Eben Upton regularly mentions that machines like the BBC Micro gave the country a generation of youngsters with the technical spark that in time led to PhDs and business entrepreneurs, and it's very true. But the ground was more fertile for engineers in other respects as well, because "back in our day", the UK government used to invest in future experts by paying for their university tuition through grants. (Student loans were considered "that anti-educational American idea", and ridiculed.) The investment in people made at that time was well rewarded, as our tuition fees were paid back to government hundreds of times over by successful engineers through taxes.
Then Maggie came along and made the greed motive fashionable, and everything started going downhill. "That American idea" became the norm, and inevitably added a disincentive against pursuing a university degree. The dearth of engineers today doesn't have only Eben's single cause, it has multiple. Every hurdle you add reduces the number of future engineers, and money is a very big hurdle for most young people.
The Foundation is already a non-profit of course, so that's already going in the right direction. The two distributors are probably making so little profit on Rpi currently that it's only barely "business" I expect, mostly just good PR for them, not much profit. That could change if high volume brings their BOM and manufacturing costs down, but for now they may have no headroom for educational discounts on Rpi at all.
We'll have to see whether government still has the foresight to invest in future engineers once the Rpi is available in an educational package, time will tell. Perhaps this is where other pillars of UK industry could step in and offer Rpi for education for free, or at least heavily discounted. Every little bit helps secure the country's technical future.
