Free private Github repos for students and edu people | Hacker News Reader

Free private Github repos for students and edu people

github.com

220 pointsndr162 comments

I work at GitHub on all things related to education. I got a note that this was on HN, so I thought I'd drop by and offer to answer questions and provide some additional details.

Details on the discount:

* We're happy to provide students with GitHub Micro (5 private repositories) accounts for free. So long as you're a student, you're eligible. You can use the private repositories for anything you want.

* We offer organization accounts with private repositories to teachers that are using GitHub in class.

* Academic discounts on GitHub and GitHub Enterprise are available for many academic use cases, including: school administration, IT, and research groups.

Aside from the education discounts, I spend a lot of my time on university campuses. Feel free to email support@github.com if you're interested in having someone from GitHub come by your campus for a tech talk or to participate in an event.

> You can use the private repositories for anything you want.

Does that include using them for purposes that are not directly related to your education?

Yes.

What if you're faculty and want to use them for research projects (which may/may not eventually get open sourced)?

In most cases, research falls under our standard academic discount which is 25% off. You can apply via the form, due to manual processing turnaround can be a few days.

sweet!

If you're start using a private repo for education now but go to grad school do those repos remain free?

So long as you're a student, you qualify. After you graduate you get to keep them until the two years expires.

thanks =D

How would you know one isn't a student anymore? I'm pretty sure students don't lose access to their .edu email after they graduate (with most schools, at least). Not that I would do that, but there are people who certainly would.

replying to iNeal: really? My school turns my school.edu to alum.school.edu.

Two (semi-related) questions:

* Are high school students eligible?

* If so, my high school doesn't provide us with email addresses. Is that critical? (I have other ways of verifying my enrollment.)

Thanks!

> High school students are eligible as well.

> Since most high schools don't issue email addresses, the turnaround for approval can be longer.

Great, I've sent off a request, along with some information that should make it easier for you to verify me!

This a really cool idea, and great for getting students started without the stress of making code public. Kudos to Github. Does GitHub offer any similar benefits to non-profits or other types of organizations?

We offer free Bronze Organization plans to nonprofits with proof of status.

https://github.com/nonprofit

Is there any opportunity for non-US non-profit associations? That "501(c)(3) status" seems blocking.

Yes, please send a request via http://github.com/nonprofit

You'll need proof of non-profit status from your jurisdiction.

If I can be totally honest, our group had a pretty bad enterprise sales experience recently. We had trouble getting answers to our questions (we are a bit of a non-standard .edu account). We thought we had negotiated a good deal until the PO was about to be cut and then we came to find out there were conditions on the original deal nobody told us about. Our team was just crushed by the end because we love github and it left such a bad impression. I hope we are outliers, but I worry that we aren't.

I'm really sorry to hear that. I work at GitHub, so if you want to talk more about your experience please drop me a line. It's this username at that domain. Or hit up any other GitHubbers in this thread: We wouldn't be hanging around if we didn't want to hear from you.

My school doesn't have a .edu domain, can I still apply? with the school email address? ( .net )

Absolutely! The approval just won't be as automated (i.e., might take a day or two).

Done. Thanks, waiting for the approval.

I had a .ch address. Got verified in 10 minutes.

I'm a student. I've filled it out at least three times in the past and never gotten anything.

Me too. Are you from outside the US? That might be it, as my university does not use a .edu.

I'm sorry to hear that you didn't get a response. Maybe the emails went to your spam. Email support@github.com and I'll get you sorted out.

I've successfully used it with an *.ac.uk address

Nope, I'm in the US with an .edu email address. Checked the spam filter and everything. Nothing.

EDIT: Registered again and it worked! Goodbye bitbucket.

Bitbucket has offered unlimited free private repositories for years, why should students go through the trouble of using github?

THIS.

Bitbucket is free for personal use. Unlimited private repos. Edu accounts have unlimited collaborators... FOREVER.

and they're super responsive to support requests, support importing code from more sources, and support mercurial and git both.

Also the ticket trackers let you attach arbitrary files, not just those animated gifs :)

Also, BitBucket supports Mercurial, which is used by some major academic projects (for example, the Jikes Research Virtual Machine). I also personally prefer Metcurial, so having the choice is great.

Also, on windows Mercurial get a wonderful tool as to Tortoise, and it works well with Bitbucket...

mercurial (via tortoise, and even cmdline) is much easier to use for simple things (branches, merge, update) I think git has more bells and whistles, but a lot more painfull for novices to use

But only 5 collaborators which isn't good when you have a class of 30-60!

Not true for academic licenses/accounts.

"These licences [academic] allow students and teachers to collaborate with an unlimited number of programmers"

[1]https://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageI...

I see, that's pretty sweet

TIL BitBucket is run by Atlassian (i.e. the JIRA people).

Links to save you time, if you're interested:

https://bitbucket.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitbucket

For Open Source projects Github > * You just can't beat the tremendous community.

However when things need to be private... Atlassian suite > Github suite

JIRA is so much more powerful than Github issues/wiki. And it is significantly cheaper to boot.

I have a student account on GitHub and I use BitBucket for private repositories with my employer. I prefer the GitHub website so much more. Better design, better graphs, you can get an overview of who in your team has committed in a time period (Pulse), better README, better commit history layout, more service hooks (no Trello support for BitBucket is annoying considering we use Trello for organizing and managing our projects), to mention a few.

What kind of organization account do teachers get?

I wanted to let you know that your email validation is broken. my real university email address does not pass validation.

this is the how the email address looks like:

someusername@mail.huji.ac.il

I see it was fixed since I posted it. Thank you!

It is only free for one year. if you need free private repositories, you should stick to bitbucket

Ideal for semester project.

Works great! Made my day.

Thanks Github

Is it renewable if you're still a student after the year is up?

Yes, you'll need to reapply after the two year period, but the turnaround is quick.

Two years.

It's actually free until you graduate. :) You just have to re-up every two years.

+1 for bitbucket, I keep all of my private projects there.

Bitbucket has unlimited free private repos anyways. Adding your .edu just gives you the ability to have unlimited collaborators.

+1 for Bitbucket, unless you want to deal with the hassle of moving over from github to bitbucket when you no longer qualify as a student.

Or... you can pay $7/mo, given that as a nom-student you can probably afford that much? :P

Why pay for something that you can get easily for free from a competitor?

Yeah, seriously.. Why would you pay $7.. do you like wasting your money...

> Or... you can pay $7/mo, given that as a nom-student you can probably afford that much? :P

What's a "nom student"? Does that mean graduated? Because he didn't say that.

Or does it mean "landed a high paying job"? Cause not everybody does or can be certain they will.

There is one thing you can be certain of however, and that is that you will be up to your neck in student loan debt. Paying $7/mo is not always a justifiable expense.

Sure in many cases your assumption is correct, but you could be a tiny bit less flippant about it.

I did this when I was a student, and I recently had to move over the private repos to bitbucket when it expired. Just stick to bitbucket for private repos.

GitHub is a pretty great service (IMO). Totally worth paying for. If cost is your number one driving force, then sure -- go with Bitbucket -- but I think GitHub provides a way better experience (for users and developers).

Github is great for everyone but agencies who have a high number of repositories.

Bitbucket is great for us as it's per user pricing instead of per repository pricing that Github has.

Github is fantastic for opensource projects or people with a low number of repositories - It's handy if you only plan on having a couple of repositories (if you are a SaaS etc).

"Github is great for everyone but agencies who have a high number of repositories."

This is the single reason we cannot use GitHub, it would cost £1000s.

As far as I'm concerned, one of the best features of git is how easy it is to create new repos. Setting up a new repo for a new weekend side project, or splitting out a large codebase that's gotten unwieldy into a few separate repos, should be a no-brainer.

BitBucket lets me have as many private repos as I want, since they make their money when you want to add collaborators; GitHub's payment structure forces me to consciously think about how many repositories I have. I prefer GitHub to BitBucket in terms of their web UI/UX, but I really don't like that psychological shift.

Honestly this has never been a problem for me. How many private repos do you really need? It can't cost that much per month. The things most people are working on just aren't that important. Or better yet, they _benefit_ from being public.

I'm like the guy you replied to. I make a lot of repos in the course of work, play, and learning. Most of them I'd like to keep around, including history. I could fit everything on one CD; storage is cheap. Github would want $100/month to host those repositories. BB wants nothing, or http://repositoryhosting.com will host them all with backups for $6.

I don't have to think about costs when typing "git init", and I don't have to think about scrubbing passwords/keys/personal information when typing "git push"; repo-count pricing and public by default have high psychological overhead. GH's pricing doesn't work for me, so I don't keep my private repos there. Not a big deal, but I also don't think it indicates there's something wrong with how I work, the value of my code, or how I spend my money.

I have 38 private repos on Bitbucket.

None benefit me by being public.

Seriously? I have 20 different Git repos for various things that either can't or simply don't make sense to be public. Sure, GitHub's great and I have a paid account with them (not even the minimum), but I certainly have to rely on BitBucket as well.

You understand to create a repo you issue one command, regardless of whether you use git or hg? Also, GitHub doesn't support Hg is a major drawback for a lot of people. Git has a relatively higher learning curve, although certain commands in Git are really really awesome I have to admit.

Replace 'git' with 'DVCS'. My choice of git over hg isn't particularly relevant to the larger point I was making.

It's not always because I don't want to pay. In my case for example, I don't have a job, credit card, bank account or any other source of income. I simply can't play for a monthly subscription for version control. how do I explain it to my parents who are middle class indians and only have limited computer exposure, because they will be the one paying for it. Believe it or not, hosted version control is luxury for people not getting paid and Bitbucket lets me have that luxury without all the hassle for figuring out how to pay for it and I am very grateful to them for it.

Explain that, as a programmer, it's a useful investment to make in preparation for looking for a job?

GitHub hosts public repositories for free, so this doesn't seem to directly apply.

GitHub is phenomenal software, and I'm happy to pay for it. If you're not in a situation to pay for it, I feel for you, but software is a lot of really, really, really hard work, and I don't expect to receive the fruit of that work for free. As a programmer, I would hope you would feel the same way, even if you don't decide to pay for said software.

Charging by repository count, rather than some saner metric more indicative of actual usage (like number of users) is a deal breaker.

Got tired of waiting for Github to stop excluding my team because of the repo count nonsense, went to Bitbucket, never looked back.

Would gladly have paid Github a reasonable amount of money, but according to their silly metric, my little team required a Platinum account.

$20 a month for our sized team at Bitbucket and we have unlimited everything. For $25 a month at Github, we'd already be out of repositories just versioning our dotfiles.

I do agree that by charging by repository count they are losing a large number of customers who run small web design and development shops. If GitHub price per person rather than per repository, they would gain so many more paid for customers.

I don't see the advantage of using one Git repository to another. For me all of them just allow me to do git pull/push/log/etc...

I stick to Bitbucket for all my private stuff and even some public stuff. Whoever cares about my public code has to do exactly the same process in Bitbucket as in Github (i.e., just gets the URL and goes there to see the code).

What experience do you find better in Github? (note, I use Github for work )

I don't understand the fascination with github. Bitbucket gives you unlimited private repos for free, no special requirements. It has wikis, issue tracking, and contributors.

Does it have the projects? Once a platform is big enough it's not only about features.

Why would public repos on github effect my private repo on bitbucket?

Exactly. Roll your private repos on bitbucket and public repos on GitHub for the exposure.

What's the difference between publicity of repos on Bitbucket and Github?

To me, if the task is to see the code, they seem essentially the same — a storages one can checkout from, with a nice-looking web interface to preview the contents.

As for collaboration, DVCS are distributed by their very definition. Sure, clicking on "fork" button on web is easier that "pull; remote add; push" series of commands, but I believe this is completely negligible threshold as compared to actual work.

GitHub is more likely to pass the "dumb HR" test. "Oh a GitHub profile. I have heard of that."

I think one can just write "Git" instead of "GitHub" and point anywhere.

I like to think of Github as Facebook, Bitbucket as Google+. I use Bitbucket all the time (and love it), but it doesn't have the social network for whatever reason.

Agreed. I also think that Mercurial is really great, and I'd recommend that anyone who has only used Git spend some time working with Mercurial instead.

It seems to me that Git has won the popularity war,and GitHub has benefitted from that. GH has also focused on the social networking side more.

As an academic, I'd recommend BitBucket, and pretty much every academic I know prefers it to GitHub due to the free academic accounts.

To students preparing for graduation, I'd recommend getting a portfolio together on GitHub, but also spending time on Mercurial - it is much nicer in some ways, and variety is good for the soul.

Maybe you are on to something here. I am a g+ user, but not Facebook. I don't care about the social aspects of my code at all. Almost all of it is closed source anyway.

I've used both and they both work quite well. I prefer Github for the community, and I find their design and overall experience to be nicer. But Bitbucket really isn't bad either.

GitHub has a larger community and a much better user experience. I get a lot of enjoyment simply from using GitHub, but not from using BitBucket.

There's also less direct reasons, like GitHub Inc having a really open culture and GitHubbers are really awesome.

I agree with the enjoyment factor. I hate using BitBucket, I can't quite explain why. It feels neglected and the website layout hasn't been given much thought.

Why not just use Bitbucket? I switched over all my private repos to Bitbucket some time ago and it is working pretty well.

And to note, with BitBucket and an .edu email you get an unlimited account.

For all the people wondering about what constitutes a "school-issued email address" (.edu, .net, .ch, .ac.il, &c), we use the swot gem (https://github.com/leereilly/swot) to automatically identify domains belonging to academic institutions. You can see for yourself what's allowed, even send Pull Requests to include your school if it's missing. Anything that's not automatically accepted still goes through a manual review process.

And as others (johndbritton, jbarnette, jeremymcanally) have pointed out, you can contact us at support@github.com if you're having any trouble.

I made a private repo for our Group Coursework, so that we could develop without the risk of plagiarism by other groups. Once our coursework was marked, we just made the repo public (https://github.com/JosephRedfern/CM2301-9) - really handy.

I can see how this works out well for GitHub, too - 6 of our team-members didn't have GitHub accounts when we started out. They now all do. Thanks GitHub!

I used that during my last semester and it was awesome. I set it so that my README.md would have my schedules, books to read, homework assignment, etc. I'd update it as the term would go on. I was able to keep track of all my projects at a single place even though they were unrelated, and I also took notes during the lectures. With how they display .md files, it's really easy and quick to take notes and still have something decent to read afterward.

Sounds very useful, mind if I take a look?

I removed them from Github to leave place for the next semester, since we are limited in private repos and I didn't made them public since they also have answers to some homework.

email me about how you did it then wesleympennock@gmail.com

This is what it looked like, with more accurate and interesting information: https://github.com/KaivoAnastetiks/University-Demo

Github as private wiki, interesting.

Not only wiki since I also had a lot of source code throughout this. Also, since they added the feature to create files from Github, I used that a lot when I had downtime at my job so that I could work on school from Github. It could also be used in group projects I believe (unless we can't share those but I didn't notice if it's the case).

If you use Emacs, you might want to check out Org Mode. It was basically designed to do that kind of stuff. Github also displays .org documents rather well.

I recently pushed a group into using GitHub for configuration files and documentation for a project that delivered an OpenStack compute cluster.

The main driver was not my own experience/preference for GitHub, but that they have Windows & Mac GUI clients. I had no expectation that the other group members were going to learn Git (most are Windows users with no understanding of VCS), and therefore getting them using these clients made things a lot simpler.

I did, however, recommend that the University look at using Atlassian's JIRA + Bitbucket together for future semesters, mostly because JIRA has educational licensing and integrates nicely with Bitbucket.

As an aside: the more software-orientated projects struggled (and have struggled in previous years) with organising & distributing workload. Students aren't formally introduced to (D)VCS systems nor any project management software, and alongside figuring out their project scope & getting something working, things tend to fall apart in a bad way. Some good web-based PM software and a DVCS could hopefully go a long way into structuring their projects, and would also give their project supervisor better auditing capability to keep tabs on any "dead wood" members.

Just FYI, we have incredibly good educational prices on GitHub Enterprise and offer pretty decent discounts for the .com product for universities. Glad you found our native clients useful! :)

Yet another reason to love Github. I'm running out of love guys, seriously, knock off all this "do cool stuff" BS. ;)

Does this also apply to high school students? My oldest attends a STEM high school here in Seattle, and this would be excellent for them.

Yup, it's for high schoolers, too. It's just not as automatic, so turnaround might take a bit more time.

> High school students are eligible as well.

> Since most high schools don't issue email addresses, the turnaround for approval can be longer.

We're also huge fans of FIRST and love to support those groups. http://octodex.github.com/FIRSTocat/

https://bitbucket.org

I sincerely wish that more educators would teach about Git. Obviously I'm going on personal experience, but how many people are coming out of college with CS or BIS degrees and they've not even setup a Git repo before? From my experience that number is too high. Hopefully offerings like this will help solve that issue.

Wow Github you just lost out on a new subscriber! I was eyeing the micro accounts and then found this HN link. Thanks for being awesome!!!

Our student radio station applied for an edu organisation account and within a week had our org upgraded, we weren't sure if we would classify but figured as we were fully student run and non-profit that it was worth asking.

Just wanted to add my thanks! :)

Just out of curiosity, what happened to SourceForge? They were essentially the GitHub of the dotcom boom, and pretty awesome at the time, but really seem to have fallen off.

I remember using SourceForge back in the day. Not so much for hosting my own code, but for downloading projects. I don't know for sure and I'm venturing a guess, but I feel like they kind of fell behind and spun their wheels for a bit.

They're still around and active, just not in the spotlight as much. They're mostly used as a distributing system now. They're worth consideration if your projects host and distribute large binary files in addition to source archives.

That's exactly why we use SourceForge for Ubertooth, it gives us a good way to host released versions and some binary firmware images.

I mirror Ubertooth to Github because I was tired of having to answer the question "what's the Github URL?" from people wishing to browse the code.

A friend of mine, upon seeing this page, noted that he applied for this a year ago and still hasn't gotten a response. What sort of turnaround these applications have?

For students with school-issued email addresses the turnaround time is very quick. Without a school issued email address the turnaround should be a few days.

Perhaps the message was caught in a spam filter somewhere.

I started working at GitHub in August and have improved the application process quite a bit from what it used to be.

Tell your friend to reapply.

It was instant for me. I used a .edu email.

Brilliant, I use Github to contribute to open source, but have had my private repos on Bitbucket. It's great to move over to the one platform :) Thanks Github!

just use bitbucket for private repos.

They also let (501c3) nonprofit organizations in for free at the bronze tier. Thanks!

https://github.com/nonprofit

Bitbucket offers free private repos to everyone as well. And there's no need to fill out a special form. That's what I've been using for school projects.

If you add your student Email address to the account they'll give you unlimited collaborators too if you ever need that.

I think the 7$ dollars a month is reasonable for a great service, I'm a student (while working) but will continue to pay for my repos. I hope others do the same. I think a significant percentage of GitHub's user base are in school for something and could potentially qualify for this, but probably shouldn't if they can afford to pay. That said I use the student discount for Amazon Prime, so I am a hypocrite.

It's in github's best interest that students get this for free - they want you to share it with your friends. Free things typically have a higher viral factor, and github is actually quite social.

Your $7/month isn't really doing them any favors. They'd prefer if you'd convert your friends.

Github is a startup that took VC money. Use the free service they are offering you, if you feel so inclined to donate your money, they are several non-profit startups/organizations that need money badly so consider them first.

I think this is likely to be a better strategy for getting new users than losing existing ones.

I've been using the free tier for a couple years now as a student. Because of this free micro offer, I'm now queued up to convert into a paying customer upon completion of my PhD. In two years, I'll be a lot more personally invested in the service.

Is this exclusive to College students or are High School students eligible too?

High school students are eligible as well.

Since most high schools don't issue email addresses, the turnaround for approval can be longer.

I have a school issued ID, how would I go about this? Would I simply use the same form but with my personal email?

Use the same form and provide some additional context in the comment field.

I just did exactly that! Thanks :)

I'm a student, so I get to take advantage of this, but if you aren't, a bare git repo in a Dropbox folder makes an okay poor-man's private repo. You need to be careful to let Dropbox sync before you shut down your computer, and, though collaboration is possible with shared folders, you're likely in for a world pain from syncronization issues.

This is a bad idea b/c of sync issues. Just use bitbucket, which is a poor man's github.

How do you classify Bitbucket as poor man's github? It has almost all the same features, supports git and mercurial and unlimited private repos.

> supports git and mercurial

If you're implying that you're stuck with git if you use GitHub, you can use SVN with GitHub if you really want to.

https://github.com/blog/1178-collaborating-on-github-with-su...

> you can use SVN with GitHub if you really want to.

How is that remotely relevant? Mercurial is a great DVCS with a user experience that is (in my opinion) far superior to git. SVN on the other hand is...I don't think I need to rehash this tired old DVCS vs SVN argument.

I would love hg support on github, but until that time will use bitbucket for my own projects, perhaps occasionally syncing to GitHub using hg-git.

I'm not arguing one (D)VCS over another, I'm just mentioning that you have some limited flexibility just like you do with BitBucket. Your emphasis was on the "and", so I assumed you were counting the option of choosing your DVCS as a benefit, not the specific DVCS that were offered.

I am not the parent. I wrote the original comment, and my point was that I use hg, and github does not support hg.

Sorry, didn't notice I was replying to someone else.

Your point wasn't obvious from what you wrote; there's a mention of which DVCS BitBucket supports but not which DVCS you use.

> [BitBucket] has almost all the same features, supports git and mercurial and unlimited private repos.

BTW, GitHub indirectly supports Mercurial. They wrote an hg-git plugin [1] that allows you to push to and pull from a git remote repo using hg.

[1] http://hg-git.github.io/

Because it's cheaper, but has a lower quality UI/UX.

As an aside, both Bitbucket and Assembla provide free private repos.

UK students with .ac.uk?

Yep -- all students are eligible.

I really like this idea. I had Bitbucket before but it doesn't have a sense of community. Plus Github's Wiki & ticketing system is kinda neat. Does anyone know how long it takes to get approval after adding .edu email account & verified?

It was instantaneous for me.

I tried to get one a few months ago. Still haven't heard from them. :(

I got response in few minutes. And I don't even have .edu student email. weird

wow, I just got upgraded in less than 1 minute. I mentioned current university projects which may have helped, and used a uk address.

Try again! And be sure to follow the request for information pretty closely. We get lots of requests, so sometimes if they don't provide what we need (e.g., don't mention the school they're attending or something) we have to reject it, and since we get so many, it's hard/impossible to provide individual feedback.

You should be all set now.

Cool, thanks! :-)

I got mine more than a year ago in less than 30 mins. I was pretty surprised, since my student email address hostname uses a country-specific tld instead of .edu.

Same here (.nl). I guess GitHub has a list of approved domain names for this? Makes sense as .edu seems to be used in the US mostly. In that case it might take a while if you're the first student from your university to register.

I applied two times and both times my application got rejected. My college doesn't provide any .edu or other email ids to its students so I guess this isn't for me.

Send an email to support@github.com and I'll take care of it.

I just applied third time with scanned photos of my college ID. I'll send the email if it gets rejected too. Thanks

Edit: They accepted it this time! Thanks :D

This is great. I never learned GIT because I didn't want to pay to get a private repo. My next project will be on GIT thanks to this!

I respect the effort and love that education and students receive but I would love to see companies offer these sorts of deals for other important industries like HEALTHCARE. It's "cool" when companies announce these deals but the reality is, more college students care about getting loaded than building software. Healthcare is arguably more important than education and the companies fighting to improve it have more financial challenges than most students. NOTE: I'm a 24 yr old college dropout and co-founder of a health startup.

I'm a student of the Internet. I learn on it every day of my life. I'm guessing I don't count though because I'm not affiliated with a corporation that cares more about charging my bank account than making sure I learn anything.

Philosohical arguments like these don't make much sense on HN. By the same token, we all are students for life, either of Internet or of School of Hard Knocks. They also say .edu address so that should make it more clearer for you.

I see it more of an argument of definition.

Students - People who pay to have information presented to them in a nice and comprehensible manner.

Not Students - People who scour the internet and books in search of information that aligns with their interests.

It seems a bit backwards to me.

Yes, the actual definition requires a 'student' be in attendance of a 'school' or 'college'. What about Wikipedia, KhanAcademy, Google etc...? Aren't these new schools that I can 'attend' and don't have to hop through a bunch of red tape, apply, or send them money?

So, in this scenario 'student' is a proxy for broke and young and impressionable. These guys want to give a discount to impressionable youngsters who will learn their tool and take it with them into their careers. It has nothing to do with actually learning things in school, and everything to do with where you are in your lifespan.

I'm sure you feel very good about being self-taught, but the fact of the matter is that if you didn't pay tens of thousands of dollars for a prolonged adolescence with some vaguely educational overtones, you're in the minority. You can hardly expect them to have a 'idealist' package for people who are 'particularly nifty' or ambitious. 'Student' is a convenient way to filter out a demographic.

If it's simply that, then why restrict it to students, instead of by age? Most people under the age of 21 are broke, young, and impressionable.

I feel very good about the fact that I don't have to pay back debts for the rest of my life. I feel bad that a company that I look up to doesn't think the self-taught crowd are as worthy students as those who have it spoon fed to them.

Frankly, that'd be a fine policy, but it may well be considered discriminatory.

Not being in debt is awesome. Being self-taught is really cool, and I'm sure we could debate the merits of traditional university education all day. The fact of the matter is, wasting four years of your life and starting out deeply in debt is half the societal contract that makes you a 'student'. In exchange, you get to do student things. You get student discounts. You get a free pass to drink and be a git for those four years, if you choose. If you want to buck half the system, why not go whole hog and pay full price for GitHub? You're still saving $9958 a year over my education.

Have you asked us? support@github are real humans, I promise.

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