Geek/artist buying guide Part 3: Educational Discounts
Why pay full price for software?…the magic of Educational Discounts
I suppose there are many of you who don’t have any moral compunction about simply downloading copies of commercial software from bitTorrents or file sharing services. Those people might as well stop reading now. For those who actually feel like they should pay for their software, but who find the costs of the product they want a little overwhelming, I have a suggestion.
Take a class. I recently bought the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection, which includes the full versions of all of Adobe’s flagship software, including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Flash, Premiere, and After Effects. The Suite retails for $2,500. That was a little pricey for my sensibilities. On the other hand, I do like to be able to look myself in the mirror and not see a pirate, so I didn’t want to get a free, hacked copy of the software online. My solution came through my desire to learn how to play the guitar.
I enrolled some time ago at Santa Monica College, an accredited 2-year public community college. For three semesters now, I have been taking a 3-credit hour guitar class. The total cost of each semester for me is only about $80. The major bonus, I have discovered, is that SMC supplied me with a lovely student ID card with my name and photo on it, and a sticker on the back showing that it was current. With that card, I was able to visit an online software purveyor (in this case, Provantage Personal Computer Products had the best price among the reputable store listings) and order my software at the Educational Discount rate. I just needed to e-mail them a scanned image of my ID card to prove I qualified.
Adobe, probably in order to increase their corporate sales, gives massive discounts to student and teachers (or anyone with accredited educational credentials), hoping that the students will grow up to use (and demand) the same software packages in the workplace. Many other companies use the same strategy.
As a result, my Adobe CS3 Master Collection cost a whopping 3/5 less than the normal retail price. Spend $80 on a class to save $1,500 on software? Sounds like a good idea to me. There is no difference between the student discount version of the software and the regular price version. So for you artists out there who need Photoshop, but don’t want to steal it, maybe it’s time you went back to school. If you are currently in school, buy your software now.
Some shops I’ve used for the educational discount:
http://www.creationengine.com
http://www.provantage.com
For price comparisons:
http://shopper.cnet.com
And to make sure the shop you intend to buy from is on the up and up:
http://www.resellerratings.com
Tags: buying guide
This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Reviews and Recommendations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
