[FlamingSpork]

My team has used C++ for the past several years, but we are switching to Java this year because it's the language our school teaches in a programming course and we're sick of pointers.

I've used both C++ and Java, and I'd say that Java is much easier to work with. Switching from Java to C++ might seem reasonably easy, but there's a bunch of quirks you will need to learn. Nothing is different with syntax, but, as has been mentioned on this thread, the ways data is stored is rather different.