Hardware for 4K video editing

Hello all,

At our school, we have begin a film production course (again... it has come and gone over the years, and I taught it for two years many moons ago), and I am looking for some feedback from users here who are experienced in 4K video editing. My most recent experience is with 1080i/p footage editied in Avid Media Composer, going back 7-8 years, so I am a bit out of date.

The current class uses a GH4 with 6 Rokinon FF CINE DS lenses, cage, etc. and is taught by an instructor with a dozen or so Hollywood films to his credit, when he was working as 1st or 2nd camera, so he has a very solid background. I am tasked with finding some editing gear. My platform of choice is usually Windows, simply because of, well, choice. But, in this case we will be looking to an Apple platform for political reasons. (I'm not interested in any of the discourse that goes along with the Mac/PC issue - I get enough of this at work already.)

I'm interested in knowing what works and what doesn't in terms of hardware, specifically the editing systems, keeping in mind that these are for high school students, who will only have 4-6 hours per week to use them. Mac Minis are cheaper, but pretty limited in terms of CPU, RAM and video. The 21" iMac 4K is limited to 16Gb soldered RAM and Intel video. The 27" 5K will support 64Gb (reportedly) and 4Gb R9 video (I'd prefer to see nVidia).

Local storage for working files will likely be the standard Apple fusion hybrid drives; I'm not really interested in local RAID, external drives, or the like, preferring to focus on shared network storage, as we are a large campus (30+ buildings), and teenagers + external drives don't work well together...

We have a decent campus network infrastructure, and our preference is to use network storage for nearly everything. We have three decent sized SANs, and will be looking to add a SAN specifically for multimedia content in the near future, to support video and audio editing, HD video streaming on & off campus, etc.

Software - we have the full Adobe suite available via a campus license, so Premiere Pro, After Effects, and the rest are all available. I suspect some will want to use FCP. We could get Avid MC (cheap for schools), but I doubt the students will have time to really learn it well enough to take advantage of it.

Interested in hearing what is seen as the best solution in the Mac world for 4K.