My university switched pretty quickly. But I do not know how empirical that decision was. Anecdotally all of my friends made the switch from 2k and were fine with XP. But again, anecdote. Your university apparently found that 2k was meaningfully more stable for them.
That much is true.
> It was mostly a wash vs Windows 2000.
No, not really. They did some empirical testing at the university I went to and the conclusion was that they kept the Windows boxes on 2k almost until Vista.