This is only for the teaching/student aspect of academia. There's the whole business side of academia which is still a non-profit, still doesn't have any money, but for which the academic stuff doesn't apply.
Very well-put.
Furthermore, Github's "Education" site doesn't actually say _what_ the acadmic pricing plans are like, just that you can "ask for a discount".
They gave us free private repos for our organization when we were an academic research team building robots. It doesn't hurt to try.