Faculty re-verification failed, access revoked, unable to retry

[joelwross]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Re-verification/Repeat Application

Hi everyone,

I attempted to re-verify my faculty status, but due to what I assume was a poor photo the verification was denied. All access and benefits for my 10 years of repositories have been revoked.

I am want to re-attempt to verify, but the "Start an application" button is disabled. How do I try to get verified again?

I tried going through support (the CoPilot chatbot), but after explaining the problem to the AI it decided I needed to submit a ticket. But the support system refuses to allow tickets to be submitted under the "verification" category, and any other category used produces an automated response and ticket closing.

How do I get the button to reactive? How do I get help?

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[amiriguesss]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Re-verification/Repeat Application

Hi everyone,

I attempted to re-verify my faculty status, but due to what I assume was a poor photo the verification was denied. All access and benefits for my 10 years of repositories have been revoked.

I am want to re-attempt to verify, but the "Start an application" button is disabled. How do I try to get verified again?

I tried going through support (the CoPilot chatbot), but after explaining the problem to the AI it decided I needed to submit a ticket. But the support system refuses to allow tickets to be submitted under the "verification" category, and any other category used produces an automated response and ticket closing.

How do I get the button to reactive? How do I get help?

Not staff, just another educator who's spent way too long in this particular maze — a few things that might help you.
First, the good news: a denial isn't the end of the road. GitHub's own teacher docs say that if your affiliation proof wasn't clear, "you must reapply" with a better document. There's no documented cooldown, no 30-day lockout, nothing like that — the docs basically assume people just reapply. So a greyed-out button isn't GitHub telling you it's over. It's either a bug or an account-level hold, and neither is something you can flip from your side. Which is exactly why support has to poke your account.
When you do get back in, upload a different document than the one you used before. This seems to genuinely matter — it's called out under basically every denial reason in the docs. If you sent your faculty ID last time, send an employment verification letter on school letterhead instead (or something showing your name, the institution, and a current date). The one non-negotiable is that a date proving you're currently employed is legible: front-lit, whole document in frame, no glare, nothing over the name or dates. And double-check the form says Faculty — people who get auto-routed into the student flow get rejected outright, since faculty aren't eligible for the Student Developer Pack.
Now the annoying part. The dead button is the actual problem to solve, and the Copilot bot / "verification" ticket category is a black hole you'll never win against. Go here instead: https://support.github.com/contact/education — that's the link GitHub's own Education docs use for "Contact GitHub Education Support," and it's separate from the general verification triage you've been bounced off of. Two things that make it land better: describe it as "the Education application entry point is disabled for my account and I need the application state reset," not "please approve my faculty status" (approval requests just get auto-triaged back to the application form). And if that form also refuses to submit, pick a neighbouring category, put "GitHub Education — faculty reverification, application button disabled" in the subject, and ask explicitly that it be routed to the Education team.
Do the boring checks before you file so you can say you did: confirm you're signed into the account named in the denial email, confirm no second account is holding your academic email or benefit, and reproduce the disabled button in a private window with a different browser. Screenshot the button, screenshot where it redirects, note the UTC time, keep the denial email. That's the stuff that lets someone act on it in one pass instead of playing twenty questions with you. Give a specific one-off like this a day or two before you nudge it again, then follow up on the same ticket rather than opening a new one.
And to be clear about the scary part: nothing here deleted your repos. Ten years of work is intact. What lapses are the Education benefits — the free GitHub Team upgrade, Copilot Pro, portal access — and they come back once you're reverified. Worth saying out loud, because the revocation email makes it sound like your account got nuked and it didn't.
One last thing — you're not the only one hitting this. There's another thread from a student whose "Start an application" button redirects to the pricing page instead of the form (discussion #207890). If you add your screenshots there — redacted, never the actual documents in a public thread — and note you're seeing the disabled-button variant as faculty, it raises the odds of someone from Education noticing, and at minimum the pattern becomes harder to write off as user error.
I'm not going to pretend I know the exact internal reason the button locks, and anyone who tells you they do is guessing. But the reapply path definitely exists, the docs point at it, and Education support is the only door that can reopen it for you.

[joelwross]

Thank you so much for the detailed reply and suggestions!

2 days after I posted this I got another email "welcoming" me to Github Education, and I have been able to apply discounts to my organizations as usual. The "start application" button is still greyed out, but maybe I got reverified somehow?

I'll send a tick through the support link you provided just in case (and add a note to the other thread you provided), but maybe it is just the button interface?

(For what it's worth; I tried manually re-enabling the button and was able to get the form interface to launch, but it errored at submission :p)

[amiriguesss]

Thank you so much for the detailed reply and suggestions!

2 days after I posted this I got another email "welcoming" me to Github Education, and I have been able to apply discounts to my organizations as usual. The "start application" button is still greyed out, but maybe I got reverified somehow?

I'll send a tick through the support link you provided just in case (and add a note to the other thread you provided), but maybe it is just the button interface?

(For what it's worth; I tried manually re-enabling the button and was able to get the form interface to launch, but it errored at submission :p)

Honestly, I think you already have your answer and the button is the least interesting part of it.
That "welcome to GitHub Education" email two days later is almost certainly your approval going through. It's the email they send when the application clears, and the fact that org discounts are applying again is the real signal — that's the backend flag that actually gates your benefits, and it's set. The button is a separate thing sitting on top of it.
Which takes a lot of the menace out of the grey button. Once there's an approved application on the account, there's nothing left to start, so the entry point has no reason to light up. I can't tell you that's deliberate, but it fits what you're seeing. And your experiment kind of proves it: you forced the form open, hit submit, and it errored. That's the backend refusing a second application from an account that already has one. If anything, that's the best evidence you're verified.
So my advice is to stop poking it. Don't reapply. If you somehow get another application through, best case it's rejected as a duplicate; worst case a human sees two conflicting applications and starts unpicking your active status. Not worth it for a UI glitch.
Still send the ticket, just reframe it. Don't ask to be verified — ask them to confirm your teacher application is active, and mention the Start an application button is still disabled and you'd like it cleared if that isn't expected. Something they can answer in one pass instead of routing you back to a form you can't use.
To be sure before you bother: Teacher badge on your profile, Copilot Pro showing as active on the benefits page, org billing showing the discount instead of list price. If all three line up, you're done and the button is cosmetic.
And your note in the other thread is more useful now than it was before. The interesting detail isn't the disabled button, it's that the approval email and the UI state showed up at different times. For anyone else staring at a grey button wondering if they're still in limbo, "check your email and your org billing, not the button" is a much better takeaway than "my button is also broken."

[markpolyak]

I also successfully reverified my teacher status, only to find the next day that all my organization discounts had been revoked and the "Upgrade to GitHub Team" button had disappeared from the Education dashboard. More than three days later, the button reappeared, and I received an email from GitHub stating that my education benefits were now available.

This is confusing, but it looks like this is how the GitHub Education reverification process works.

[markpolyak]

In my case, the "Start an application" button did not become inactive immediately. I managed to try to reapply for verification after my organization discounts had been revoked, but I got the following message:

There was an error creating the discount request. Errors: Discount request could not be created. Discount request errors: Hi, Mark Polyak! You were last verified as a faculty on Sep 14, 2026. It is not necessary for you to re verify at this time., You have an outstanding discount request for @markpolyak. We will get back to you soon.

The next day, the button became inactive. Two days later, I received an email from GitHub saying that my benefits were available.

[Waldo0926]

Hi Joel, thanks for sharing this.

I’m experiencing a related but slightly different GitHub Education reverification issue as a student. In my case, the “Start an application” button is enabled, but clicking it redirects me to the general GitHub Pricing page instead of opening the Education application form. My Education benefits are still shown as Revoked.

I documented my case separately in #207890. I’m adding it here because these issues may be related to the current Education reverification/application flow.

Glad to hear that your benefits were eventually restored.