Uni students get a student license (free), and then can go on to pirate it until they are making good money. At that point they can either pirate it forever or pay a small fee to use it (relative to their income). They could also take the programming skills they picked up and switch to another platform (Python or Julia). Having said that though, I haven’t used anything like Mathematica, which makes symbolic maths very simple. I’ve tried some libraries in python that didn’t cut the mustard (Sympy) and haven’t experimented in Julia yet.