Apple Wants Students to Verify Their Identity Before Getting Education Discounts 

Apple has provided educational discounts for years to allow students, teachers, and staff to get discounted devices. The Apple education discount program has provided price breaks for all types of Apple products, including MacBooks and iPads, which have been especially popular with students attending college or professional educators.

According to reports, Apple has decided to change the way users will access these benefits through stricter identity verification processes for educational purchases. These strict rules will help ensure that only eligible users will be able to access the student discount for Apple products.

What Is Changing?

Historically, many regions had users who were able to use Apple’s education pricing with very little verification at checkout to use the benefit. However, in several markets, Apple is now requiring that customers verify their education or student status with additional documentation before being allowed to process the order through the educational pricing.

Apple may also utilize third-party verification services to confirm whether a consumer is truly affiliated with an academically recognized institution before granting access to the discount price.

Why Is Apple Doing This?

Education discounts are for students, teachers, and academic staff; however, many individuals who are not eligible have taken advantage of this offer without being properly verified over time. The new verification process that Apple has put into place will help minimize the amount of misuse and help ensure that students receive the full benefit of the student discount program as intended. By limiting access to eligible users, the company will also be ensuring that education pricing is fair and equitable across the system.

How Can Verification Work?

A student or an educator verifies their academic status by obtaining items such as:

  1) Validate their email address.

  2) Upload their educational documentation.

  3) Verify that they are enrolled in school.

  4) Validate through third-party student verification platforms.

Some users may only have their academic status verified once.

While others may be required to go through the process again after a period of time.

What Do Students Get From This?

For legitimate students and teachers, this can add one more step to their purchasing process.

However, the process enhances the validity of the educational offerings of the vendors.

Once verified, educational pricing on various products such as:

1.   MacBooks
2.   iPads
3.   Apple accessory products
4.   Specific software and/or services

If the user cannot provide proof of their academic eligibility, they will lose their ability to use the educational pricing.

More Companies Using Online Verification for Discounts

Apple is not the only business that is creating a more rigorous verification process.

1. Many companies that offer student discounts now have identity verification tools
2. In place to ensure that the discounts can only be utilized by the appropriate customers.
3. As online shopping grows, businesses are starting to place more emphasis on validating their customer’s identity.
4. Confirming the identity of the account holder.

Conclusion

Apple’s recent move to implement a stronger identity verification process for education discounts is part of a larger initiative.

Aimed at curbing the abuse of student discounts.

Although this new verification step may seem inconvenient for some user.

It is anticipated that it will help to preserve these education discounts for the individuals for whom they were intended (students and educators).