Zip drives arrived at exactly the same time as digital art, the web, and most importantly Macromedia Flash. Maybe the CS people with a few source code files didn’t fully use the space, but the art kids certainly did.

There simply was no other option at the time than Zip drives. Others did not strike the right balance of price, capacity, responsiveness, etc. Maybe Iomega paid to get them installed, I don’t know, but there really was no other option so I can easily see schools buying them just because they needed a solution.

USB thumb drives started appearing not long after, and they didn’t suffer from the click of death, so those became the preferred media by the time those people graduated school.