In an unusual arrangement, many students who attend college in California will be able to buy Microsoft software at deeply discounted prices because of a new licensing and online-sales agreement the Microsoft Corporation has made with two higher-education consortia.

Microsoft plans to offer similar agreements to other college consortia. The agreements could help Microsoft increase its sales of software to college students, many of whom obtain unlicensed copies rather than pay academic-retail prices.

The Foundation of California Community Colleges and the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities are the first consortia to sign contracts that let students buy Microsoft Office XP Professional and other widely used software programs from an online store at prices much lower than the academic-retail prices that campus bookstores typically charge. Academic-retail prices are significantly lower than standard retail prices.

"Most of the students were buying at retail, or they were not buying at all," said Larry Toy, the community-college foundation's president. "Mostly, they were not buying at all."

Under the new arrangement, registered students at 185 California colleges can purchase Office XP Professional for $70.95, a 64-percent discount off the academic-retail price of $199.

The arrangement imposes no administrative burden on colleges that participate. Typically, colleges are reluctant to license software to resell to students because doing so requires setting up a complex operation "to order, keep track of inventory, and keep track of what licenses they're giving out," Mr. Toy said.

On top of that, colleges have to worry about restocking, and even about where to store the CD's that contain the software. Microsoft has a contract with e-academy Inc. to operate the online store so that colleges themselves no longer have to worry about those details, Mr. Toy said. The company manages the licenses and ships the software directly to the students.

Microsoft officials said other college consortia are evaluating the new option and could sign similar agreements. University systems and individual colleges could also enter into similar licensing agreements.

Microsoft is offering the new option for students under what it calls its Student Select licensing program. Licenses purchased under the Student Select program give users the right to use the software for as long as they want.

Many colleges lease Microsoft software for faculty and staff members in exchange for annual license fees that are even lower than the one-time fees that students pay for Select licenses.

"We're aggressively looking at ways to make [licensing] easier and simpler for our customers," said Brad Stauffer, national consortium manager for Microsoft's education-solutions group.

Students can use the online store to buy a limited number of Microsoft programs: Office XP Professional, Office XP Standard, Office X Mac, and Windows XP Professional Upgrade.

Front Page and Publisher, two other popular Microsoft packages that students use for publishing their academic work on the Web, are currently excluded from the Student Select program. If Microsoft were to add to the list of software packages, Front Page and Publisher "would be the two that we would suggest," Mr. Toy said.