It works both ways. A friend of mine is in the graphic design program at my university. She is REQUIRED to have a MacBook Pro. Windows PCs...won't cut it. Not even allowed in the class with one.
I wonder if that is more due to Final Cut and not just the Mac itself as Final Cut is very much liked out in the world.
that would make a lot more sense.
It would make more sense if she would have to use Final Cut... I doubt a graphics design program would include video editing... different skill entirely.
It makes sense; I can almost guarantee that any design firm worth its salt is run on OS X. There's no point going to University for 3 (usually) years and coming out with a degree, then being refused a job everywhere because you don't know how to get round OS X.
My college course was run (almost) exclusively with Macs (the radio production studio was run on WIndows boxes with beefy soundcards). The video production lab was obviously all Mac because of Final Cut Studio, and even though all the DTP stuff (essentially Adobe CS and Macromedia MX) could have been run on PCs it was all done on eMacs (and later Intel iMacs);
a) to save space... needed to fit 25 workstations in a rather small room... certainly not enough room for your average PC + Display + Speakers.
b) because anyone going into multimedia technology would most likely have to learn to work with OS X (everybody has Windows experience, so even if you don't end up using OS X it doesn't do any harm)
c) less tech issues to deal with! There was 1 technician for the whole building; using OS X made his job a lot easier. There was nothing more serious than "Internet Explorer's crashed again, how do I fix it?" "cmd-option-esc, force quit and open Safari" in the 2 years I was there. I only did radio for a year and someone would need the tech once a day to sort something out (admittedly the setups where more complicated with all the external sound equipment; but the video lab had a lot of external video devices and there weren't half as many problems).
d) they actually allowed for so much more... projects created around Comic Life, photography projects managed through iPhoto, video portfolios burnt through iDVD, soundtracks composed with iTunes+GarageBand... all a lot simpler on a Mac than Windows.