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...
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
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.)
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.
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 - 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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
In germany, universities are funded by the government, but you basically need a grammar school degree ("Abitur") to get into one - there are other paths, but of almost three million students, only 60 000 don't have one. Additionally, if you want to study certain subjects, where there's a high demand, you need good grades. Both these rules favor students with upper class parents. The latter rule has an exception which somehow makes that even worse: You can sue to get a place in a university, for any subject, regardless of your grades, but this costs money, which again tilts the system in favor of students with upper class parents.
Bottom Line: Even if universities are funded by the government, students still tend to be privileged. Educational resources should rather offer discounts for everyone below a certain age.
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.
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.
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.
He also mentioned in the article that, he too, was a broke college student at one point and used to ask people for discounts while juggling multiple jobs trying to get by. Does he not see the hypocrisy in that?
It's not that people with an .edu address aren't all broke, it's that they are better off then the average person, certainly worldwide, and probably even for the US. So instead the author offers discounts based on region.
"I'm unable or unwilling to read." would be more frank and straightforward than this summary.
> 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>.
> 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.
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.
Not sure you’ve drawn the right conclusions there - there are a bunch of countries using .edu under their own cctld. That decision is down to the country - in fact, Italy launched edu.it in 2018: https://www.miur.gov.it/nuovo-dominio-edu.it
I had a .ie (Ireland) email from university, and that allowed educational freebies on Dropbox at least. Another interesting aspect no one seems to be discussing is that I get to keep that email for life. Is that not common elsewhere?
From what I've seen with my significant other, that's not the case in Germany, she lost access to her university email as soon as she was done with her studies.
The discount sites I used also did SAML federation. There's like two big groups of unis federated so a site only has to link to two IDPs to be able to accept most universities.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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?
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.
A few countries put educational institutions behind a .edu. second level domain, the vast majority don't, their student emails are behind [universityname].tld without any .edu. involved.
our .UK ltd was owned and verified as an educational institution though if you bothered to look up the whois. Seems like we already built a system to handle this, not a tld
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).
> 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?
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-e...
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).
> "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).
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.
> "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."
> 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.
With modern technology, let's say you have a car with a higher trim package, and for a simplified example, let's say the upgrade is the radio. A manufacturer can and will make a new plastic trim piece with different buttons, but install the exact same radio behind it in all cars. The difference will be in a software or firmware switch that makes the radio behave differently.
To the customer, it seems like a different product, but to someone who understands how it's done, who is selling it, it's not really.
I think people find it useful to classify this as price discrimination.
This is an example that comes to mind, by the way, because I once bought a (base model) car that used exactly this method, only the switch was misconfigured so the buttons acted like the expensive trim.
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.
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.
73 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 97.3 ms ] threadI 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.)
For example, here's the JetBrains repository - 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.
Most my customers are full-time software engineers, but not necessarily in wealthy countries.
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.
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.
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?
Bottom Line: Even if universities are funded by the government, students still tend to be privileged. Educational resources should rather offer discounts for everyone below a certain age.
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.
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.
"Because I don't want to." would be more frank and straightforward than all those made up arguments.
It's due the reasons I covered in "all those made up arguments", as you call them.
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.
"I'm unable or unwilling to read." would be more frank and straightforward than this summary.
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.
Never seen a French school/uni with .edu
https://www.unimelb.edu.au/ https://www.sydney.edu.au/ https://www.adelaide.edu.au/
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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?
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-e...
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).
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).
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.
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!
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.
> "One way firms practise price discrimination is to offer slightly different products as a way to discriminate between consumers ability to pay."
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.
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/...
Looks like Wikipedia's article also states the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
With modern technology, let's say you have a car with a higher trim package, and for a simplified example, let's say the upgrade is the radio. A manufacturer can and will make a new plastic trim piece with different buttons, but install the exact same radio behind it in all cars. The difference will be in a software or firmware switch that makes the radio behave differently.
To the customer, it seems like a different product, but to someone who understands how it's done, who is selling it, it's not really.
I think people find it useful to classify this as price discrimination.
This is an example that comes to mind, by the way, because I once bought a (base model) car that used exactly this method, only the switch was misconfigured so the buttons acted like the expensive trim.
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.