For years, Microsoft, Apple, and others have offered educational discounts to students. Now, Microsoft has gone significantly further, providing a free copy of Office to students whose schools license it for their faculty and staff.
The Student Advantage program essentially extends an Office 365 subscription to the student body. Beginning Dec. 1, any academic institution that licenses Office for staff and faculty can provide Office 365 ProPlus for students at no additional cost, Microsoft announced at the Educause 2013 conference.
Until now, Microsoft has offered access to Office for both students and educators via its Office for Education plans, available in three tiers. A free, basic tier offers perks like 25GB of hosted SkyDrive storage, hosted email with a user-selected domain name, and other benefits that go a bit beyond what Microsoft offers via the Web for consumers—including Office Web Apps.
But only the paid A3 tiers and above offer desktop versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, Access, Lync, and OneNote; under that plan, students pay $2.50 per month per user, and faculty and staff pay $4.50 per user, per month. Students can also buy a four-year Office 365 University license for $79.99.
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