MicroCap was top of the line professional software maintained for ~35 years by one guy who is now retired and just made it freeware. LTSpice is a nice piece of software but, like many FOSS, it leaves a lot to be desired in user experience and robustness of features. It's got on the fly analysis, your graph outputs literally update as you change your circuit so you can visually see instantly how your output changes as you tweak values. I can't tell you just how much more quickly and intuitively I can put circuits together and run tests and simulations and get graphs. The UI and workflow are orders of magnitude better than LTSpice. But to colleges that get a lot of government grants/assistance plus their course fees, and multimillion/billion pound companies, it's chump change. The programs are expensive to use as employees and singular people, of course.
Especially considering the fact that I'm not the only student using said "seat" (computer, node, whatever), and there will be generations of students after me that may use the same package to help them through their course.
A five year course puts me in the region of £40k-£45k total so I can see how £580 worth of multisim might be a reasonable investment to be fair. My company pays like £8000-£9000 per year for me to go to college. Although their quote for the "education" package is £580. That to me, from their description of what a "seat" is, seems like the per-user (a user could also count as the computer itself, meaning ten people using the same computer could be one "user" in their eyes) price. The prices I quoted are for a single "seat" as they call it on NI's website. Although if you work it out, it is kind of reasonable for the educational institutions to spend that kind of money on this kind of software.
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