Your college is way out of date. The recommendations are wrong. They rate a grade of FAIL. I work in IT at a major university and graduated with a management degree and am fully qualified to issue the failing grade to your school.
-Industry standards: Apple is now bigger than Microsoft. Apple is now bigger than Google. Apple is now bigger than Microsoft + Google combined! If there is a de-facto industry standard it is now Apple, not Microsoft.
-Microsoft Office compatibility. Your college's information is total BS. The file format for both Mac and Windows versions of Office is identical. Starting in 2007 on the PC and 2008 on the Mac, Microsoft switched to open standards called Office Open XML (OOXML) file formats as the default file formats for Office applications. Identical means there is no difference, and therefore there is no possibility for file incompatibility. There never was a file compatibility issue. That's because the Windows versions of Microsoft Office applications came from the Mac in the first place and kept the same file formats.
Microsoft Office features - There are feature differences between the Mac and PC versions of Office. The Mac version has features that are missing from the PC version and vice-versa:
* Excel macros: The version of VBA for running Excel macros on the Mac in Excel 2011 (which replaced 2008 almost 2 years ago) is the same as the version as in Excel 2010 32-bit version on the PC. Excel macros written for 64-bit Office 2010 won't run on the Mac or in Office 2010 32-bit on Windows. Properly written add-ins will work on Mac or PC Excel. There was a time when Apple didn't matter and add-in writers felt free to include Windows API and Active-X stuff in their add-ins. These technologies are Windows only. If your college hasn't updated to add-ins that were written with both Mac and PC platforms in mind, then you might run into trouble. This is where you might have to run Office 2010 in a virtual environment or boot camp.
-Microsoft Access is not available on the Mac. This is not exactly true. Microsoft Access 2010 is available stand-alone and runs on the Mac in Crossover. However, as a practical matter, most colleges provide Microsoft Office 2010 for free or a nominal cost, so you would install that in Crossover, instead, Microsoft Access runs both within the whole Office suite or by itself on the Mac if you also install Crossover or use Parallels or Boot Camp. Parallels and boot camp require Microsoft Windows.
- PivotTables on the Mac are prettier than on the PC. PivotCharts are not supported on the Mac
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-make-a-pivottable-in-excel-for-mac-2011.html
- Faculty support. Faculty should not be expected to provide training and support for software and hardware. That's up to the student and the IT department. That said, faculty must be aware of the software and hardware that's being deployed in the field. Apple is bigger than Microsoft + Google combined. Enough said. Sounds like your faculty (or more likely your school's IT department) may be trying hide from reality.
-Peer support. The level of support for collaboration in Microsoft Office on the Mac version of Microsoft Office is identical to the PC version.http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/office-2011-for-mac-editing-coauthored-powerpoint-.html
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/coauthoring-powerpoint-presentations-in-office-201.html
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-edit-a-coauthored-word-2011-document.html
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-coauthor-a-document-in-word-2011-for-mac.html
If your school were cutting edge I would worry about slicer, PowerView, and PowerPivot features in Excel 15 which will be coming out in the fall. These feature are really great but aren't in Office for the Mac. If your school were cutting edge they would deploy Office 15 for Windows as soon as it comes out and have you learn about these things, but I bet your faculty never heard of any of this.