Education Benefits application repeatedly rejected due to name mismatch (Japanese kanji name on student ID)

[tacamy]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Re-verification/Repeat Application

Hi everyone,

Hi everyone,

I'm a Japanese student, and my student ID (academic affiliation document) shows my name written in Japanese kanji characters. I have a university email address and have applied for GitHub Education Benefits, but every time my application is rejected within about a minute, with the following message:

"Please ensure that your academic affiliation document contains your last name exactly as it appears in your GitHub billing information. If you have only a single legal name, enter it in both the first and last name fields of your GitHub billing information. Please ensure that your academic affiliation document contains your first name exactly as it appears in your GitHub billing information. Variations of your name and nicknames are unacceptable. You are unlikely to be verified until you have completed your GitHub user profile with your full name exactly as it appears in your academic affiliation document. Please do not use a variation of your name or a nickname. Once you have updated your profile information log out and log back into GitHub before re-applying."

I have already updated both my GitHub billing information and my GitHub user profile so that the name matches exactly what is on my student ID, and reapplied, but I keep getting rejected for the same reason.

I thought it might be a caching issue, so I waited two days after making the changes before reapplying, but nothing changed. I also tried logging out and back in before reapplying, but the result was the same.

Does the name need to be written in English/Roman letters? I don't have any document that shows my name in English. What should I do in this situation?

Thank you for your help.

[Monam1083]

This is a known limitation for students whose names aren't in the Latin alphabet — you're not doing anything wrong. Other Japanese, Korean, and Chinese students have run into the exact same automated rejection, and the pattern in their reports is consistent: GitHub's automated verification system can't reliably read non-Latin scripts (kanji, hangul, hanzi), so it keeps flagging a "mismatch" even when everything actually matches.
To answer your direct question: yes, in practice you'll need a Romanized (English/Roman letter) version of your name to get through the automated check, since the OCR system isn't compatible with Japanese text. Here's what's worked for others in your situation:

Get an official document that includes your name in Romaji. Many Japanese universities can issue an enrollment certificate or student ID in English (or bilingual) — check your school's registrar/international office, or your school's website, since some let you download this directly.
Photograph your original Japanese document next to the English translation/document in the same image, rather than submitting only the Japanese one.
Set your GitHub billing name and profile name to match the Romanized name exactly as it appears on that English document — not a stylized or nickname version.
Log out and back in before reapplying (you've already done this, but it's required after every profile/billing change).

One extra edge case to watch for: if your legal given name is very short (e.g. a single kanji character), GitHub's billing form has a minimum character requirement that can make an exact match technically impossible — other students have hit this specific wall too.
If you genuinely have no document with an English/Romanized name available, or you try the above and still get auto-rejected, your best path is GitHub Education Support (support.github.com/contact/education) and explicitly ask for manual/human review, since the automated OCR is the root problem here, not your eligibility. Include your GitHub username, a brief explanation that your document is in Japanese with no English equivalent, and attach your documentation.

[tacamy]

Thank you so much for the detailed explanation — this is really helpful. I'll check with my university's registrar/international office to see if they can issue an enrollment certificate or student ID with my name in Romaji. Thanks again for taking the time to help!

[Mehrab-Javadzadeh]

Hi! 👋

If your student ID only shows your name in Japanese, you should generally use the name exactly as it appears on your official academic document. If your document does not include a Romanized version of your name, I wouldn't recommend creating one just for the application.

Since you've already:

• Matched your GitHub profile name and billing information to your student ID,
• Logged out and back in,
• Waited before reapplying,

it doesn't sound like a simple profile mismatch.

A rejection within about a minute may indicate that the verification system is failing to match the document automatically rather than reviewing it manually.

At this point, I'd recommend contacting GitHub Education Support and explaining that your university-issued document only contains your name in Japanese characters and that you don't have an official English/Romanized version. They should be able to advise whether another document or verification method is acceptable in your case.

Hopefully someone else who has completed verification with a Japanese-language student ID can also share their experience.

Good luck, and I hope you get verified soon! 🍀