Honestly, I don't think it's as big of a deal. GitHub's student discount is all about giving students free private repositories for two years. Gitlab's is about

Honestly, I don't think it's as big of a deal. GitHub's student discount is all about giving students free private repositories for two years. Gitlab's is about adding more on top of that (private is free by default). There is a lot less urgency needed to setup a system for administering discounts like GitHub did for this reason. They could probably just benefit from making it more clear that private repositories are free for students (even though they're free for everybody), no verification needed. If they reword it like that, it's basically saying "we're not even going to make you verify that you're a student and you get a great deal."