In Malaysia it's quite hard to find tablets other than Wacom. I'd suggest buying secondhand Wacom, 'cause usually Wacom tablets are pretty hardcore. Try seeing if anyone bought it and then ended up not using it.

Regarding to your question on advantage of small tablets mostly would be the price and easy to carry around, considering you're bringing this to class. If you're trying to draw something big and your tablet is small, one way to go around it is to use the zoom function on your drawing software.
Source: have a small Wacom (hobbyist as well). It's actually not hard to use at all.

And there are a lot of other tablets, just google and you'll find them. A good reviewed one (when I was looking for a tablet myself) is the Monoprice tablet, which I read is of good quality and quite cheap. However, importing one makes the price similar to a Wacom, so I'd advise againts it.