Now that Dell has sucked away its lead (largely through some really sleazy selling tactics that we may go into at another time), just what hope does Apple have to get back into the education game? Sure, there are occasional big wins like all those "every kid gets an iBook" programs kicking off in various counties and states, but for the most part Dell is only extending its lead as more and more school districts get suckered into thinking that Wintels are cheaper. How can Apple possibly counter that sort of thinking, particularly in an economy as tattered as this one?

Well, here's one strategy: forget about the K-12 market for a second and focus on higher education, where there's a specific need that Apple might be able to fill-- more specifically, a need that Dell just can't touch. Simply put, them colleges 'n' universities need tunes, baby! It's a well-established fact that college students start to deflate after 24 hours without music, and since many of them have trouble scraping together 89 cents for a frozen burrito, they're a lot less likely to shell out $18 or whatever for a CD than they are to fire up Limewire or Kazaa or Flibbityfoo or Oogieboogiegrackgracksoooeeeeeeee or whatever the hip and happenin' peer-to-peer thiefware happens to be that moment and download a bunch of illegal music that will surely lead to eventual blindness, heart palpitations, internal nasal warts, scurvy, and death-- followed by an eternity of fire and poking by the devil, whom, of course, the RIAA keeps on retainer for a lot of things. (We hear he makes one heck of a fine clam dip, for one thing.)

Well, what with the RIAA suing the pants off of every individual or organization that's ever even heard of downloading unlicensed music, the universities are getting a little worried about what kind of hot water their students might be dangling them over. So, according to CNET, some schools have met with music services such as Pressplay, Rhapsody, and yes, even Apple in hopes of hashing out some sort of system by which its student body could download the bejeezus out of a hefty music catalog for a flat fee.

Now, that sounds suspiciously like a subscription-based plan to us, and of course Apple doesn't do that, but given how the record labels license their stuff, an all-you-can-eat "paid version of Kazaa" isn't likely to come from anybody. But what if Apple agreed to subsidize per-song downloads by students at a participating college who also agreed to buy a slew of Macs for its labs, or push Macs as preferred or even required purchases by students? None of the other music services can offer such a package, because they don't make computers; Dell's out of the loop, too, because it doesn't sell music. So Apple's in a unique position to score some serious visibility at the nation's largest universities, if it can just find a way to crunch the numbers. What if every student who buys a Mac gets a $250 credit for iTunes Music Store purchases, and the university kicks in another $150 a semester via the usual tuition hikes?

We're just thinking out loud, here-- er, typing out loud. Thinking onscreen. Whatever. The point is, there must be some way for Apple to provide the soundtrack to the nation's colleges and universities while squeezing a bunch of Macs in the door as well. We'll leave it to the hired brains at One Infinite Loop to figure out how.