The Georgia Institute of Technology has become the first education institution in the world to let students pay for their dining and shopping with bitcoins.
Now the students can top up their campus payment cards, BuzzCards, with bitcoins at the student payment cards center. BuzzCards are accepted at over 200 locations all over the campus.
With the help of BuzzCards, the students can pay for their lunches, parking, usage of public recreation zones, tickets to sport events. One can even withdraw cash from the card using any of the ten ATMs, situated at the campus.
Former students of Georgia Institute of Technology Tony Gallippi and Stephen Pair, now heads of the payment service BitPay, will do their best to help their alma mater process bitcoin payments.
Home Turf
Georgia Tech Institute is in the top 10 state educational establishments in the USA. It incorporates over 100 research centers, providing sound educational platform for over 21,000 technically savvy students.
Stephanie Wargo, Vice President of Marketing at BitPay, announced the company’s plans concerning the program of bitcoin integration into higher educations’ payment systems. “We see the student market as a huge potential as these millennials are the executives of the future,” says Wargo. “They have grown up with technology and are quick to embrace new ideas, like Bitcoin.”
Around the World
While Georgia Tech Institute has been incorporating bitcoins in the students’ payment cards, a whole range of higher educational establishments have also been experimenting with crypto-currencies.
In December last year, the University of Nicosia in Cyprus started accepting bitcoins from their students as a payment of the tuition fees. Now anyone can buy the courses from this University with bitcoins. Some universities in USA also offer this payment option, for example New York University and Duke University.
The students all over the world increasingly tend to discuss with the educational institution management the possibility of bitcoin acceptance at their campuses. Just at the beginning of this year, the members of bitcoin club at Massachusetts Technological Institute promised to reward each student of the campus with $100 worth in bitcoins in the strive to popularize digital currency.
