by: Erin Morrison
With the holidays coming up, a lot of shopping is going to be done. As a student, there are plenty of places you can get everything you need, from school supplies to presents, at a discounted price using your student ID and student email.
The easiest place to get student discounts is online. One of the best websites to get student discounts is through Unidays. They use your student email to verify that you are currently a student, and they can offer exclusive deals, typically ranging from 10% to 60%.
Unidays has deals for clothing and makeup brands like Adidas, Coulour Pop, Levi’s, Too Faced, and dozens of others. The company provides discounts for items associated with fashion, beauty, food and drink, lifestyle, health and fitness, technology, and sports and media.
Another decent discount is through glasses.com. Students can get half off the price of their prescription lenses through glasses.com using Unidays. At grocery stores like Costco and Sam’s Club, students can get a free gift card. The best deals on everything are usually limited time offers and can go above 60% off.
Unidays also has deals on a lot of tech from Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, and more. The best of those deals would be $200 off of a MacBook. Also, Parkland Students have their own tech deal through the school. Students can get Office 365 which includes Microsoft Word and other Microsoft features for free. Brian Melunce, who works in Tech Service at Parkland, said the students can download it for free at go.parkland.edu. It can be used while you are a Parkland student and for one year after.
Movie theaters usually have student discounts if you bring your ID. In Champaign and Savoy there are AMC and Goodrich Quality Theaters, both of which offer cheaper movie tickets for students with a valid ID.
While shopping online, students can get Amazon Prime half off for free shipping and access to more discounts. The first six months of prime are free for students. Students can also get three free months of Spotify Premium, Hulu and Showtime. After three months, it is more than half off at $5 a month.
If you are traveling for the holidays, there are plenty of discounts you can get for that. If you are flying, skyscanner.com is a website that finds you the cheapest flights, and it can find you the cheapest flights exclusively for students. You can choose where you want to fly, and it will show you how to get that as cheap as possible.
The site also shows which airlines are having sales for students. If you are traveling by train, Amtrak offers 15% off for students traveling in the Midwest. Students at the University of Illinois can ride MTD buses for free with their Illini IDs.
If you own a car, it is likely you can get a student discount on the insurance if you have good grades. It varies from company to company, but The Zebra, a website that compares insurance rates said that, “most car insurance companies offer discounts for students with GPAs of 3.0 or above.” For most of these discounts, you must be under 25.
Students can get a lot of subscription deals. For example, a digital subscription to The New York Times is $1 a week for students, and The Washington Post is $1 a month. Through Unidays, The Financial Times is 50% off and Audible, an audiobook website, is 33% off.
It can be surprising who offers discounts to students. More companies are constantly creating new deals for students to take advantage of. It can never hurt to just ask if there is a student discount before you buy anything, especially when it comes to holiday shopping.
