Actually with Illustrator, unless they have changed something since going to cloud based there was no such thing as a student or home version. If you got a student discount you still got the whole program and all plug-ins are good to go. I know this because I had a daughter in school and used her academic discount when I bought stand alone CS5 AI which I still use with lots of sweet plug-ins from Astute Graphics. Some of the new plug-ins will not work on my older version but enough do that it makes life pretty speedy.
To Blue Line, If you are technically challenged I don't think I would recommend Adobe Illustrator as it's a real challenge to learn and much like a reverse polish calculator, once you get used to it all the other stuff seems really messed up. AI however IS the tool of choice for design on a mac. In fact I think it runs much more smooth on a mac than on the windows platform. Should you decide to give it a go I highly recommend finding a home study course like Lynda.com. If you can find a good one and have a few months to practice (no I'm not even kidding) Illustrator is a great program. Once learned it's about the handiest thing since indoor plumbing and you can cut the designs from Sure Cuts A Lot. I use SignCut Pro 1 which is mac OR pc compatible as my interface with the cutter. I think the SCALP program has improved since the early days and many on here have luck with it but as a design tool I think it's lacking.