I'm afraid not - we only use that for group/volume discounts and for special cases (e.g., someone accidentally orders the Basic version when they really wanted Complete, they write us the next day and we give them a $20 off coupon on the NWP+ABC upgrade so they end up paying the same amount that they would have if they'd bought the Complete version initially).
We get a ton of e-mail about student discounts, but there are a lot of reasons why it really doesn't make sense for us to offer them.
A big part of it is the economics of Pleco's business. The software companies that offer large student discounts (Adobe, Quark, Microsoft, et al) generally make most of their money selling software to large corporations; they know those companies are going to pay full price for their software, and they're happy to give discounts to students to help make sure that those students are familiar with their software (which ultimately helps keep the companies buying it).
We, on the other hand, sell almost exclusively to individual buyers; we do get the occasional institutional sale, but we make most of our money one customer at a time. And a very high percentage of those customers are students. So even a relatively modest student discount would severely impact our profits, and it's highly unlikely that we'd get any of that money back in corporate sales later on. We've experimented in the past with lowering our prices across the board, to see if the extra volume would make up for the loss in per-copy profits, but it never even comes close to doing so. Part of the problem there is that a lot of the royalties we pay are specified in fixed per-copy dollar amounts, rather than a percentage of sales; hence, any discount we offer will come almost entirely out of our share of the profits.
Making things even harder is the fact that there really isn't any way we can effectively limit a student discount to students. It's easy enough to verify that someone is a registered student at a US-based college or university, but if you're studying Chinese in a dusty basement in Kunming there's not really any good way for you to prove that fact to us. And even if we could easily distinguish between students and non-students, is it really fair for us to give a discount to a 35-year-old professional with an MBA who's taking a year off to brush up on her Mandarin but deny one to a 22-year-old intern at an NGO who's barely making enough money to pay his rent? We don't want to be in the position of setting up arbitrary rules for who's "worthy" of a discount and who isn't.
I've been personally soured on the idea of student discounts lately by a couple of e-mails I've gotten from people basically saying "give me a student discount or I'll just steal your software off a P2P network" - I know most people wouldn't stoop to that, but it's aggravating nonetheless, since they're basically only writing in order to make up some sort of moral justification for stealing from us.
So anyway, the upshot is that I really don't see us offering a discount to students or to any other specific group anytime soon. However, we are exploring some ideas for a "student edition" or something similar which would offer a reduced feature set at a lower price; for $30 you'd get a basic version of PlecoDict with only the free CEDICT/ADSO/LDC/UniHan dictionaries and maybe a few features disabled. We've also got an idea for a product that would sell for around $15 and basically just be a handwriting recognizer grafted onto a character reference; you could write in a single character to get its Pinyin, radical, etc, and then use those to look it up in a paper dictionary. Far and away the best-selling version of PlecoDict right now is the $120 Complete package, so it could only help our sales to offer another product at a lower price point.
