This might help a parent of a College Student.
Living in Google Land of Education I am increasingly more adamant that the decline of Microsoft Office in schools is Educational Malpractice. Not out of any great love for Microsoft, but that it is what the majority of Enterprise still uses.
I worked for multiple large corporations and one small company (250 employees) and observed that most employees used very simple spreadsheets.
I found that people who had leaned on Excel were able to switch to OpenOffice with little difficulty and vice versa. Switching to Google Sheets was only slightly more difficult.
It’s true that the vast majority of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft Office, but the opposite is true of most unicorn startups (startups worth $1B +).
I taught several people how to use Lotus 1-2-3 in the early 80’s, and Excel later.
IMO knowing how to use a spreadsheet is more important that knowing how to use a specific brand of spreadsheet.
With the possible exception of hard core accounting types. There is a reason Google started supporting Excel files in Google Workspace/Drive. 
Nuts; we just bought 365 for our college freshman. At least we got 50% off.
I agree with Wayne that most people aren’t going to have jobs that use Excel’s standout features. If the student was taught how to learn, they should be able to pick up Excel if they’re used to other spreadsheets. For stats classes, it’s better to teach Python ecosystem tooling than spreadsheets.
I don’t operate in Spreadsheets mostly, I’m a Lawyer and Teacher. My thing is .docx being the standard in word documents. They should at least know how to work Microsoft Word.
I also think Google Slides is just a bad PowerPoint competitor. (I live in PowerPoint more then anywhere else as a teacher).
I agree. However, anyone who learns on Numbers (Pages, etc) is mostly lost when attempting to switch to any other office suite.
AFAIK I only had one person who ever used Numbers, Pages, or Keynote. As I recall she used Numbers & Pages to do (a mail merge?) every month or two. I only learned of this when I upgraded everyone’s default apps in 2013 and she discovered Apple had removed all the features she needed the next day.
I reinstalled the old version of iWork for her before I had my first cup of coffee that morning.
I wonder if this is to soften the blow from Microsoft’s discontinuation of the A1 Plus (Academic Free) licenses. The plus licenses allowed academic users to download and use Office Desktop Apps for personal use. Now, unless the institutions pay for A3, they will only get to use the web versions of office app.
This is the case for the institution I work for. Previously, our students could download office apps. Now, they only have Office on the web. Despite being the number one private university in the country, they are not willing to pay for 10,000 licenses to use desktop apps.
It’s not a huge problem as only a tiny number of students use Office, the vast majority prefer Google’s apps (even among staff, most choose Google).
In our business school, we will still teach Excel but using the web version.
It will mean future generations of students won’t be using Microsoft desktop apps, the.end of an era.