do I have to explain this stuff to them. Have they not been to school... Oh yeah. Apparently schools think computers use some kind of digital analog of metal type which was all created in the dark ages and has been frozen in aspic ever since.

People like me... I.e. clients, need designers who have an understanding of modern typography. I think it's a reasonable assumption that they'd get that from some exposure to modern fonts.

Being a Norwegian, my perspective on money is probably somewhat skewed. The savings from skipping one night out for a student is often enough to license a new font.

Is Worldwide "the exemplar of its genre", or is that a canny bit of self-promotion that's crept into The Perfect Set?

@emspace
I would suggest you encourage your students to directly contact the font companies whose work they find interesting. No harm in asking for a student discount directly. They may or may not get the response they are hoping for, but it will reinforce the idea that type designers are people too, that most of us want to be helpful, and most of us run small enough operations that can respond to personalized requests.

In crafting the request, I would suggest that your students explain in real design terms, why they are interested in using a particular type design. What is the scope of the project and why this particular typeface is important to the success of that project. Stating that this or that typeface is "really cool" or that "I'm in love with it" will not cut it.

"What do you feel you've learned better working with poor fonts? Or is it that when you finally got to work with a good font, you were use to work hard to make it look good so it was easier? Or was it that you had to find the good font in a sea of poor fonts?"

When you have to correct the kerning of text you learn a lot more about kerning, and so on. It was much easier to find areas that need improvement, and experiment with noticeable changes when you are starting off with something that has that much room for improvement. That was my experience at least.

There's nothing you can do with a bunch of recent vintage fonts that you couldn't accomplish with a standard set of Adobe fonts. At least, nothing that a good designer couldn't accomplish. But isn't that the point? You're trying to turn them into good designers. If you can make something good with a bog standard font, you could make it great with a specialized typeface.

I dated some fonts in school. I found them overall rather rigid and immutable.

There are two different issues here. Yes, being able to design well with a limited set of fonts is important. But, at the same time, students should be getting relevant experience - which means learning how to deal with the quirks and limitations of today's popular typefaces.

For my needs, the font collection from Bitstream that is included with various Corel products is wonderful, because it includes quality versions of nearly all the classic typefaces I'm interested in. For a student today, though, something like that would not be enough.

Instead, learning about the quirks of Lucida, Stone, Gandhi, and similar faces, for example, is likely going to be very relevant. Or, as a random example, perhaps Marat, from Ludwig Type, depending on how popular it is. Or Bitstream's Charter.

Or FontFont's Ernestine - just one example related to a participant here; many others qualify, since faces embodying contemporary design principles are useful even if they're not the currently fashionable and overused faces. (One of the reasons Gandhi, being free, came to mind earlier.)

I'm wondering if some of the struggling smaller font houses might get together and offer some kind of deal to colleges... it wouldn't hurt to have a generation of typographers growing up with experience with Williams Caslon and Goodchild and Bouwsma Text...

It's probably important to remember that trends come and trends go, nowadays more quickly than ever. Today's “hot fonts” are tomorrow's old news, which makes a basic collection of golden oldies an important asset.

Unless the curriculum clearly states that one of the course objectives in looking cool right now, stick with the hip freebies or hold a bake sale.