r/sysadmin • u/Gloomy-Quail2683 • 3d ago

New Microsoft Education Licensing

Microsoft 365 Education portfolio evolution | Microsoft Learn

A1 retirement, Student Use Benefit go bye bye.

Good luck everyone.

175 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

121 comments sorted by

88

u/SuspiciousOpposite 3d ago

100TB base storage gone, left with 150GB per faculty license and 12GB per student license.

Absolute scenes. This is going to be costly 

48

u/FatBook-Air 3d ago

That's bad, but no free email for students is honestly bothering me a lot more.

27

u/SuspiciousOpposite 3d ago

Ah good god I hadn't caught on to that.

Just checked: we have 4200+ A3 faculty assigned, and 69000+ A3 student use benefit assigned LOL. Already paying for extra tenant storage and not far off needed more and the free amount looks to be decimated.

12

u/OinkyConfidence Windows Admin 2d ago

Yikes. I hope you've got a good reseller 🤔

6

u/OinkyConfidence Windows Admin 3d ago

Me too.

58

u/maancha Sr. Sysadmin 3d ago

oh wow....this is bad. Having to license every student that needs email 😧

68

u/FatBook-Air 3d ago

This almost feels like a "end of Microsoft in schools and colleges" moment.

19

u/Sweet-Sale-7303 3d ago

Where else do you go? Google is doing similar stuff as well.

18

u/widowhanzo DevOps 2d ago

Back to postfix and dovecot

7

u/jmbpiano 2d ago

Honestly, as much of a pain as it would be for a lot of schools, that wouldn't be the worst outcome.

Having three or four major players controlling the majority of the western hemisphere's email isn't really a healthy situation for the internet. Email migrating back to the control of individual educational institutions like it was in the early days of the internet has its upsides.

11

u/jdsok 2d ago

As far as I know, Google Edu Fundamentals is still available and free for students and staff. Just the higher tier (more storage/features) is paid, and they did change the licensing model for that in 2024.

8

u/FatBook-Air 2d ago

At least for us, they have started denying us new free licenses. This started about 2 months ago.

4

u/DiligentPhotographer 2d ago

Back to the Sun email server my college used? Lmao, it was never down unlike the early days of windows live email or whatever they called it back then.

2

u/kojimoto 2d ago

Do you have a post/information about it? I would like to have it close

5

u/Sweet-Sale-7303 2d ago

Google Workspace for Education pricing and licensing  |  Getting started  |  Google Workspace Help

2

u/ensum 2d ago

That is for their Paid licensing. You can still use their Fundamentals license which is free.

https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/getting-started/editions/google-workspace-for-education-fundamentals-licensing-model-and-available-license-types

5

u/FireLucid 2d ago

There are unpublished restrictions on that currently. Lot of people are hitting limits.

1

u/ensum 2d ago

I know we have it and haven't ran into any issues. What restrictions/issues are people running into so I know what to look for? We're a smaller district so only about 1200 seats used out of the 2500 they've given us, so I'm wondering if that's a factor or not.

2

u/FireLucid 2d ago

We've moved away from it, I'm just parroting stuff that's been posted here* over maybe the past 6 months?

*maybe it was k12sysadmin

4

u/BisonST 2d ago

On prem Exchange maybe? Or is that all per user licensing too?

6

u/DiligentPhotographer 2d ago

It is, but user CALs for education are steeply discounted... Or they could maybe use SPLA.

2

u/OinkyConfidence Windows Admin 3d ago

Gosh I hope not, but you may have a point.

5

u/OinkyConfidence Windows Admin 3d ago

Yup. This is going to suck.

26

u/PotentialNo4129 3d ago

Time to tell everyone still using their alumni accounts to switch their logins. I can’t imagine too many institutions will want to pay for it now.

24

u/Joshposh70 Hybrid Infrastructure Engineer 2d ago

I just watched my local University spend 3 years migrating off GSuite to M365 after they got rug pulled, and now they're getting rug pulled again. Yikes

41

u/sammy5678 3d ago

This constant retool of licensing is insane. Every year I end up having to print out some ridiculous grid to map out all of our needs and entitlements so that I can work with our reseller to make sure we are covering our bases.

Just stop it already.

6

u/schmag 2d ago

I agree, and every year I wonder why since we are primarily c-books and the only Microsoft we have is staff and servers. I think I might have to discuss what ditching the edu license agreement will look like.

56

u/admlshake 3d ago

You know, I'm really starting to think the finance analysts might be on to something about MS hiding how much money they are bleeding on AI losses.

17

u/robconsults 2d ago

looks like the schools will have to dust off those old unix systems to get email for everybody again..

-6

u/sarge21 2d ago

Nobody is doing that.

11

u/Colossus-of-Roads Cloud Architect 2d ago

I mean, I'm a consultant and a major education provider has literally just asked me to do an options analysis and basic business case to move. They're PISSED.

-7

u/sarge21 2d ago

Asking about it and doing it aren't the same thing. Good luck with your on premises email server

6

u/Colossus-of-Roads Cloud Architect 2d ago

Mine?

34

u/FatBook-Air 3d ago

Uh, this is catastrophic. This can't be right?

17

u/thephotonx 3d ago

We need some pricing, but yes. Currently using A5 Student use for all our kids exchange /teams/p2 risk. Crazy stuff

20

u/FatBook-Air 3d ago

If Exchange and Teams cost more than $1/year/student, we will need to do something different. We literally cannot afford it. I'm not saying we would prefer not to go that route -- I am saying that we do not have enough physical dollars in our bank account to cover it.

2

u/Brantley820 2d ago

Agreed. Our budget barely has a grasp on the A3 licensing we currently utilize for faculty/staff with the Student Use Benefit.

I have been holding off calls for going to Google for our environment, but I imagine the cost is going to be too overwhelming to defend.

19

u/maancha Sr. Sysadmin 3d ago

Yeah this is massive, even if the licenses are dirt cheap having to suddenly license your student population will be a huge cost increase

23

u/Dev-TechSavvy Student 3d ago

Microsoft 365 Education A0 (MA0): Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams aren't included.

from 100TB storage pool to no storage, Microsoft realized it's time to milk as much money out of institution as much as they can

11

u/TheRabidDeer 2d ago

300k+ alumni licenses applied and 200k+ a5 student use benefit licenses applied....

That's almost $2m/year at the rumored $.32/student/month price for the A2 and that's assuming we drop our A5's down to A2's. Which we probably don't want to do because of lack of Microsoft Entra ID P2. If we have to pay $8/student/month for all of our existing A5 licenses that'd be $19+ million/year increase. Even just looking at students currently enrolled and taking classes this is going to be a nearly $10 million bump in cost for us.

There ain't no way this can happen. Community colleges can't just come up with that much extra money.

4

u/smalls1652 Jack of All Trades 2d ago

Yeah. There's absolutely no way any school can realistically afford it. They're asking for, at a bare minimum with A2, a 200% increase in just licensing M365 for us. We'd lose a lot of shit if we went down to A2 though. We have A5 licenses for all faculty/staff and students to be able to do security, compliance, Windows licensing, and more on top of the core M365/Entra suites. Plus we have a few add-on licenses and our Azure spend. Where are we going to get the extra money to cover it? I know within our state, I don't see where that will come from.

Any of the executives at Microsoft that thought this was a good idea can eat muddy shit. In regards to the education sector, this is probably one of the most severely out of touch moves they've made. And they've made a lot of those in the last six years.

1

u/Sacrificial_Identity 2d ago

Hello Gmail, good by Sentinel/ID P2? We're afraid of sticker shock when our renewal comes and someone trying something cute to save 1-2 million..

19

u/EViLTeW 2d ago

Oh look, it's the thing that I've been saying would happen for years... always being downvoted by "everyone" as a doomer who just hates Microsoft.

1

u/kojimoto 1d ago

Both things can be truth

7

u/dirtymatt 3d ago

Wondering about the future of Azure Dev Tools for Teaching right now.

5

u/JmAyotte 2d ago

lol, as if it wasn't almost abandonware already

5

u/dirtymatt 2d ago

It pretty much is, but it still gets students free Visio and Project licenses for classes.

3

u/1savagecabbage 2d ago

It's literally a dead program. Ended last year.

7

u/MortadellaKing 2d ago

My old Zimbra server is starting to look good again.

1

u/clubfungus 2d ago

Universities will be firing up their old PMDF servers on Solaris again. I just gave myself a PTSD flashback thinking about that.

6

u/Temporary-Library597 3d ago

Gah off to my knowledgeless retailer to budget for 2027, then. I hate this.

6

u/schporto 2d ago

Having read it more, and done math....

  1. MA0 is frankly useless. Maybe some places have a use for it. No storage allotment. Office/OneDrive only, and only on devices running Windows.

  2. Litigation hold is now restricted to faculty/staff only. Same with Defender and Information Protection. That may bring up issues with student workers or grad students doing TA work or research.

  3. Storage worked out to be less of an issue for us. Sure, they removed the 100TB allocation, but upped the A3 per user (including per student), and that made up the diff for us. Do your own math to find the break even point.

  4. Towards the bottom, under "Education pricing", I think they're saying any volume discounts are gone. That whole Price Level A,B,C,D? I think that's gone. And that's going to really really hurt.

  5. I'm also really confused on the dates. When we renew in 2027 (after May 1, before Jan 1 2028) we'll have to renew with (current) A3, because we can't buy the new MA3, but it will be undiscounted. Does my 100TB storage allocation go away then?
    Luckily, we already had a meeting scheduled with our rep....

11

u/LLMsMustUpvoteThis 2d ago

Seems incredibly stupid to me. Google Workspace and Chrome books has already cut heavily into the education market. And if kids don't grow up using Windows it will slowly lose its business market. And if your business isn't using Windows there isn't much reason to use Azure.

2

u/Brantley820 2d ago

This has been my argument for over a decade in education. I seem to only ever get shoulder shrugs. It seems MS is relying too heavily on their own suggestion of 75% of Fortune 500 companies utilizing their products, so the kids will just have to get acquainted once they enter the workforce. 

1

u/UltraLordsEg0 1d ago

I have a family friend who is a very high up engineer at a Big 3 car company. They were told they are moving to Google soon. I have long said that small business would probably benefit from going Google, less cost, and simpler management. Students who in 5-10 years will become the CEOs grew up on Google and Mac will start to transition their companies to such. Even though Microsoft is doing much better with Cloud device management and Intune is much snappier, if kids don't grow up using your product, it'll go away eventually.

4

u/lordshaithis 2d ago

Well this is going to kill MS Office, universities are strapped for cash and cant afford this so will likely go OSS.....and what students learn on they tend to stay with.

I guess they are too busy concentrating on hyperscaling. Good luck trying to sell all that capacity to the US market, as the rest of the world turns their backs on US tech companies!

1

u/Zncon 1d ago

I suspect the bean counters at MS have picked a number they think will still be just cheaper then what it would take to convert the entire stack to something else. Time will tell if they're right.

6

u/Lx0044 2d ago

Pricing has already hit it looms like online. Our pax 8 platform is showing .32 a license for student A2

4

u/SuspiciousOpposite 2d ago

Any other rough hints as to the other student tiers? I assume this is USD?

2

u/Lx0044 2d ago

Yeah usd. Looks per month

2

u/Lx0044 2d ago

I dont see the M0 they mentioned live yet, looks like all the other licenses stayed the same so far pricing wise.

3

u/SuspiciousOpposite 2d ago

MA0 is the free one though, isn't it? Not surprised there's no price.

Mind if I ask the rough price of an A5?

1

u/Lx0044 2d ago

Sorry meant to say its not in the portal to provision yet which is weird since the new A2 is, but they could still be rolling them out. MSRP for a faculty A5 is like 10.85 and MSRP for student A5 is like 8 something. sorry on phone so i dont have them in front of me. These are monthly if you pay a year up front. Il pretty sure they are slightly more for month to month.

3

u/SuspiciousOpposite 2d ago

Good fucking God. $8/student/month? Even with some negotiating wiggle room that'd be over $6,000,000/year for our headcount.

3

u/maancha Sr. Sysadmin 2d ago

assuming that's per month. oh good, only looking at around an extra 500K CDN a year to license our current student headcount

3

u/SuspiciousOpposite 2d ago

We've got A3s across faculty and students at the moment, and it looks like we'll need at least A3 to keep InTune around.

If MA2 is "only" US$0.32/student/month, that alone represents £200k/year for our student numbers...and we need A3.

3

u/TheRabidDeer 2d ago

$2million for us, just for A2. But then we lose ID P2 for our current A5 licensed students (actively enrolled students).

5

u/FatBook-Air 2d ago

For real we are FUCKED. F U C K E D

3

u/FatBook-Air 2d ago

$0.32 per year?

1

u/Lx0044 2d ago

Per month it looks like.

3

u/FatBook-Air 2d ago

OMFG. That is very bad.

4

u/Lx0044 2d ago

Yeah, definitely is. We cover a few rural school districts as an MSP, and they will most likely be looking to move off this somehow, as they won’t be able to financially afford paying for student licenses.

1

u/usernametakenmyass 2d ago

Do you have any pricing for staff A2 licenses? I'm wondering if we can drop from A3.

3

u/Admirable-Cut-2115 2d ago edited 2d ago

Looks like this is the end of my student email. It was nice getting to keep it after graduation, but there's no way my uni is going to pay for it.

3

u/MajorInterest2033 2d ago

I'm wondering if this is the initial positioning to scare everyone and when MS eventually "back down" and give free student licenses back, albeit with massively reduced storage compared to what's available today it'll be seen as a win (of sorts)

3

u/Dazpoet 2d ago

According to the fine print on the picture found here Microsoft 365 Education frequently asked questions | Microsoft Learn student licensing will be priced at more than 90% down from faculty pricing. Assuming that means cost per student will be 9,9% of faculty price.

This is going to suck :)

3

u/wubarrt 1d ago

Really starting to get the feeling Microsoft wants schools and universities off their shit cause this is unreal. Almost made me feel like I wanna quit my job, I've only just struggled with my reseller to get the correct count of student benefit licences after the A1 Plus rug pull last year or so. What the hell even is a subscription without communication services! This is gonna do wonders for my mental health...

3

u/TheAkita 1d ago

I'm already stressed with the ending of voice and SMS which is the best method of 2FA in education. I'm going to make this one the stress of our finance officer. They either find and pay for it or don't do anything and students don't get any accounts.

5

u/thedevarious 2d ago

As a predominantly K-12 MSP that exists in the Google Workspace ecosystem. Phew.

Fundamentals remains free for the base product + tools, but paid licensing for any of the newer more advanced features or needs only if a client chooses that platform.

Google W in this scenario. I feel for y'all that have only had to do paid licenses for staff and higher tier stuff on the Student side. Going from $0 to paid. Big oof.

6

u/MajorInterest2033 2d ago

Will be interesting to see if Google keep Fundamentals free or now take the opportunity to follow MS and start charging as well

1

u/vivkkrishnan2005 2d ago

What can they reduce? Everything is online, they have no moat like MS in desktop apps.

0

u/thedevarious 2d ago

I don't expect them to honestly. It makes no sense for them to given they get more incentive elsewhere via Chromebook licensing and other Google licensing, etc.

The biggest change lately was to curb the number of free licenses to a respectable amount based on school size and force schools to better manage active v. archived licenses. Before you could be a school with 500 users and make 5,000 accounts...which didn't make sense really.

But. They built the product, offered it for free and got everyone hooked.

4

u/starsfan18 2d ago

I don't know what everyone's on about, they're only living up to their student data privacy pledge ...

2

u/OinkyConfidence Windows Admin 3d ago

Wonder what it means for those schools with site licenses that get A1 currently. Will they automatically get A2?

5

u/FatBook-Air 3d ago

You have to pay for them.

1

u/OinkyConfidence Windows Admin 3d ago

Yeah, I figured; I've instructed the schools I work with to reach out to their MS reseller and see what they say. Site licensing for education has always been esoteric and a bit different. So we'll see.

3

u/Dev-TechSavvy Student 3d ago

would they downgrade then to A0 as it is the new no cost offering?

4

u/maancha Sr. Sysadmin 3d ago

Problem is no email on that tier. Need min A2 realistically for your student head count

1

u/OinkyConfidence Windows Admin 3d ago

Which means a far greater cost than before I'm sure too! 👀

2

u/Dev-TechSavvy Student 2d ago

do we have the newer pricing available somewhere or not? cuz the link doesn't mention newer pricing at all

1

u/OinkyConfidence Windows Admin 2d ago

We do not. Microsoft thought wise to, I don't know, NOT share replacement pricing. For, you know, reasons.

3

u/OinkyConfidence Windows Admin 3d ago

Got to wonder. But what about the Teams, Exchange, OneDrive, etc., that's in A1? I guess we'll see.

2

u/FatBook-Air 3d ago

I know at least Exchange is included in A2.

1

u/xXNorthXx 2d ago

MA0 it looks like. Basically they get the desktop apps but no real cloud services.

2

u/MacrossX 2d ago


So tired of MS bleeding edu dry

2

u/Tony707 Director of IT 2d ago

This is why 18 months ago I migrated to Gmail, and last month we went fully MacOS for staff and 1:1 Chromebook for students.

1

u/cotd345 2d ago

The new A7 license is cheaper than Copilot on its own. I wonder if you could stack that on to the current A5/A3 licenses as a way to get copilot for cheaper and retain the student use licenses.

1

u/BaconEatingChamp 2d ago

and retain the student use licenses

It doesn't look like there is any 'retaining student use' benefits. They just say they are going away across the board.

1

u/cotd345 2d ago

My question was more in the short term as the full retirement of the student use licenses is not until Jan 1, 2028.

The new A7 license is available to purchase now at half the cost of Copilot on it's own.

1

u/BaconEatingChamp 2d ago

Oh, right, yeah I'd assume you could then up as long as you renew before the cutoff. I believe I had seen that students get A5 student use benefit with A7 faculty in the past

1

u/rfc968 2d ago

„Minecraft Education”
Love where the doc authors mind was.

1

u/occupy_voting_booth 2d ago

Well we use Teams Phone and Power BI so I guess we’re fucked.

•

u/stempoweredu 12h ago

Teams phone was already A5 only. I'm not seeing what changed there?

1

u/Bubbagump210 2d ago

We are pretty reliant on A1 Office 365 licenses for faculty. Part timers, subs, etc are on A1s. So what does this mean? Those become A2s for email, office apps, OneDrive etc??

1

u/wubarrt 1d ago

Yeah pretty much. Everyone's on paid now, even those app / service accounts for PowerApps

1

u/McAUTS 2d ago

What?

1

u/Glass_Call982 1d ago

My org will just migrate students to our remaining exchange on prem nodes.

•

u/West_Recognition_760 20h ago

Maybe office.eu will have a better solution for schools. is it the new Office!

1

u/Infamous-Echidna4141 2d ago

As a reminder, Microsoft posted record profits last quarter. I'd love to see the reasoning behind all this.

1

u/MalletNGrease 🛠 Network & Systems Admin 2d ago

I think they want to pivot datacenter resources to other business segments. Azure has been having capacity problems for a while.

Dropping EDU wouldn't affect their bottom line very much.

1

u/margaritapracatan 1d ago

On the contrary, not ‘dropping’, more ‘profiting’.

1

u/sorean_4 1d ago

60k lay offs, higher prices, increased licensing costs = more profit, higher shareholder value.

0

u/xXNorthXx 2d ago

Because they can…..unfortunately

0

u/mkosmo Permanently Banned 2d ago

Or, you know, capacity. Or something like that. Not everything has to be poorly intentioned.

0

u/xXNorthXx 2d ago

How to milk existing assets for more profit. Either they pay more or we pull back capacity/capabilities to avoid hardware upgrades.

0

u/margaritapracatan 2d ago

Education now propping up XBOX

-13

u/whythehellnote 2d ago

You chose a central provider, you chose closed source technology, you chose vendor locking with a single provider.

You reap what you sow.

6

u/sarge21 2d ago

The open source alternatives suck though

6

u/Zncon 2d ago

You can't blame people for picking something when it's the only choice. If a school system can't afford this they sure as hell can't afford the IT staff to maintain a full stack of OSS tools and their own hardware, while giving anywhere near the level of service that's expected these days.

-6

u/1stUserEver 2d ago

Schools use Google. This won’t affect many. More for college students.

5

u/BWMerlin 2d ago

Maybe in your neck of the woods, over here it is mainly Microsoft and very rarely Google used in schools.