So I am continuing a project that was given to me by several college students from a nereby university. The project has never been for the school, but the students worked on it on the school computers so now all of the parts and assemblies that they gave me have the student/educational icon in the total assembly. I am working on my project in SW 2012 pro, is there anyway I can convert these parts from their educational version to the pro version short of redesigning the parts? Thanks.
I am pretty sure the VAR gave you the correct info. It's the way that SW chose to protect student versions from being able to be used in industrial operations.
You could possibly save the parts in a neutral format (STEP, IGES, etc) and then import them into the new version of SW. They would be "dumb solids" but "Feature Works" is part of SW Pro and it may be able to convert some features back into editable geometry.