SOLIDWORKS Education Edition
Dassault Systèmes | Website | Version 2026
Available For Use By
Students
Faculty
Staff
Permitted Uses
Research
Classwork/Course Instruction
Administrative Use
Restrictions
All ME Faculty and students have access. Outside of ME, only available for the specific courses that were funded by their department.
Education Edition Eligibility Table
No Research Use
No Commercial Use
No Administrative Use
Where It May Be Installed
University Owned Computers
Virtualized Environments
Personally Owned Computers (but not recommended. Install the Student Edition.)
SOLIDWORKS Education Edition is intended for instructional and coursework use at UT Austin for the complete CAD teaching and learning tool. Featuring software plus a full curriculum and interactive courseware, SOLIDWORKS Education Edition is your all-inclusive resource for teaching 3D mechanical CAD, design validation, and data management. This is one of three versions (Education, Student, Research) of SOLIDWORKS licensed within Mechanical Engineering. Please see the SOLIDWORKS Information page for details on which version to use and how you can get access to it.
Appropriate Use Cases
This license is intended to support instruction and coursework use at UT Austin for participating units.
The SOLIDWORKS Education Edition license covers instructional use only.
This license does not cover use for purposes not directly related to instructional classwork; e.g., use with 3D printers or milling machines is not allowed. See SOLIDWORKS Research for more details on using SOLIDWORKS for non-instructional purposes.
This license does not cover research usage, except when used for classwork in a for-credit class. See SOLIDWORKS Research for more details on using SOLIDWORKS for research purposes.
If you are running SOLIDWORKS Education Edition on campus, as long as you are connected to the campus network (wired or wireless), you do not need to do anything else. If you are running SOLIDWORKS from off campus, you will need to connect to the UT VPN before starting SOLIDWORKS.
Cost
Licenses are department funded and available at no cost to you. See here and here for full Education Edition features.
How to Obtain Access
Note: Students installing SOLIDWORKS on computers they personally own should download and install Student Edition using the instructions here. These two versions are essentially identical in features, but differ in how they are licensed and activated.
To request access to SOLIDWORKS Education Edition:
Email: mech-it@austin.utexas.edu
Include details about what you need it for.