The license your school offers will be a better solution.
It will likely have SAS/GRAPH, ETS and a different interface.
For example, one area where SAS UE is weak is on the SAS/ETS module. Not all the time series procs are included.
SAS Studio is what's used in UE and your University will likely offer the course in SAS Base or EG. If it's Base it'll be fine but EG is significantly different.
The ideal situation would be to pay the $50 and get the SAS version. You'll also have to pay for a Windows License for the Virtual Machine to run SAS. Hopefully your University should have good offers from Microsoft because the $249 for a Windows license is high, SAS requires Windows Pro the last time I checked. VMWare would then be about $40 which means you're looking at 3-400. At that point you may as well buy a Windows computer.
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