SKU, quota and policy restrictions on Azure for Students and Free Subscriptions

Microsoft’s response confirms that your troubleshooting process is correct: Azure for Students subscriptions evaluate policies, quotas, SKU restrictions, availability zones, and live regional capacity separately, so a student can have allowed regions, available credit, and visible quota yet still be unable to deploy a VM. It is possible for all allowed regions to effectively fail at the same time due to SKU or capacity restrictions, and the “policy not started” or “Not Registered” behavior likely indicates a backend policy initialization or propagation issue rather than a normal quota problem. There also appears to be little educator-facing documentation warning that allowed regions do not guarantee deployable VM availability, meaning your educators independently worked out the practical deployment workflow very accurately, sorry for not being as supportive as I want, but that's what I found internally.

Let me know if you need anything else