You don't really need a good soundcard for study audio engineering course. What for? He is not making a recording studio. Anyway, there are good external soundcard available which you can buy later.

But it's not really needed. What you need is your PC first, which can run the software for your course..

For Adobe, more RAM are recommended. If possible get 16GB RAM, no need too high CPU, i5 is enough. But if you have budget, then go for i7.