How do I get educational discounts that require .edu email addresses when we use .org?
November 20th, 2007
Many companies and organizations run these sorts of deals and create the rules that require a .edu address under the mistaken assumption that all schools use .edu addresses for all of their email systems.We don’t use .edu for our student email domain. However, usieagles.org is registered to the University of Southern Indiana and has the same technical and administrative contacts as as the domain registration for usi.edu.
It is really those organizations and companies that aren’t honoring that relationship due to poor planning and bad assumptions on their part. Anyone can verify that usieagles.org is a valid University of Southern Indiana owned domain using publicly available and widely understood tools.
USI is not the only institution of higher education to use multiple (non edu) domains. There are many schools that use .org addresses for their student email. We had the same problem with Facebook when it was only open to universities. After Facebook realized that a number of institutions of higher educuation use .org addressing for their student email, they changed their policies to allow registrations from these valid domains.
The best step to take when encountering this problem is to contact the organization running the promotion. If you can’t find any contact information, it probably isn’t a place you want to deal with anyway. If it is a company with multiple divisions, like Microsoft, or Dell, Gateway, or Apple, try to find their education division. Most offer some sort of toll free 800 number for sales inquiries.
Tell them to do a whois lookup on usieagles.org and on usi.edu. The results of those searches will clearly show that both domains are owned by this university. That should prove the relationship and hopefully they will work with you to get your discount.
Other companies will accept other forms of proof of your enrollment with a university. See if the company offering the promotion will accept something besides an email address to prove your eligibility. It should be noted that email isn’t very concrete proof of enrollment as many institutions give .edu addresses to alumni that wouldn’t be eligible for educational discounts. Some forms of proof that many companies accept include faxed photocopies of your student ID, and proof of enrollment letters from the Registrar’s Office.
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