I bought one of these new for about £1400 plus vat new. Its a lot more solid than I was expecting being mainly constructed of aluminium profile.

3 Axis A3 Ballscrew Assembled CNC Router Package

I had to do the electronics and mach 3 side of things myself but I doubt I would be able to build the mechanicals for what I paid and the machine does everything I need it to. It recently cut some Aluminium tooling plate, took a while but it got there.

What sort of products are you looking to make? That would dictate what sort of machine you should be looking at.

Denfords are overpriced, some of the little routers/mills are pants but their VMC's like the triac look rather good.

Software is an important factor as well as you don't wont students being put off by having to spend weeks and weeks learning a toolpath generating program like mastercam. Something like cut2d and cut3d are cheap and you can learn them in about 30mins with some guidence from somebody in the know. They are however a lot less powerfull than some of the big cam programs, something that falls between them is Rhino 3d with the Rhino cam plugin. What CAD program does the Uni have? If you have something like solidworks you may be able to get a cam plugin?