All College labs offer both Word Perfect and Microsoft Word. If you want to impress your CS professors you'll make the extra effort to learn TeX or, easier, LaTex. This markup language is the very top of the line for scientific papers. It is fairly expensive for use with Windows. For Unix, you can't beat the free GNU gcc compiler.
Much software has an academic price which is often substantially lower than the commercial price.
It should be pointed out that this is the wrong question even if it is frequently asked. A better question would be one which probed the whole range of effort-requiring activities on the part of the student. The better question would also investigate how the work load is distributed within the semester.