I am curious to know if school districts ever give their K-12 students their own email addresses these days.
For example, maybe the school would assign “molly.brown@red-willow-public.edu”
(Btw, I’m mainly interested to know what U.S. schools do, but others from around the globe feel free to chime in!)
I know colleges and universities assign college students their own email addresses, but when I was in school minors never had their own emails. But considering how some grade schools are giving out laptops to students, maybe they are in the business of setting up online accounts like emails, web portal accounts and so on.
Both of our children were given email accounts as the technology has shifted how students are taught. Most quizzes are done online, there are classroom assignments done online, and student/teacher interaction and feedback on assignments occur via email.
I asked this question because I am trying to figure out how to offer teachers and maybe college students an “academic” discount on membership to my website.
The thinking was that if only teachers and college students have a myname@school.edu, then that would be an easy way during registration to automatically determine if someone has a legitimate claim to an academic discount.
But if some 4th grader has a .edu email, then that turns verification into a manual process.
Depending solely on a email address isn’t going to work because .edu isn’t the only TLD used by educators. The school district my children attend(ed) doesn’t use .edu, nor does my wife (who is a teacher) have a .edu email address.
Just some of the other TLDs used by school districts, universities, etc. off the top of my head
I graduated from my college’s masters program 4 years ago, but I get to keep my .edu email address forever (so long as i keep updating the password every 6 months). Relying on a .edu email address is insufficient.
Any suggestions on a practical way to verify if a customer is an educator or a college student and not turn this into an administrative (or privacy) nightmare for me, a company of 1?
In this day and age, I’d hate to require people giving me intimate school details, plus I doubt a small business owner like me could use them to the confirm things with schools because they would likely scream “Foul!”
I wonder how a newspaper like the Wall Street Journal does that? (Probably with a million dollar budget and just being the WSJ!!)
Yeah… it’s going to be extremely difficult, especially if you’re open to international students for that discount.
Companies like the WSJ, like Adobe… yup… they’ve got the budget to afford access to databases and the such… though i must admit i haven’t done the research to back this statement up concretely… they have SOME mechanism for validating education enrollment status…
And apparently they can do it on real-time, because I tried subscribing today using a believable student email address and university, and when I clicked “submit” it said it was invalid.
Kind of scary if they have access to every student at XYZ university on real-time, but I wouldn’t doubt it.
Makes me thing that it would be too time-consuming/cost-prohibitive for me to have to verify enrollment.
Maybe it is just easier to offer a discounted subscription, not verify, and trust I’m not getting taken?
Or, maybe I just trust that my offering is worth full-price to educators and possibly college students?
Years ago when i went to college everyone had their own email and a small amount of storage space on a server that you could access from any computer on that particular site
Actually, every reputed university or college thus get their students .edu or something private which is specific to their network hierarchy, but it is not universally verifiable in most cases. But some countries have country specific domains for colleges, universities .
