What each student plan costs

The discount is $20 a line at every tier, so it is worth proportionally far more at the bottom. On Essentials Saver it is a 40% cut; on Experience Beyond it is 20%. That is unusual: most tiered discounts scale with the plan price and leave the entry tier barely touched.

The verification term is the thing to read

The primary account holder has to verify student enrollment within 45 days of signing up, through ID.me, and re-verify when asked. Miss it and the plan does not cancel. It converts to the standard version and the price goes up by as much as $20 a line.

Two lines is the ceiling. These are not family plans, and the account holder is the one who must be a student, so a student plus a partner or a roommate works, and a student joining their parents' account does not.

Which tier is worth taking

At $30, Essentials Saver with Student Perks is the plan to beat. It is the same price as Mint Unlimited and cheaper than most prepaid competition, on T-Mobile's own network with no MVNO deprioritization. What it does not include is hotspot at any usable speed, Essentials Saver runs tethering at 3G from the first megabyte, and the streaming perks the Experience tiers carry.

That single limitation is what decides this. If you tether a laptop, $65 for Experience More buys 60GB of high-speed hotspot, and there is no cheaper route to real tethering inside T-Mobile's own lineup. If you do not, the $35 gap buys Netflix, Apple TV and international data — nice, and not $420 a year of nice.

Experience Beyond at $80 is harder to justify on a student budget. The step up from More is 250GB of hotspot instead of 60GB and yearly rather than two-yearly upgrades, which is a household-scale feature set at a price that is still above what most people pay for phone service.

How it compares to the other discount ladders

T-Mobile now runs four of these programs (student, 55+, military and first responder) and they are not equally generous. The student discount is $20 a line on Experience More and Experience Beyond. The 55+ discount on the same two plans is $15. Students do better, on the same plan, than anyone else with a verified discount.

All four share the same shape: two lines maximum, the account holder must be the qualifying person, and verification lapses cost you the rate. If more than one applies to your household, they do not stack — pick the one with the larger discount and put the account in that person's name.

The short version: take Essentials Saver at $30 unless you tether, in which case Experience More at $65 is the only plan in the lineup that solves it. Verify inside 45 days, and price the plan at its standard rate before you commit, because that is what it costs the month you graduate.