I started university today, I’m on a more general IT department. In first semester we have only one subject that is actually IT (rest is maths and english) that is about basic programming in C. And it turns out that university computers that we will use for this subject are all running Ubuntu. I planned to bring my laptop anyway because I want to have my configs, but it’s still great that students who never used Linux will be introduced to it (for some basic stuff tho).
It is the norm in the West. See other comments. I don’t know why OP is surprised.
I study in a technical university in the west. Apart from my own laptop, I’ve only spotted one Linux computer, which was an IT student’s laptop. Though I don’t study IT myself