Are You Making Use of All Your Student Benefits?

You tend to only realise it once you’ve already been a student and gone through college or university, just how differently you tend to get treated by just about everybody during those years. If you go back to being a student to complete an even higher qualification after perhaps having entered the post-grad job market for a bit, you’ll notice it even more, this apparent “student privilege.” Are you making the most of it though because there are a lot of benefits which are reserved exclusively for students?

Student benefits come from two rather polarised view-points, one being from the point of view of sympathisers — those people and organisations who understand just how tough the life of a student can be, and the other being the point of view of those people and organisations seeking to capitalise on the so-called “student economy.”

Sympathisers

Perhaps the best example of student life sympathisers is that of your parents; the sponsors who don’t really expect anything in return out of sponsoring your studies and everything around your studies which makes up what it means to live the life of a student. I mean as much as your parents may talk about not having any more money, your rather devious self could call home at just about any time and make up something which is vital to your studies that needs to be paid for. They’re likely to dig into their pockets and sponsor whatever phantom cost you concocted, driven by the thinking that as long as you ultimately get that qualification and become self-sufficient, then all the costs and financial sacrifices are worth it.

There’s a different kind of student sympathiser though, in the form of those individuals and mostly companies which offer discounts aimed specifically at students. It’s perhaps a way of tapping into a market they’d otherwise not have access to, but it’s perhaps more about helping students out through offering them a little bit of financial alleviation. A student bus pass is one such example and there are many others, and it’s not simply a matter of helping students save as much money as possible, but rather just to help students balance their often meagre financial affairs a little better.

Student Economy Capitalists

Student economy capitalists come from a completely different place. They believe that students belong to one of the richest groups of people with the most disposable cash to spend and they’re not too far off the mark with that analysis. As a result of most students having a “direct line” to effectively accessing their parents’ bank accounts in the form of being able to ask for “emergency money,” a lot of companies play on the generally impulsive nature of the typical student so as to try and get them to spend their money with them.

You might be offered a credit card at discounted fees for instance, but this move is ultimately only geared towards encouraging you to spend money as opposed to giving you an outright student benefit.

Either way, there are a lot of benefits available only to students and if you’re a student you should be making full use of each of these which are indeed constructive to your cause.