How to add your institution to the list of institutions eligible for Figma's free professor/student licenses

General Discussion
1

If someone can help, I would appreciate it.

As I am a professor at the Academy of Applied Studies Polytechnic, where we have a UX UI Design department, I would first like to know how to add my institution (mentioned above) to the list of institutions on the link (Figma for higher education) for getting a free professor/student Figma license.

Considering that I am a professor teaching UX design and UI design courses at this Academy, Figma is an essential tool for my work that I must present to my students as a resource they will use in the future. Currently, there are 56 students, and there will be many more in the coming years. Since students (and professors) cannot select the Academy from the list of institutions to obtain a free license, they are unable to use this program in its full functionality.

I wrote to the support team at support@figma.com, but they replied to me as follows:

“It looks like you’re contacting us from a Starter account. Customers on this plan receive support through our Community Support Forum where you can ask questions and receive help from our team and the Figma Community. If you’re looking for email support and have a Pro, Org, or Enterprise plan, please use our contact form using the email associated with that account.”

In UX design, the scenario where a user’s journey ends because they cannot select an option that is missing from a dropdown menu is often referred to as a dead end. While dead ends can be considered a type of edge case, they specifically highlight moments where the user experience fails to provide a clear next step, leading to frustration.

I am amazed that Figma, as a company that should be the main protagonist of UX principles since it is the creator of the program for UX and UI design, allows my user flow (as a long-time user of this software) to end as a pointless search for information and a technically hopeless scenario for me as an end user. Therefore, apart from this forum, I cannot reach out directly to technical support anywhere else because I have a STARTER PLAN.

If anyone can help with advice, suggestions or maybe their own experience, please comment this post.

Thanks in advance.

Prof. Dr. Fedor Rakic

2

Hi there! Thanks for reaching out to the community, and sorry for the confusion here.
As a workaround, when you apply in this form, please select ‘School not listed’ in What’s your school’s name , then you can specify below the full school name as you can see in this screenshot:

Screenshot 2024-09-02 at 14.05.06
Screenshot 2024-09-02 at 14.05.06944×544 12.2 KB

I hope this helps!

1 Like
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Dear Celine,

Thank you for your answer, it helped a lot.

My suggestion is that it should be evident and visible to future users that “School is not listed” can be selected. I hardly found it, even when you wrote me what to select. Actually, I could not find it since it is not listed. I needed to write it in the dropdown field so it could be selected. It would be better to put it as the first or last choice.

Thanks again.

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Thanks for your feedback, we will share it to the Figma Education team!