As Chancellor Garcia announced earlier this year, the CSU Office of the Chancellor (CO) has acquired OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu for all 500,000+ students, staff, and faculty through July 2026. ChatGPT is an advanced generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution that can help summarize documents, assist with text composition, conduct data analytics, and perform various other tasks.
According to the CO, the CSU acquired ChatGPT Edu because the CSU is committed to closing equity and accessibility gaps by providing access to high-quality AI tools to support academic achievement for its students and employee communities.
What Happens Next?
- CSUSB ITS has configured ChatGPT Edu to be available on the MyCoyote page, behind single sign-on.
- Faculty and staff access to ChatGPT Edu went live on March 24, 2025.
- CSUSB student access will go live on April 14, 2025.
- CSUSB's ChatGPT Edu environment and all data including prompts and files will remain private to CSUSB.
- No CSUSB conversations or data will be shared with OpenAI, the CO, other CSU campuses, or anyone else for AI models' training purposes. ChatGPT Edu has robust data privacy and security and administrative controls.
- Please see other pages on the CSUSB "Teaching with Generative AI" website for information and support resources.
- The CO's AI Commons website and the OpenAI Training site also offer useful resources.
What Can ChatGPT Do?
ChatGPT can perform many tasks such as information summaries, writing, coding, data analysis, translation, project management, live internet search, and more. For more on its capabilities, visit OpenAI - ChatGPT.
FAQs
All users will access ChatGPT Edu it behind single-sign on as a tile in MyCoyote.
- Access to GPT-4o, OpenAI's flagship model, excelling in text interpretation, coding, and mathematics
- Advanced capabilities such as data analytics, web browsing, and document summarization
- The ability to build GPTs, custom versions of ChatGPT, and share them within university workspaces
- Improved language capabilities across quality and speed, with over 50 languages supported
- Robust security, data privacy, and administrative controls such as group permissions, SSO, SCIM, and GPT management
- Conversations and data are not used to train OpenAI models
There is no direct cost to students, faculty, employees, colleges, divisions or departments for the plan purchased through the Office of the Chancellor. ChatGPT is funded through July 2026 at which time a possible extension will be evaluated.
The CSU Chancellor’s Office has signed an 18-month (February 2025 - July 2026) contract for ChatGPT with an option to extend the agreement for all active students, faculty, and staff.
- CSUSB’s ChatGPT Edu environment and its encompassing data, will remain private to CSUSB.
- No CSUSB conversations or data will be shared with OpenAI or other universities, for training purposes or AI models. ChatGPT Edu has robust data privacy, security and administrative controls such as group permissions, etc.
The CSU ChatGPT Edu plan includes enterprise commercial data protection features like SAML Single Sign-On (SSO), domain verification, custom data retention windows, SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, and data encryption at rest and in transit.
ChatGPT Edu does allow the creation of custom GPTs by all users. Support materials to show you how are forthcoming.
While the Edu plan offers extensive features, GPT-4o usage is limited to a total of 10 prompts every five hours for each of CSUSB's approximately 20,000 users; that is, approximately 200,000 prompts every five hours. After this cap is reached ChatGPT Edu will switch to GPT-4o mini which allows for unlimited messages. After the five hours elapse access to GPT-4o is again restored with the same cap in effect.
Yes, OpenAI provides applications for various platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS. Access and sign-in instructions to follow once authentication settings are in place.
Yes, ChatGPT Edu includes web search, allowing users to access and retrieve up-to-date information from the internet to enhance their queries and research.
Any existing content on a free or plus/enterprise plan will need to be migrated to ChatGPT Edu. Once the campus ChatGPT environment has a registered domain space (e.g. calstate.edu) associated with it, people will be prompted to move their data the next time they login. Anyone part way through the billing cycle on a person plan will automatically receive a prorated credit.
Alumni and emeritus faculty are not currently eligible to access ChatGPT Edu under the CSU agreement.
FERP participants and retired annuitants who have continued active status are eligible to access ChatGPT Edu.
Not at this time, however research is underway to determine if Auxiliary employees can be granted access in the future, and if so at what cost.
- Non-confidential data and files
- Non-copyrighted content. Before uploading copyrighted content, ChatGPT users should check with the publisher to obtain approval.
- From OpenAI:
- Infrastructure: Our data centers impact the environment through energy and water use. Our main partner, Azure, aims to be carbon negative by 2030, use 100% renewable energy by 2025, and achieve water positivity, zero waste, and net-zero deforestation by 2030.
- Organization Initiatives: We're working on industry scorecards (ISO 14001, 26000, and OHSAS 18001/ISO 45001), related disclosures (CSRD, SFDR, SECR, TCFD), and researching ways to reduce the carbon footprint of ML training.
ChatGPT-specific, self-paced learning resources are available below:
- OpenAI, LLMs & ChatGPT (05:34)
- Multimodality Explained (10:24)
- Introduction to Prompt Engineering (05:52)
- Introduction to GPTs (06:40)
- ChatGPT Search (05:43)
- Advanced Prompt Engineering (08:50)
- ChatGPT for Data Analysis (04:48)
Please see other GenAI learning resources on our Teaching with GenAI website. For general support questions, contact the CSUSB Technology Support Center, support@csusb.edu.