Multisim and choosing a FPGA Board
I don't know what your budget is, but Digilent have quite a couple of different boards - and also offer student discounts. We used the Spartan3/3E starter boards and the Nexys2 boards at my university.

A Spartan3/6 board would allow you to do all the basic stuff, and the Xilinx ISE Webpack software suite used for programming it is freely available.