And there is the Rub...
Apple can't give away the education market becuase it is still a large part of the MAC market in general. Almost every college I have been to has had at least 1 Mac lab.
If you look at apple's site they have a program set up for education discounts.
Now Microsoft whose percentage of market from giveaways and donations of MS products to the Education market isn't really making them much cash in the grand scale of things. Microsoft doesn't need the Ed market. In fact a Private Anti-Trust Case Settlement between Consumers and MS in which 1 Billion US Dollars in MS products would have been donated to schools was found by the judge not to be in the best intrest of the public and was struk down. See MS could easily not make a dime or lose money in the Ed Market becuase it has 36 Billion in Cash Reserves. In fact MS is set to loose 1 Billion this year on XBox and isn't projected to make a dime off of XBox until 2005. When you have 36 Billion in Cash reserves you can do things like this.
As far as marketing things goes... Microsoft is so big now that a lot investment bankers will no longer give you money to compete against Microsoft. The Investment bankers and Wall Street in general does not believe that a company can stand agaionst MS so they do not give these companies money. Prime example is the Indreama project that would have competed directly against the XBox. The Indream had 6 prototypes and 30 Games in developement or near realase when they had to cancel, and all the polls showed that those polled were slightly more likely to purchase an Indreama Console over an XBox, but the project was shut down due to lack of funds anyhow becuase Investors refused to inveat in the company becuase it could not difrentiate itself from XBox. Basically its a mindset. Just like all those developers who swore up and down that NS was dead at 6.1 but then 6.2 came out and now 7.0 and AOL has intergrated NS into Compuserve and is gearing up to test run AOL+NS on the MAC platform.
