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Alan said
Reasonably enough, I am not eligible for the $180 student lab license
to use on my office and home computers. However, as a faculty member
at the University of Maryland I am eligible for a discounted license
for Stata through their GradPlan. I have used this to purchase my
past copies of Stata. Currently the cost of a Stata SE license
through the GradPlan for me is about $425.
The institutional specific glitch I have is that my department is
unwilling to spend $425 for a license for my use. So, it is not that
Stata does not provide an educational discount (they do and it is
large, but that my University is unwilling to pay that amount for me
to have the same version as the students for teaching purposes. This
has led to some discussion of alternative, less expensive, statistical
software applications.
We have dealt with this issue at BC (which is a GradPlan site) by
providing Stata/SE (or /MP) only to faculty members who have a real
need for Stata/SE. (Do your students really have Stata/SE in their
lab? Our PhD students don't--they use Stata/IC). Stata/IC is quite
adequate for many faculty members' needs, and if they need to use a
larger dataset, we have Stata/SE and Stata/MP available on servers
that can be used to create a subset of the dataset usable in Stata/IC
(as can Stat/Transfer). The Stata/IC faculty license is no more than
the lab license price you quote. It may well be that even that cost
per seat is a problem budgetwise, but it's usually easier to get
someone to part with $1x than with $2.4x. It would be nice if everyone
could have the snazziest version of Stata on their desk, but many
people don't really need it to do what they are trying to do (although
I still am green with envy after hearing a conference presentation
where someone stated they had Stata/MP for 16 cores handy...)
Kit Baum | Boston College Economics & DIW Berlin | http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Stata Programming
| http://www.stata-press.com/books/isp.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata | http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html
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