I am a design professional, both owning my own company and contracting for several other large architectural firms, the standard of choice is AutoCAD. A lot of it is dictated by the .dwg file format, its what the client wants, every client has certian standards that you have to abide by if you want more work and good ratings, especially if you do government work.
I use AutoCAD LT 2011 and have been on a every two year upgrade cycle, about $600 a year when you break it down. I could use other programs but from a productivity standpoint its not worth it, even if they are FREE programs, which most do not do the same functionality that AutoCAD will do, they may look the same but there is a lot about AutoCAD that you will never get into in school.
A lot of clients are now switching to Revit, which is a BIM product. I personally don't think its faster, we have done several projects in Revit, only to find out we could have done them with less hassle, less hard drive space and twice as fast in AutoCAD, but that is what the client requested. Autodesk is "selling" Revit to the clients, in theory it sounds perfect, but down to actuality its not all the way there yet.
Anyways $899 is a wonderful price for AutoCAD, professional software is expensive, I have close to $10,000 tied up in software just to hopefully make money, its a large investment but pays for it self, plus I can write it off