According to a recent review of multiple purchase orders by Bloomberg, OpenAI is rapidly capturing the U.S. higher education market with its highly competitive pricing strategy. OpenAI has sold over 700,000 ChatGPT licenses to approximately 35 public universities in the U.S., establishing a solid foothold on campuses.

ChatGPT

OpenAI has adopted an extremely aggressive tiered pricing strategy, aiming to gain market share by lowering entry barriers:

  • Campus wholesale price: University bulk purchase agreements show that the license fee per user is just a few dollars per month (in some contracts, such as the California State University system, the monthly cost per person is only about $2).

  • Retail comparison: This price is much lower than the $20 per month for individual educational users and is just a fraction of the $60 per month for the enterprise version.

Taking the California State University system (CSU) as an example, the university pays about $15 million annually to provide full-function access to ChatGPT for nearly 500,000 students and faculty. This strategy is seen as a typical "cultivating future users" approach—popularizing the tool among students to turn them into long-term loyal users in the workforce.

Although Microsoft has a natural advantage of bundling with the university's existing office software, Copilot faces challenges in penetrating the campus market. Data shows that Copilot has a relatively high acceptance rate among teachers, but its popularity is significantly lower than ChatGPT among students, who are more active and have greater future potential.

This difference mainly stems from ChatGPT's high awareness among students and a more user-friendly interaction experience for younger users. According to statistics, in the 20+ campuses that have signed up, the number of interactions in September alone exceeded 14 million, with an average monthly usage frequency of 176 times per person.