I swear that when I was a student, my department had a good mix of distros.
Most students were on Ubuntu and Mint VMs.
Students in system or HPC labs had to learn CentOS. However, my entry condition to my lab was to install FreeBSD as a guest on VMWare ESXi. Everything must be specifically partitioned and must be done in one sitting. (This happened illegally in the server room. I could not exit and hope to reenter, hence the rule.)