16 ms·

Why I don't give .edu discounts

50 points by AlchemistCamp 6y ago

whereistimbo 6y ago
Agree with the article, it is annoying that some student discount only applies with .edu email address which means US-only accredited school. But a lot of .edu email address owner is actually wealthy so...
- phoe-krk 6y ago
  I have noticed that some of those programs also work for other countries' TLDs, for instance, .edu.pl for Poland.
  - whereistimbo 6y ago
    TIL. Still there are only 17 countries with .edu as second level domain. Unfortunately Indonesia doesn't have .edu second level domain, I'm stuck with .ac.id
    - OJFord 6y ago
      In the UK we use .ac.uk, it was (when I was a student) my experience that places that say '.edu discount' generally also accepted my '.ac.uk' - I only recall one that didn't, and that was resolved after a support email. I wonder if .edu is more strictly controlled in America though, because I still have an alumni.*.ac.uk address, which presumably anyone with automated handling of it would still accept. (Unless I suppose that's also common over there and they filter it out, and hope for no Mr Al Umnus from Scunthorpe.)
    - rswail 6y ago
      ac stands for academic so it has the same function as a 2LD as edu.
  - ajdlinux 6y ago
    In my experience as an Australian, if a company sells its product globally and doesn't have complicated per-country sales channels then they usually offer their student discounts program to more than just US students.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Many companies extend the same offer to non-US educational institutions by a domain list. For example, here's the JetBrains repository - https://github.com/JetBrains/swot https://github.com/JetBrains/swot - of worldwide educational institution domains that they are using for validation of their educational licenses; a smaller organization can probably piggyback off of it or a similar list instead of maintaining their own.
- marban 6y ago
  You don't need to be wealthy to buy a .edu for $4.99 on eBay...
bootloop 6y ago
I don't know what the product is here. But giving students a free license allows them to explore your product and get them hooked so they might use it in the professional world later on (and ask their employer to pay for it).
- ffritz 6y ago
  I have read somewhere that this is also most likely why Adobe was more or less chill about the fact that their stuff was/is being heavily pirated, because students could develop their skills with Adobes products and later on, the future employer of that student would have to buy a license. This probably changed with their “affordable” subscriptions.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  The post is talking about "an educational product" so in this regard students seem like the main target audience, not a fringe group that may become the target audience later, after their studies (which fits most other products).
  - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
    It's an educational product but not related to being a student at a credential-granting institution. It's screencasts for people learning Elixir. Most my customers are full-time software engineers, but not necessarily in wealthy countries.
- CodesInChaos 6y ago
  For products in that category I'd rather offer a free "for non commercial use only" version.
- croes 6y ago
  He his talking about his screencasts. So there is no product to use and buy later.
hijp 6y ago
I'm a student, I'm broke, I like the convenience of using the .edu for discounts. Sometimes I run into places that use a third party verification service that asks for a picture of a student id with current semester visible. But if the problem is equity, then I like Sam Harris's model of offering his content free, no questions asked, for a year. I subscribed to his podcast this way and received an automated response immediately with the rss feed. I never want money to be the reason why someone can’t get access to my digital content. If you really can’t afford a monthly or annual subscription to SamHarris.org, just contact us, and we’ll give you a 1-year membership for free.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  I respect that model, too. He's also the first major podcaster I know of to go to a subscription only-model, years before Substack even existed. His case is somewhat unusual, though. He's not trying to maximize revenue and it much more focused on spreading his ideas (and meditation training) as widely as possible. It would be astounding if Sketch, Jetbrains or similar companies copied it.
g_p 6y ago
It would be interesting to analyze this from the perspective of a country where students don't pay privately for their own education (or at least it isn't heavily normalized), where having such an email isn't necessarily a proxy for being wealthy and having spent on an education. I tend to think giving exposure of your product to students is valuable, but that lifelong "student email accounts" probably go some way to breaking this. There are websites where people will share student deals and how to get a valid student email by enrolling in the cheapest possible distance learning course, to avail themselves of the deal. The question for the HN audience is if these users are more or less valuable? They're willing to pay less, or seek a "discount" or "bargain", but likely also sharing your name and raising awareness of it. Will they be more likely than most to share the product with others because they got a "discount", and then the others will end up just paying full price as they don't want to jump through hoops and spend hours doing it?
- cassepipe 6y ago
  Here are my two centimes from France where education is (comparatively to the US) free (Something like a three hundred euros fees per year whose two thirds are a participation to be covered by health insurance (student health insurance is notorously inefficient btw)). Even here, although university is open to everyone most people who attend it and dont drop out are privilidged in some way, the content of the two first year is generally a bit poor and it acts a waiting room to select the very few research oriented minds. There are all kind of special public schools that act the same way the ivy league does in terms of reproducing social elites. To the point : Even here, I think the argument of the article still stand. Student is a very broad category and that emcompasses rich and poor and I agree that discounts should be revenue based and not category based.
  - throwaway4889 6y ago
    Means testing is stupid and the bureaucracy involved to check whether the free lunch does not go to the undeserving (god forbid) is often not worth it, compared to just giving everyone something (and recouping it through taxation).
- 6y ago
GordonS 6y ago
I guess it depends on the product. I sell a B2B security product, and occasionally students or professors ask about a discount - instead, I just give them a bunch of free licenses. Our product has appeared in several papers/theses as a result. My understanding is that Google ranks .edu links quite well, so it seems like a win-win.
- jopsen 6y ago
  As student I recall a few products where getting a student license didn't require any verification. If the sign-up flow requires you click a button and check a checkbox, few businesses will do that :) If you see to end-users, some them might.. but still a low risk.
m000 6y ago
TL;DR: Although a lot of people with a .edu address are broke, we can't make sure that everyone with a .edu address is broke. And there are surely people somewhere in the world poorer than anyone with a .edu address. So nobody gets a discount. "Because I don't want to." would be more frank and straightforward than all those made up arguments.
- throwaway4889 6y ago
  Yeah I don't get why one would write all those words and invoke all sorts of abstract concepts on a public blog spot to justify not giving money.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  I'm not a huge fan of others limiting educational discounts to only people with .edu email addresses, either. It's due the reasons I covered in "all those made up arguments", as you call them.
  - m000 6y ago
    So, you're bitter because you didn't get educational discounts just because you live in Taiwan. Because of this, you decided to not give .edu discounts. I.e. you turn against the "privileged" .edu students rather than the companies that were too lazy to extend discounts to non-US universities. That's just a misguided grudge (to say the least). What do you really expect to gain business-wise by publicizing a misguided personal grudge with a poorly written post? You don't mention you live in Taiwan. You don't even mention that you give discounts to non-US universities. So, in the end, you come out no better than those "other" companies. The post doesn't work as a publicity stunt either, as you make no mention of the product you're selling. Why not opaquely offer e.g. a 10% discount to .edu emails and a %40 discount to less-"privileged" universities. No explanations needed, you just receive a discount code in your email address. No drama, no grudges, no need to write lengthy posts and argue with strangers on HN. Disclosure: Never had a .edu email.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
auganov 6y ago
> Who has a .edu email address? Generally it's only students, faculty and alumni of accredited US colleges. This roughly translates to "many of the most priviledged people in the world". I'm pretty sure most sites do actually respect .edu equivalents in other countries. Certainly seen .ac.uk work. And for most countries it's simply .edu.<country tld>.
- znpy 6y ago
  > I'm pretty sure most sites do actually respect .edu equivalents in other countries. Certainly seen .ac.uk work. And for most countries it's simply .edu.<country tld>. No, they don't. The .edu tld is one of those areas where the US govt still exercises monopoly over a public resource (the dns space). Here in italy for example, there is no such thing as .edu.it. Most universities have their own regular .it dns zone.
  - ulucs 6y ago
    My .edu.tr mail address suggests otherwise. Italy could have simply created an .edu.it extension itself
  - enedil 6y ago
    I have .edu.pl address and most of the times I get educational discounts.
  - Galanwe 6y ago
    Same here in France. Public uni had its own domain "univ-<city>.fr" Never seen a French school/uni with .edu
    - bryanlarsen 6y ago
      Canadian universities named after places are generally u<place_name>.ca, (aka ubc.ca, uwaterloo.ca) but those named after people aren't, like mcgill.ca, queensu.ca, stfx.ca, carleton.ca.
    - type0 6y ago
nottorp 6y ago
How about educational discounts instead of .edu discounts? There are students outside the US as well. Not that i can figure out from that site what you're selling. Edit: just because it may not be obvious: in countries with state paid higher education the students can actually be poor.
- maple3142 6y ago
  I think websites should be able to check for .edu.(country tld)
  - nottorp 6y ago
    That's not a rule unfortunately. If you want to do it, you prolly have to add "email us if your educational institution isn't recognized" and add them one by one when they show up.
josh_fyi 6y ago
Alumni have edu addresses too, and there are always more alumni than students; and the alumni need professional tools more than students. So, these discounts might be going mostly to alumni. The discounts are not a chance to get a student hooked before they enter the real world.
- ugexe 6y ago
  Yes the article explicitly states that alumni, whom the author consider a privileged class, also have .edu emails
jankotek 6y ago
Are people actually using .edu for email? It is gone once you leave uni.
tasogare 6y ago
> Nearly anything universities teach can be learned outside of a university, and usually faster. Seems the writer has a personal bias against universities, because this affirmation is so wrong on many levels. Sure lot of skills can be learned outside them, yet some totally aren’t (medicine for example). This explains more clearly why he doesn’t offer educational discounts (which by the way doesn’t have to be tied to owning an .edu email since most institutions use others TLDs anyway).
adamsvystun 6y ago
The article talks about student discounts as if they are always verified by '.edu' email address. Then the article criticizes '.edu' email address based discounts and concludes that students discounts are bad. I was a student outside the US in multiple countries. I don't remember any product/software that offered an academic discount that I was not able to access. Most companies accept local equivalents of addresses (like .edu.pl), if not they often offer a possibility to send them your student ID for identity verification. There is also an option to use internationally recognized student cards - like ISIC, which can be gotten in more than 130 countries. Bottom line, academic discounts are useful for students across the globe, who on average are broke.
- ulucs 6y ago
  Ironically, it's the author's own privilege (living in the richest country in the world) that renders them blind to this.
  - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
    I live in Taiwan. Being blocked from .edu discounts is a common complaint here.
    - ulucs 6y ago
      So why not offer educational discounts with /edu\.[a-z]+/ ? That blocks the "privileged" US students, and lets the poorer countries off the hook. You're still denying some opportunity to Taiwanese students with their .edu.tw addresses EDIT: Not to mention how US schools have made strides in recruiting students from disadvantaged backgrounds, to the point that there were schools making their students fake a troubled past so they could get better admissions. Do those students' disadvantages just disappear because they are admitted?
      - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
        I already give people in Taiwan a region-based discount. If I offer some kind of educational discounts for a future product, it definitely won't be based on email address or limited to people in official institutions. I'd also extend them to people in coding bootcamps, people in language schools and anybody who could credibly claim to be studying full-time, even if they were self-studying between jobs.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
josh_fyi 6y ago
To the extent that these discounts target students at accredited universities in rich countries (and not non-accredited schools or pool countries), the discounts achieve exactly the goal of hooking low-income students who will later have greater buying power (personally or through their work).
ldeangelis 6y ago
Maybe leveraging the Github developer student pack could work. Sign in with Github, and if you have the student developer pack you get a discount.
mufufu 6y ago
> When you subsidize something, you get more of it. ... That leads to the question of what educational discounts subsidize. In effect, they subsidize going to very expensive universities. I’m not sure I am following the point here. Are you suggesting people are signing up to a 4 year university, taking out tens of thousands of dollars in loans (as you mentioned) in order to get a student discount?
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  In my specific case, the subsidy would be very, very small. In aggregate, discounts, special offers, easier credit, grants, loans and a social affordances add up. At the margins, subsidies lead more people to spend four (or often five to six) years of their life getting a credential. If you're interested in this topic, I highly recommend Bryan Caplan's book: https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste-ebook/dp/B07T3QRNLC https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste-e...
AnonC 6y ago
Maybe the next follow up post should be titled “Why I don’t give any discounts” and explain all the factors that make it difficult, like considering which country a person is in and purchasing power parity, and how even that could not weed out people who can afford to pay but don’t want to. /s Got it. You don’t want to give discounts. It doesn’t need so many words to explain it as if it’s a problem you can’t handle (when the truth is that you’ve decided you won’t handle it).
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  > "like considering which country a person is in and purchasing power parity, and how even that could not weed out people who can afford to pay but don’t want to" I'm not sure where you got that impression. In the article, I used purchasing parity discounts as a contrasting case. I do offer them and they're more generous than those of any other similar offering I know of (including those for other languages).
runxel 6y ago
This approach doesn't appear to be really smart. Actually more in the contrary. While it depends on the product in general you should definitely give students some discount, or even free stuff (if those are licenses). Couple of reasons: * You can leverage your product because you can hook students to it. If it is any good they will become attached and will enforce it later in the workplace (this happens because students will spend time in your software e.g.; they will see this time as an investment – you should, too!) generating a magnitude more than you "lost" in providing the discount in the first place. If you don't do that you have scared those people off forever. * If you don't give discount or free licenses, they will just get it from shady forums anyway ;) So you don't get anything. * Generate a positive feeling towards your brand. So much underestimated effect. If you've once damaged the attitude you just can't regain it, seriously. Last comment: Please don't use .edu addresses as a only verifaction. There is a world beyond the US, and they don't use that.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  > "Generate a positive feeling towards your brand." I try to do this by having a generous freemium model. To the best of my knowledge nobody in my space has put even 1/3 of the free content out onto YouTube. Hopefully not offering extra discounts the rest of my tutorials won't overwhelm that goodwill, but one never knows... Many experience entrepreneurs also tell me that a freemium model at all is a mistake. > "Please don't use .edu addresses as a only verification. There is a world beyond the US, and they don't use that." Thank you!
cobbzilla 6y ago
> A less direct form of price discrimination is to create a slightly different product that would only appeal to customers with more money. In software, we see this often with features revolving around team management, accounting and compliance. Um, if the feature set is different, that's a different product, not price discrimination. Price discrimination is charging different customers different amounts for the same product. I gave up after reading that. [edit] OK I scanned the rest, and found a section titled "Hypocracy" -- is that a system of rule by the underclass? Or perhaps the author meant "Hypocrisy"... there's a bad joke somewhere in here given that the topic involves higher education.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/pd/price-discrimination/ https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/pd/price-discrimin... > "One way firms practise price discrimination is to offer slightly different products as a way to discriminate between consumers ability to pay."
  - cobbzilla 6y ago
    Sorry, that explanation is just plain wrong. A car maker who offers a "GT" upgrade to their standard car model is not engaging in price discrimination, they're selling two different products. Selling movie tickets cheaper to students and the elderly is price discrimination. It's literally the same product, with a different price.
    - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
      > "Sorry, that explanation is just plain wrong." I'm pretty sure I saw the same in my freshman econ textbook, long ago. Tyler Cowen also speaks of selling slightly different versions of a product in the MRU video on price discrimination: https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-microeconomics/price-discrimination-examples-airlines-arbitrage https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-microeconomics/... Looks like Wikipedia's article also states the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
madushan1000 6y ago
Not all that relevant to the article, but students in southeast Asia(I was in a Sri Lankan university) rarely ever get access to any of these discounts. The only educational discounts I remember getting are free licenses to some Microsoft products, because the Microsoft regional manager for the country was a friend of my department head, and github students pack. We never got access to any Adobe, Mathematica, or any other math/engineering related software. Only things we had access to was couple of half a decade old dog slow computers in a "lab" with similarly old software versions with legit licenses. Students used to use cracked versions of everything to get stuff done.
fomine3 6y ago
Totally agree. University isn't the only signal for need to be discounted. I think that JetBrains' license style (company pay more but individual can use products for work) is reasonable.

50 points by AlchemistCamp 6y ago

Agree with the article, it is annoying that some student discount only applies with .edu email address which means US-only accredited school. But a lot of .edu email address owner is actually wealthy so...

phoe-krk 6y ago
I have noticed that some of those programs also work for other countries' TLDs, for instance, .edu.pl for Poland.
- whereistimbo 6y ago
  TIL. Still there are only 17 countries with .edu as second level domain. Unfortunately Indonesia doesn't have .edu second level domain, I'm stuck with .ac.id
  - OJFord 6y ago
    In the UK we use .ac.uk, it was (when I was a student) my experience that places that say '.edu discount' generally also accepted my '.ac.uk' - I only recall one that didn't, and that was resolved after a support email. I wonder if .edu is more strictly controlled in America though, because I still have an alumni.*.ac.uk address, which presumably anyone with automated handling of it would still accept. (Unless I suppose that's also common over there and they filter it out, and hope for no Mr Al Umnus from Scunthorpe.)
  - rswail 6y ago
    ac stands for academic so it has the same function as a 2LD as edu.
- ajdlinux 6y ago
  In my experience as an Australian, if a company sells its product globally and doesn't have complicated per-country sales channels then they usually offer their student discounts program to more than just US students.
PeterisP 6y ago
Many companies extend the same offer to non-US educational institutions by a domain list. For example, here's the JetBrains repository - https://github.com/JetBrains/swot https://github.com/JetBrains/swot - of worldwide educational institution domains that they are using for validation of their educational licenses; a smaller organization can probably piggyback off of it or a similar list instead of maintaining their own.
marban 6y ago
You don't need to be wealthy to buy a .edu for $4.99 on eBay...

bootloop 6y ago

I don't know what the product is here. But giving students a free license allows them to explore your product and get them hooked so they might use it in the professional world later on (and ask their employer to pay for it).

ffritz 6y ago
I have read somewhere that this is also most likely why Adobe was more or less chill about the fact that their stuff was/is being heavily pirated, because students could develop their skills with Adobes products and later on, the future employer of that student would have to buy a license. This probably changed with their “affordable” subscriptions.
PeterisP 6y ago
The post is talking about "an educational product" so in this regard students seem like the main target audience, not a fringe group that may become the target audience later, after their studies (which fits most other products).
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  It's an educational product but not related to being a student at a credential-granting institution. It's screencasts for people learning Elixir. Most my customers are full-time software engineers, but not necessarily in wealthy countries.
CodesInChaos 6y ago
For products in that category I'd rather offer a free "for non commercial use only" version.
croes 6y ago
He his talking about his screencasts. So there is no product to use and buy later.

hijp 6y ago

I'm a student, I'm broke, I like the convenience of using the .edu for discounts. Sometimes I run into places that use a third party verification service that asks for a picture of a student id with current semester visible. But if the problem is equity, then I like Sam Harris's model of offering his content free, no questions asked, for a year. I subscribed to his podcast this way and received an automated response immediately with the rss feed. I never want money to be the reason why someone can’t get access to my digital content. If you really can’t afford a monthly or annual subscription to SamHarris.org, just contact us, and we’ll give you a 1-year membership for free.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago
I respect that model, too. He's also the first major podcaster I know of to go to a subscription only-model, years before Substack even existed. His case is somewhat unusual, though. He's not trying to maximize revenue and it much more focused on spreading his ideas (and meditation training) as widely as possible. It would be astounding if Sketch, Jetbrains or similar companies copied it.

g_p 6y ago

It would be interesting to analyze this from the perspective of a country where students don't pay privately for their own education (or at least it isn't heavily normalized), where having such an email isn't necessarily a proxy for being wealthy and having spent on an education. I tend to think giving exposure of your product to students is valuable, but that lifelong "student email accounts" probably go some way to breaking this. There are websites where people will share student deals and how to get a valid student email by enrolling in the cheapest possible distance learning course, to avail themselves of the deal. The question for the HN audience is if these users are more or less valuable? They're willing to pay less, or seek a "discount" or "bargain", but likely also sharing your name and raising awareness of it. Will they be more likely than most to share the product with others because they got a "discount", and then the others will end up just paying full price as they don't want to jump through hoops and spend hours doing it?

cassepipe 6y ago
Here are my two centimes from France where education is (comparatively to the US) free (Something like a three hundred euros fees per year whose two thirds are a participation to be covered by health insurance (student health insurance is notorously inefficient btw)). Even here, although university is open to everyone most people who attend it and dont drop out are privilidged in some way, the content of the two first year is generally a bit poor and it acts a waiting room to select the very few research oriented minds. There are all kind of special public schools that act the same way the ivy league does in terms of reproducing social elites. To the point : Even here, I think the argument of the article still stand. Student is a very broad category and that emcompasses rich and poor and I agree that discounts should be revenue based and not category based.
- throwaway4889 6y ago
  Means testing is stupid and the bureaucracy involved to check whether the free lunch does not go to the undeserving (god forbid) is often not worth it, compared to just giving everyone something (and recouping it through taxation).
6y ago

GordonS 6y ago

I guess it depends on the product. I sell a B2B security product, and occasionally students or professors ask about a discount - instead, I just give them a bunch of free licenses. Our product has appeared in several papers/theses as a result. My understanding is that Google ranks .edu links quite well, so it seems like a win-win.

jopsen 6y ago
As student I recall a few products where getting a student license didn't require any verification. If the sign-up flow requires you click a button and check a checkbox, few businesses will do that :) If you see to end-users, some them might.. but still a low risk.

m000 6y ago

TL;DR: Although a lot of people with a .edu address are broke, we can't make sure that everyone with a .edu address is broke. And there are surely people somewhere in the world poorer than anyone with a .edu address. So nobody gets a discount. "Because I don't want to." would be more frank and straightforward than all those made up arguments.

throwaway4889 6y ago
Yeah I don't get why one would write all those words and invoke all sorts of abstract concepts on a public blog spot to justify not giving money.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
I'm not a huge fan of others limiting educational discounts to only people with .edu email addresses, either. It's due the reasons I covered in "all those made up arguments", as you call them.
- m000 6y ago
  So, you're bitter because you didn't get educational discounts just because you live in Taiwan. Because of this, you decided to not give .edu discounts. I.e. you turn against the "privileged" .edu students rather than the companies that were too lazy to extend discounts to non-US universities. That's just a misguided grudge (to say the least). What do you really expect to gain business-wise by publicizing a misguided personal grudge with a poorly written post? You don't mention you live in Taiwan. You don't even mention that you give discounts to non-US universities. So, in the end, you come out no better than those "other" companies. The post doesn't work as a publicity stunt either, as you make no mention of the product you're selling. Why not opaquely offer e.g. a 10% discount to .edu emails and a %40 discount to less-"privileged" universities. No explanations needed, you just receive a discount code in your email address. No drama, no grudges, no need to write lengthy posts and argue with strangers on HN. Disclosure: Never had a .edu email.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

auganov 6y ago

> Who has a .edu email address? Generally it's only students, faculty and alumni of accredited US colleges. This roughly translates to "many of the most priviledged people in the world". I'm pretty sure most sites do actually respect .edu equivalents in other countries. Certainly seen .ac.uk work. And for most countries it's simply .edu.<country tld>.

znpy 6y ago
> I'm pretty sure most sites do actually respect .edu equivalents in other countries. Certainly seen .ac.uk work. And for most countries it's simply .edu.<country tld>. No, they don't. The .edu tld is one of those areas where the US govt still exercises monopoly over a public resource (the dns space). Here in italy for example, there is no such thing as .edu.it. Most universities have their own regular .it dns zone.
- ulucs 6y ago
  My .edu.tr mail address suggests otherwise. Italy could have simply created an .edu.it extension itself
- enedil 6y ago
  I have .edu.pl address and most of the times I get educational discounts.
- Galanwe 6y ago
  Same here in France. Public uni had its own domain "univ-<city>.fr" Never seen a French school/uni with .edu
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Canadian universities named after places are generally u<place_name>.ca, (aka ubc.ca, uwaterloo.ca) but those named after people aren't, like mcgill.ca, queensu.ca, stfx.ca, carleton.ca.
  - type0 6y ago

nottorp 6y ago

How about educational discounts instead of .edu discounts? There are students outside the US as well. Not that i can figure out from that site what you're selling. Edit: just because it may not be obvious: in countries with state paid higher education the students can actually be poor.

maple3142 6y ago
I think websites should be able to check for .edu.(country tld)
- nottorp 6y ago
  That's not a rule unfortunately. If you want to do it, you prolly have to add "email us if your educational institution isn't recognized" and add them one by one when they show up.

josh_fyi 6y ago

Alumni have edu addresses too, and there are always more alumni than students; and the alumni need professional tools more than students. So, these discounts might be going mostly to alumni. The discounts are not a chance to get a student hooked before they enter the real world.

ugexe 6y ago
Yes the article explicitly states that alumni, whom the author consider a privileged class, also have .edu emails

jankotek 6y ago

Are people actually using .edu for email? It is gone once you leave uni.

tasogare 6y ago

> Nearly anything universities teach can be learned outside of a university, and usually faster. Seems the writer has a personal bias against universities, because this affirmation is so wrong on many levels. Sure lot of skills can be learned outside them, yet some totally aren’t (medicine for example). This explains more clearly why he doesn’t offer educational discounts (which by the way doesn’t have to be tied to owning an .edu email since most institutions use others TLDs anyway).

adamsvystun 6y ago

The article talks about student discounts as if they are always verified by '.edu' email address. Then the article criticizes '.edu' email address based discounts and concludes that students discounts are bad. I was a student outside the US in multiple countries. I don't remember any product/software that offered an academic discount that I was not able to access. Most companies accept local equivalents of addresses (like .edu.pl), if not they often offer a possibility to send them your student ID for identity verification. There is also an option to use internationally recognized student cards - like ISIC, which can be gotten in more than 130 countries. Bottom line, academic discounts are useful for students across the globe, who on average are broke.

ulucs 6y ago
Ironically, it's the author's own privilege (living in the richest country in the world) that renders them blind to this.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  I live in Taiwan. Being blocked from .edu discounts is a common complaint here.
  - ulucs 6y ago
    So why not offer educational discounts with /edu\.[a-z]+/ ? That blocks the "privileged" US students, and lets the poorer countries off the hook. You're still denying some opportunity to Taiwanese students with their .edu.tw addresses EDIT: Not to mention how US schools have made strides in recruiting students from disadvantaged backgrounds, to the point that there were schools making their students fake a troubled past so they could get better admissions. Do those students' disadvantages just disappear because they are admitted?
    - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
      I already give people in Taiwan a region-based discount. If I offer some kind of educational discounts for a future product, it definitely won't be based on email address or limited to people in official institutions. I'd also extend them to people in coding bootcamps, people in language schools and anybody who could credibly claim to be studying full-time, even if they were self-studying between jobs.

deleted 6y ago

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josh_fyi 6y ago

To the extent that these discounts target students at accredited universities in rich countries (and not non-accredited schools or pool countries), the discounts achieve exactly the goal of hooking low-income students who will later have greater buying power (personally or through their work).

ldeangelis 6y ago

Maybe leveraging the Github developer student pack could work. Sign in with Github, and if you have the student developer pack you get a discount.

mufufu 6y ago

> When you subsidize something, you get more of it. ... That leads to the question of what educational discounts subsidize. In effect, they subsidize going to very expensive universities. I’m not sure I am following the point here. Are you suggesting people are signing up to a 4 year university, taking out tens of thousands of dollars in loans (as you mentioned) in order to get a student discount?

AlchemistCamp 6y ago
In my specific case, the subsidy would be very, very small. In aggregate, discounts, special offers, easier credit, grants, loans and a social affordances add up. At the margins, subsidies lead more people to spend four (or often five to six) years of their life getting a credential. If you're interested in this topic, I highly recommend Bryan Caplan's book: https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste-ebook/dp/B07T3QRNLC https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste-e...

AnonC 6y ago

Maybe the next follow up post should be titled “Why I don’t give any discounts” and explain all the factors that make it difficult, like considering which country a person is in and purchasing power parity, and how even that could not weed out people who can afford to pay but don’t want to. /s Got it. You don’t want to give discounts. It doesn’t need so many words to explain it as if it’s a problem you can’t handle (when the truth is that you’ve decided you won’t handle it).

AlchemistCamp 6y ago
> "like considering which country a person is in and purchasing power parity, and how even that could not weed out people who can afford to pay but don’t want to" I'm not sure where you got that impression. In the article, I used purchasing parity discounts as a contrasting case. I do offer them and they're more generous than those of any other similar offering I know of (including those for other languages).

runxel 6y ago

This approach doesn't appear to be really smart. Actually more in the contrary. While it depends on the product in general you should definitely give students some discount, or even free stuff (if those are licenses). Couple of reasons: * You can leverage your product because you can hook students to it. If it is any good they will become attached and will enforce it later in the workplace (this happens because students will spend time in your software e.g.; they will see this time as an investment – you should, too!) generating a magnitude more than you "lost" in providing the discount in the first place. If you don't do that you have scared those people off forever. * If you don't give discount or free licenses, they will just get it from shady forums anyway ;) So you don't get anything. * Generate a positive feeling towards your brand. So much underestimated effect. If you've once damaged the attitude you just can't regain it, seriously. Last comment: Please don't use .edu addresses as a only verifaction. There is a world beyond the US, and they don't use that.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago
> "Generate a positive feeling towards your brand." I try to do this by having a generous freemium model. To the best of my knowledge nobody in my space has put even 1/3 of the free content out onto YouTube. Hopefully not offering extra discounts the rest of my tutorials won't overwhelm that goodwill, but one never knows... Many experience entrepreneurs also tell me that a freemium model at all is a mistake. > "Please don't use .edu addresses as a only verification. There is a world beyond the US, and they don't use that." Thank you!

cobbzilla 6y ago

> A less direct form of price discrimination is to create a slightly different product that would only appeal to customers with more money. In software, we see this often with features revolving around team management, accounting and compliance. Um, if the feature set is different, that's a different product, not price discrimination. Price discrimination is charging different customers different amounts for the same product. I gave up after reading that. [edit] OK I scanned the rest, and found a section titled "Hypocracy" -- is that a system of rule by the underclass? Or perhaps the author meant "Hypocrisy"... there's a bad joke somewhere in here given that the topic involves higher education.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago
https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/pd/price-discrimination/ https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/pd/price-discrimin... > "One way firms practise price discrimination is to offer slightly different products as a way to discriminate between consumers ability to pay."
- cobbzilla 6y ago
  Sorry, that explanation is just plain wrong. A car maker who offers a "GT" upgrade to their standard car model is not engaging in price discrimination, they're selling two different products. Selling movie tickets cheaper to students and the elderly is price discrimination. It's literally the same product, with a different price.
  - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
    > "Sorry, that explanation is just plain wrong." I'm pretty sure I saw the same in my freshman econ textbook, long ago. Tyler Cowen also speaks of selling slightly different versions of a product in the MRU video on price discrimination: https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-microeconomics/price-discrimination-examples-airlines-arbitrage https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-microeconomics/... Looks like Wikipedia's article also states the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

madushan1000 6y ago

Not all that relevant to the article, but students in southeast Asia(I was in a Sri Lankan university) rarely ever get access to any of these discounts. The only educational discounts I remember getting are free licenses to some Microsoft products, because the Microsoft regional manager for the country was a friend of my department head, and github students pack. We never got access to any Adobe, Mathematica, or any other math/engineering related software. Only things we had access to was couple of half a decade old dog slow computers in a "lab" with similarly old software versions with legit licenses. Students used to use cracked versions of everything to get stuff done.

fomine3 6y ago

Totally agree. University isn't the only signal for need to be discounted. I think that JetBrains' license style (company pay more but individual can use products for work) is reasonable.