Student number

A student number is the number assigned to a student upon first entering or registering with an educational institution and is used to identify the student in lieu of a name for grades, essays, projects, exams and official documents.

tudent ID number systems by country

Austria

At Austrian public universities, students are assigned a unique seven-digit ID number known as "Matrikelnummer" when they enrol in any course of studies for the first time. A student retains his or her number when he or she enrolls in a different subject or switches the university altogether. Even when someone is not enrolled in any study program for many years, he or she retains it.

The "Matrikelnummer" has the following format:

Format: YYUXXXX	Explanation	Example: 9450234
YY	Academic Year when the number was issued	The two digits refers to the academic year, here 1994/95. Students enrolling in Winter 1994/95 and Summer 1995 were assigned numbers beginning with 94.
U	One-digit code representing the university issuing the number	E.g. 0=University of Vienna, 5=Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. Some universities share a particular number for this digit.
XXXX	individual number issued in the order of enrollment	In the example, the student holding the number was the 234th student enrolling at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration in the academic year of 1994/95.

United Kingdom

HESA, the Higher Education Statistics Agency, assigns a unique number to students. Many universities have their own system of student numbering.

Cambridge University

All students and staff are issued a CRSID, which represents their initials, plus a number representing when they were assigned their CRSID in relation to others with similar initials. Older CRSIDs were five characters long, which was extended to seven briefly in the early nineties, and then later reduced to five again. The digit 1 is rarely used. (For example, the first Alfred Brown Cockfoster is liable to be assigned abc20, while if next year Anna Budgens Cheapmoost comes along, she will become abc22 at the least, and quite possibly abc30, or similar.)