University IT people: How should prospective students find laptop requirements?

I'm specifically talking about something other than a decent generic word processor/browser/email McLaptop for say Faculty of Arts courses. Say an engineering/architecture course that requires a particular software.

Do course directors / faculties / tutors make the laptop minimum specs available on the Uni website?
Or is this something they'd have to phone/email the faculty office to obtain?
How common are discounts on certain brands through deals with the Uni?

Aka: my Uni made this information freely available back in *mumble* and it was easy to find - are our students being lazy or is it not communicated these days?

I've never seen any specific guidance (eg I know that we require students doing Math Finance MSc to have their own laptop but the details here Programme structure say nothing about the spec of that machine; I also know that people turn up with all sorts of machines! Part of the fun of working in a uni is taking a computer with Windows running in Greek and with a fixed IP address and getting it to work on our wireless network!)

I think that pretty much any current spec will be good enough. Our Maths PhD students are currently being given Latitude E5410 with Core i3 CPU (M350; 2.27GHz) and 4Gb of RAM if that's any help (we buy them with 3 year warranty and all-risks insurance which covers everything except the battery)

If you can afford it then buying a machine like a Latitude is better than the Inspiron; they're much better built and when the cooling fan gets clogged with fluff (it will...) it's a lot easier to take the Latitude to pieces :-)