I did a series of electronics courses at Tafe back in the late nineties and all of the students were compelled to purchase one of these calculators so that everyone was on the same page, I have no idea what they are using today, probably an Android app which I am guilty of myself.
Depending what course but at Universities they are still using the good old calculator, really just updated versions of what was being offered in the 80s with the same questionable design choices. They typically fall into non programmable, programmable, graphing and finance.
I just recently brought a Casio FX-100AU PLUS (non programmable Australian model) which was approved for statistics part of a course. The "Natural Textbook Display" runs about 5 lines deep and has easy input for algebra and statistics, not a bad calculator.
I prefer plastic over rubber buttons. I'm not a fan of silver plastic but being able to easily read the functions in general is a bonus. At the time of writing the Casio FX-100AU was the best thing going aside from the Classwiz series (which has a nicer display) but it was absent from some approved lists.