Our campus (four-year state university) has only Mathematica,
not MathCad. I don't know enough about MathCad to offer a full,
objective comparison, but I can make a few comments. First, I
love using Mathematica myself. Second, it's a rare student who
can learn to do Mathematica calculations that take more than one
or two lines. One-line graphs and symbolic and numerical calculations
are no problem to learn, but when you start to build up calculations
in multiple steps, the syntax gets confusing for students and they
start to need a lot of hand-holding. At least that's my experience
in trying to add Mathematica-based exercises to traditional upper-
division physics courses. If you devoted a large chunk of the
course to learning Mathematica, it might be different. Finally,
it's my understanding that in a printout from Mathcad you can't
actually see all the steps that were taken to produce the output,
because many of the operations are mouse-driven. Therefore, if
you want to document all the steps of your work, Mathematica
might be preferable because it's more text-based and you have
a full record of every key you typed.