I went for a pint last night with a few people. One of them was a RedHat pre-sales rep. I think that means he does all the technical talk to customers to convince them to buy RedHat.
I spent the night trying to convince him that they should give free RHEL copies to student societies like MiNDS> (balor uses the old-skool capitalisation). Problem is that he was convinced after 10 minutes that it was a good idea but I still kept talking all night. Me and organic beer don’t mix, and these guys drink fast. I’m going to have to start drinking water every second round.
It’s 08:53, I’ve been in since 08:00 and I’ve drank a litre of water. At least I met some cool people 
I use RHEL every day, and to be honest I can only see 2 reasons for MiNDS> to use it.
1) So admins will already have the redhat mindset in place when they go into industry, and won’t be doing anything awkward like trying to use a decent distro like debian.
2) To use the advanced extra features that RHEL has ( which are also in CENTOS )
Otherwise, its just a piece of no good shit.
I think your (2) is unreasonable. If I was to use RHEL I’d use RHEL not CENTOS. Particularly because of the same reason I use Debian; (virtually) guaranteed backported updates. I’ve seen that CENTOS can be weeks behind RHEL, which is not useful in a security context.
I got the educational pricelist for RHEL and it’s cheap…just not as cheap as Debian or FreeBSD
You are correct regarding centos tardiness, but these RHEL updates are only useful if applied. There are other RHEL clones, like whitebox, who apparently have a shorter lead time.
As for being cheap, yes the educational price is pretty cheap, but licensing costs shouldn’t be the main issue. What price mindset lockin?
Just to make that clearer, I know plenty of people who are !useful in a security context. And I’m no security expert