Why I don't give .edu discounts
questinglog.com
questinglog.com
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 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.
Most my customers are full-time software engineers, but not necessarily in wealthy countries.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
"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.
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.