University Looking to Update Old Hardware

74-series logic is also very very oldschool. I think it was pretty old when I was at uni nearly 20 years ago.

Building things on a breadboard will just not happen in industry, and be of little use to the students. What will be useful is using a dev board and understanding the interfaces, reading the docs on the interface control for external chips, and designing the logic to plumb it together. I think all chips have at least an I2C interface now, which often is controlled via a CPU through an FPGA.

You can get powerful dev boards for very little money that will do ethernet, HDMI etc. Spend a little more and you'll get PCIe. These are what will give them good grounding for future employment.

If I had the choice of a student who'd made a circuit with some 74 chips and some very basic logic on a tiny FPGA, or someone who could get a SoC system up and running in a few days - I know who I'd choose.