Try seeing it this way - $1000 for a headset was 9 hours of flight training for me. Or 2/3 of my monthly salary. There was no way I was dropping that much on a headset, no matter how badly I wanted one of the nice headsets. It is easy to say "well, flying costs so much already..." but the reality is, that extra 1k for the headset and that 99 bucks a year for foreflight and the 500 dollars for the ipad (etc, etc) can make a difference for some of us student pilots...the difference between flying and not. Would you literally give up flying if you couldn't buy the best headset?
Thankfully, the student in question already has a headset option. He'd like to upgrade and have his own, but may not want to drop several hours worth of flight lessons on it (and yes, that's really how I started thinking of stuff! LOL). I'd suggest looking into used headsets, if possible. I got very, very lucky and bought mine from a member here who gave me a very generous price on his old headsets. They were Sennheiser ANR, old enough to be a discontinued, and the fabric covering the overhead part was beginning to crack, but they work, and well. If you can find someone who no longer needs or wants their second set, or maybe an older pilot who's no longer flying, and who's willing to pass along their set at a reduced cost, that should last quite nicely until he's ready to drop the big bucks on a super nice headset.
