How we know what we know
Every fee, deadline and entry rule on this site was copied from a document published by a government, a regulator or the institution itself — and we kept the quote, the link and the date.
Where it comes from
We read 147 official registers — education ministries, national accreditation bodies and statutory regulators. Not ranking sites. Not agent listings. Not the marketing pages of the institutions themselves, except where an institution is the only publisher of its own fee, in which case we say so on the fact.
That distinction is the whole product. A ranking site tells you what someone thinks is best. An agent listing tells you what someone is paid to show you. A register tells you what is legally true about who may teach what, and it is the only one of the three that is checkable.
What a “fact” means here
When we say a programme costs €0 or closes on 15 January, that is not our summary of something. It is a claim: the verbatim sentence from the source, the URL it came from, and the date we read it. You can open any of them and check.
We keep the original text exactly as published, including its original language and any markup the source embedded. The interface renders a readable version, but the stored quote is untouched — because the point of the quote is that a sceptic can compare it against the source page character for character.
- Unknown is never “free”. A fee we could not read is shown as not published. It is excluded from budget filters rather than assumed affordable — the direction of that error matters, because the other way round sends someone to a country they cannot pay for.
- Unknown is never “eligible”. If a programme has entry conditions we could not parse, we count them and say so, rather than reporting no blocking requirements.
- An expired deadline is never shown as open. Deadlines are read from a view that recomputes status daily, so a closed intake cannot surface as an opportunity.
How confident we are, honestly
Of 1,242,626 claims, 19,079 have been checked by a human being. That is 1.54%. We publish that ratio because hiding it would be the first dishonest thing on a site built to be checkable.
What the other 1,223,547 are is not nothing, and the distinction matters: each one was machine-read from a named official source, quoted verbatim, and stamped with the date it was read. That is a far stronger position than any agent site or ranking table offers, none of which tell you where a number came from at all. But it is not the same as a person having confirmed it, and we will not blur the two.
What we don’t know
We hold institution records from 59 countries, but full programme catalogues from only 30:
- USUnited States205,954
- ININ56,353
- BRBR46,809
- AUAustralia23,481
- CLCL23,341
- TRTR20,120
- KRKR15,768
- MYMY13,619
- PLPoland11,668
- ESES8,528
- NONO7,380
- NGNG5,203
- ITItaly4,321
- PTPT3,976
- FRFR2,917
- FIFI2,649
- ATAT2,511
- AEAE2,456
- DEGermany2,297
- CHCH1,922
- NLNetherlands1,799
- SESweden1,419
- BEBE1,404
- HKHK1,031
- ZAZA1,000
- MXMX438
- DKDK343
- SGSG133
- QAQA94
- GBGB50
For every other country we can tell you which institutions are recognised and by whom, but not what they teach or what it costs. Saying “we have data on 191 countries” would be true and misleading, so we do not say it.
Scholarships are the thinnest part of what we hold — 7,341 awards — because almost no official body publishes them in bulk. Most are scattered across individual institution pages, which is slow to gather and slow to keep current. We would rather hold a small number we can stand behind than a large number we cannot.
Why it’s free, and how that stays honest
We take no commission from any institution, which is the single most important sentence on this page. Agent sites are paid per enrolment, which means the option they show you first is the one that pays them most. That is not a conspiracy; it is simply how the business model works, and it is why we do not use it.
Institutions can pay to verify their identity and publish a richer profile. They can never pay for position in a list, never pay to change an eligibility verdict, and never pay to have a competitor removed or a drawback hidden.
If ranking could be bought, the ranking would be worthless — and so would we.
Found something wrong?
Report it. Every correction is checked against the source and, if we got it wrong, the fact is updated with a new quote and a new date. Corrections are the mechanism that keeps this honest over time, not an admission that it is broken.
Most recent source check: