First let me get this out...the equipment should fit the application and not the other way around!
Okay, now I feel better. But the
point is whether you are picking a piece of gear and then trying to justify it or whether you have defined your needs and goals and then based on that determined that the Digidesign was a good solution. It is a little worrisome that you have not mentioned anything about the
venue, the applications, the
console it would be replacing or the rest of the
system. You haven't defined the quantity and type of inputs and outputs required, which will directly affect the equipment required and through that, the price. Because of this it does appear a
bit like you are trying to justify a piece of gear rather than defining a solution to a problem. In my experience, the latter approach is much more successful at getting funding, especially in educational institutions.
This also relates to comments people may provide. Sure, someone can offer that they love/hate their
console, but how relevant is their situation to your situation? I have one project where the Digidesign would have been a great option except that it turned out to be rather expensive for the specific I/O required and it had trouble working with the physical installation requirements for the project. It had nothing to do with the
console operation or quality and everything to do with the details of that particular application, however we had to look at such details before we could determine what was even a viable solution or not.
I also agree with Dave's comments. It is great that many schools can offer 'high end' gear for students to learn on but the reality is that most of the graduates will be moving on to colleges or jobs that will see them using equipment several steps down from that for some time. People still need to learn to use entry
level gear and to walk before they run, so also consider whether this would broaden the potential learning environment or perhaps be skipping some potentially beneficial steps.
Overall, I think that the trend is definitely toward digital. It's always great to have added functionality and capability of some of the higher end digitla consoles, but it can be much more difficult to adapt to working without capabilities you always had. Therefore, in educational applications I would prefer to see students getting experience on an O1V, LS9, M7CL, V-Mix, TT24 and other entry
level digital consoles first. Maybe they move on to higher end mixers as well but they are most likely to run into the more entry
level consoles in the 'real world' and in most cases the concepts and skills learned on those will still be applicable to higher end consoles, while the inverse may not be true.