How LinkEdu works,
in plain language

Every fact about a programme — tuition, deadlines, entry requirements — is read from the institution's own website or entered by the institution itself. We never copy a figure from a ranking site, a forum or another agency, and we never average one country's numbers onto another.

Each fact carries the page it came from and the date we last checked it. You can open that page yourself from any programme card.

Every kind of fact has a freshness target: 30 days for deadlines, scholarships and visa information, 180 days for tuition and entry requirements.

Past that target we withhold the figure and say "Being re-verified" rather than show you something that may no longer be true. A fact we have never sourced reads "Not available yet". We would rather show you a blank than a guess.

Every fact we display carries a "Report incorrect information" control. A report goes to the institution when it has claimed its page, and to us when it has not, with a 72-hour target to resolve.

We audit a sample of displayed facts every week. Once four weeks of audits exist, the measured accuracy rate is published — we will not publish a flattering number before we have earned it.

A match score compares what you told us about your grades, language results, budget and preferences against the requirements the institution published. It is arithmetic on stated facts, not an opinion about you.

If we cannot compare your grading system to the one a programme uses, the programme stays visible but the score reads "Score pending" — we will not invent an equivalence between two grading scales we have not verified.

We never show a numeric admission probability. We show how competitive an application looks, and we keep numeric probabilities switched off until our own predictions have been proven against real decisions.

No institution can pay to rank higher, appear more often, or be recommended to you. Plan, subscription and payment status are not inputs to the matching engine — this is enforced by tests that compare results with commercial status stripped out.

Institutional verification is free. Receiving and answering applications is free.

Until you accept an invitation, reply, or apply, an institution sees an anonymised card: your region, a qualification band and a grade band, plus why you matched. Not your name, not your email, not your exact country.

You can see who opened your card, mute an institution permanently, and limit how many invitations reach you. Students under 18 are never discoverable until a parent or guardian has confirmed by email.

Tuition is shown as the institution published it. Other costs — accommodation, living, insurance, visa — appear only when the institution publishes them, labelled "provided by the institution".

We never convert a currency we cannot verify, and we never total figures held in different currencies. A cost line nobody has published reads "Not available yet" — it does not mean zero.

Every automated action starts switched off. An institution chooses, per action, whether our agent suggests, drafts, acts with approval, or acts automatically — and every action it takes is written to a visible activity log.

Acting automatically never widens permission: invitation caps, the quality floor, student mutes and minor protection all still apply.