Then it is bad heroin. I used it when it was free for quite some time, I found it useful once and nice in some other cases. I can use it now for free because I accidentally did significant open source contributions, but decided not to use it as it is not that useful in the end.

I can't find anything supporting that students only get 1 year, just a general "students get GHC for free" statement.

I'm assuming it's part of the Student Developer Pack:

https://education.github.com/pack

I've gotten this before, but it was a little tricky as I had to get someone from my school to submit credentials to GitHub in order for us students to have access to this. Not sure if the process is still the same. I assume if you go to a large university this has probably already been done for you

Also I don't actually see Copilot listed there...

The way it worked for me is I went to the form to sign up, put up my college ID card up to a webcam, submit, get an automated approval about 10 seconds later, then specifically go to the GCP page and "purchase" it for free.