No phone number. No sales call. Nothing sold to consultants.

Data policy · last reviewed 2026-09-13

Verified, Estimated, or honestly Unknown

Every number on this site is one of three things, and we tell you which. The industry norm is to present all three as though they were the first one.

✓

Verified

Checked against the primary source

We read the figure on the university's own page, a government document, or a lender's own published list, and recorded where it came from and when we checked. If the source moves or changes, the check date tells you how stale our copy might be.

Where this label is used

  • -The 14 fully-sourced programmes in the published dataset, each row carrying its own sources and check date
  • -Published admission bars and GRE policies taken from official admissions pages
  • -The SBI select-institutions list on the bank-recognition tool, linked to the lender's own PDF
  • -Exchange rates on the rupee tool, from the IRS published yearly averages
≈

Estimated

Calculated by a method we disclose

No primary source published the number, so we derived it - and we tell you how. An estimate is not a guess dressed up; it is a stated method applied to stated inputs, which means you can disagree with the method rather than just doubting the number.

Where this label is used

  • -Cost, salary and payback across the 356-university coverage layer, tiered by QS rank
  • -Salary bands for 12 of the 14 verified programmes - role-and-country market ranges, not per-university outcomes
  • -Competitive GPA thresholds where a university publishes no official minimum
  • -Payback period, computed from cost, salary, destination tax and living costs by a formula printed next to the result
?

Unknown

We could not verify it, so we do not claim it

The hardest label to ship and the one we are most attached to. Where the data does not exist, is not public, or could not be retrieved, we say that plainly instead of producing a plausible number. An answer engine can quote a gap; it cannot quote a number we invented.

Where this label is used

  • -Graduate placement rates - no source we could verify publishes them per programme for international students
  • -Universities in the shortlist checker that are ranked but have no data, and ones we have nothing on at all - shown as distinct states
  • -Admission outcomes for any university with fewer than five self-reported results on the calibration page
  • -Consultant fees, where we hold no sourced data and decline to publish a plausible range
  • -Data channels we tried and could not use, recorded openly: US College Scorecard programme earnings, HESA/LEO postgraduate salary, QILT per-university international medians

The third label is the point

Verified and Estimated are ordinary good practice. Any careful publisher does some version of them. Unknown is the one that costs something, because a page that says "nobody publishes this" looks weaker than a page with a confident number on it - right up until someone checks.

A worked example. Placement rate is the single figure students most want and the one most freely quoted at them. We do not publish one, because we could not find a source that survives three questions: what counts as placed, what the response rate was, and whether international students were counted separately. Of the 14 programmes in our verified set, exactly two publish their own graduate salary data. We say two, not "most".

The same rule governs the calibration page: a university needs 5 reported outcomes before it appears at all, because an admit rate built on two reports is a made-up number with a table around it.

How to check any figure

  1. 1.Look for the label next to it. Verified figures name their source inline; estimates say what method produced them.
  2. 2.Check the date. Tuition, visa rules and lender lists all change. A verified figure with an old check date is a stale fact, not a current one, and we would rather you knew which.
  3. 3.Download the dataset and audit it in bulk. Every row carries its own sources and check date, under CC BY 4.0.
  4. 4.If a figure is wrong, tell us. Corrections with a source get applied and recorded in the changelog, including the ones that make us look bad.

See the labels in use

The shortlist checker is the clearest demonstration: paste the list a consultant gave you and every university comes back as verified, estimated, ranked-but-no-data, or not found at all.

Try the shortlist check →

Free, no profile needed. Or read how we're funded.