[madcaptenor]

This isn't exclusive to LaTeX; I think students in general just think that the symbols make things "more mathematical". I remember feeling this way briefly when I was first exposed to things like $\forall$ and $\exists$, and it wore off. This was in the late nineties; in theory I could have had access to a typesetting system but I was writing things by hand.

[jayjader]

As a former maths student, I loved the "compressibility" of using symbols for things like "forAll" and "thereExists". They're quicker to write and allow fitting in more information in less space, two qualities which become highly useful when taking tests in limited amounts of time on sheets of paper with limited space (albeit needing more paper to fit your test answers on is more arguable in it's negativity).

For a (even more) subjective point of view, as part of my studies I had oral practicals every 2 weeks or so where I was basically standing at a whiteboard along with 2 classmates, each solving problems given to us by an examiner for ~1 hour. It's simply easier for a lot of students to draw a symbol that's legible from 5 meters away than some words without making them huge.