[AlexGrant]

Hello, I feel like I could shed some of my experiences on the subject and help you out.

For the robotics club here at Iowa state I built a Prusa based reprap. Many of the structural parts of the machine were ordered from Ultimachine, great service by the way. All of the printed parts were done on the uPrint plus machine that the campus owns, we got a nice discount on materials so it only made sense. The electronics were a RAMPS 1.4 setup using Marlin firmware. I absolutely loved this setup as it was to get started and had a large array of variables to play with. I played with skeinforge for the g-code generation but I ended up settling on Slic3r, it was much quicker and did everything I wanted, and from what I have been reading the recent updates have made it much more user friendly. I primarily used ABS as my build material but I dabbled into PLA some time ago for a bit with varying levels of success.

All that said, I believe that a prusa build would be a fantastic project for students in the off-season. It allows them to know exactly what went into every bit of the project so they can diagnose problems when they arise. The cost of the printer is also much lower than a full kit, you could potentially build 3-4 good printers with the funding you are looking at, as ChrisH said.

If you are looking for a plug and play solution I would suggest waiting for the replicator 2x as it fits into your price range and it comes fully assembled. A friend of mine recently ordered a replicator and he had his working was churning out fantastic prints in a week, you definitely pay for the simplicity though.

Let me know if you have any questions, that was just a quick rundown. In the future when funds allow I plan on making my own design of printer to fit exactly what I would want from one so I am still up to date with what is going on in the open source 3d printer world.