Honestly, I don't think it's as big of a deal. GitHub's student discount is all about giving students free private repositories for two years. Gitlab's is about adding more on top of that (private is free by default).

There is a lot less urgency needed to setup a system for administering discounts like GitHub did for this reason.

They could probably just benefit from making it more clear that private repositories are free for students (even though they're free for everybody), no verification needed. If they reword it like that, it's basically saying "we're not even going to make you verify that you're a student and you get a great deal."

Interesting idea. Is there an authoritative list of educational domains? Checking the last part of the domain name doesn't work in some countries like at my old university https://www.utwente.nl/

Also, my university gave me an alumni email address that I can still use today that has the same domain name.

Someone already posted below, but you can find a pretty good list at https://github.com/leereilly/swot/tree/master/lib/domains or on the Jetbrains fork at https://github.com/JetBrains/swot/tree/master/lib/domains

Thanks, still not sure how to deal with people (becoming an) alumni.

most common way I have seen is edu email address as the first pass, and a photo of a current student ID (this requires a human to check).

Github lets me use my alumni account for the discount (I dont), their idea is if you want to abuse your alumni account you get 2 years free, and they just swallow that cost

Amazon and iirc, github gave you an option to upload a valid student Id if your student email didn't end with .edu. My school had the same issue, and this is how i managed to get Amazon prime and github student pack for free. Hope that helps!

JetBrains let me do that. It was helpful as my school doesn't allow us to talk to outside domains from our email addresses.

I think the second point is the more important one. I have no idea how prevalent it is, but my university lets me keep my original student address forever. You can't rely on even .edu addresses to ensure current academic affiliation.

A lot (most?) of schools outside of the US don’t have a .edu domain. At least in France, I never saw a single school website ending in .edu.

Most.

edu-domains where for a while also given to non-US institutions, but this stopped and has now been US-only for a long time.

There are schools, atleast here in Canada that are accredited but don't end with .edu.

I totally agree to this. As a student, I'd love to apply individually like on GitHub for the student pack.

I remember coming across someone (I think it was JetBrains, but don't quote me on that) using https://github.com/leereilly/swot

Not only that. But when I was a student and I live in a third world country where college won't give you an email address. GitHub was more than happy to accept my student certificate. It was very helpful of them. If we talk about countries like mine, then going through the administration way to get such thing is sort of fictional. We can barely make the administration handle our real absolutely necessary stuff. There are a lot of motivated students in my country and others that love this kind of things and if you are requiring the intervention of institution for setup, you might just not have offered it in the first place.