Those are legitimate use cases and I could probably argue away the Student one. I don't know how much has changed since I was in school but in the late 90s and early 2000s upgrading people's computers to Windows Workstation/2000 was the way to go. I can see with campuses having access to Dreamspark, kids just installing Enterprise or Server.

When my cousin was attending Ringling back in the early 2000s everyone needed Workstation or 2000 to run Renderman and they had setup the Renderman nodes on all of their personal workstations so that when anyone of them had a big job to render they could have the whole farm do it.