Studies Multiverse exists to help you apply abroad yourself, without an agent and without paying anyone a commission. That is a strong claim, and it only means anything if you can check how the pages are made. This one explains the rules we work to, including the ones that cost us traffic.
Who pays for this site
No university, government body, funding organisation or agent pays us to appear anywhere on this site, and we take no commission from where you apply. The site is published by A.I.T. Multiverse Consulting Ltd, Nicosia, Cyprus, and it is intended to be supported by advertising that is labelled as advertising. If an affiliate link ever appears, the disclosure will sit immediately before it, on the page, not only on the disclosure page. There are none today.
We are not a law firm, an immigration adviser, a registered migration agent or an admissions service, and nothing here is immigration, legal or financial advice.
What counts as a source, and what does not
Every factual claim about a rule, a fee or a deadline should trace back to the body that sets it. In practice that means one of five things: a government department, a national immigration authority, a national statistics office, an official research funder, or a sector body that publishes the agreement itself, such as the collective labour agreement that sets Dutch PhD pay.
Four kinds of site are not sources here, and we will drop a figure rather than take it from them:
- Recruiters and student recruitment companies. They are paid by the institutions they list.
- Education agents and lead generation sites. Your details are the product.
- Commercial immigration firms. Their guidance pages exist to sell a service, and their reading of a rule is an argument, not the rule.
- Universities, for anything other than their own fees and their own deadlines. An institution is authoritative about its own course and about nothing else, and it has an interest in your applying to it.
This is not theoretical. In earlier versions of two cost pages we had sourced figures to a recruitment company, a listings platform funded by recruiters, a lead generation site and a commercial immigration firm. All seven of those citations were removed and replaced with the government publishers who actually set the numbers. We mention it because a policy that has never been enforced is decoration.
Dates, and the difference between checked and copied
A number without a date is a rumour. Where a page presents a figure taken from an official document, it carries the date on which somebody here opened that document and read the figure. We do not move that date forward because a page still looks plausible, and we do not move it forward because a neighbouring figure was checked. If the source was not re-read, the date does not change.
Rules move faster than most people expect. Reading the sources for our destination table in August 2026 turned up three live errors of exactly this kind: Sweden had introduced a 15 hour weekly cap on student work in June 2026 where our table still said there was no limit, New Zealand had moved from 20 hours a week to 25, and the United Kingdom’s Graduate visa is set to fall from two years to eighteen months for applications made from January 2027. None of those would have been caught by proofreading. They were only caught by opening the source again.
Gaps are published as gaps
When we cannot reach an official document, the page says so in the place where the number would have been. It does not say roughly, or typically, or according to most sources. Several cells in our destination table currently read that the source was not read, and two countries carry no verified rows at all. That looks worse than a full table and it is worth more, because everything that is filled in was actually read.
The same rule applies to averages. We do not publish an average international tuition figure, because no government publishes one and any number we produced would describe nowhere. Where a fee is fixed in law we print the exact figure. Where it is not, we describe the mechanism that sets it and send you to the institution’s own fee page for the course you actually want.
How the tools work
The calculators and estimators run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us or stored anywhere. They hold no country data of their own, which is deliberate: a tool that works from what you enter cannot go stale, and cannot be quietly wrong about a country while looking authoritative. Each tool states its method. Grade conversions follow published conversion practice and are guidance only; the institution you apply to is the only body whose conversion counts.
Corrections
Guides show their last update date, and the fast moving topics, which are visa rules, work rights, funding levels and costs, get re-read rather than re-skimmed. If you find something wrong, tell us through the contact page and say where you saw the correct version. We will check the primary source and fix it, and where the error changed the meaning of a page we will say on the page what it used to say. Silent correction is how a site keeps looking right while teaching people the wrong thing.
What we will not do
- We will not rank universities, and we will not tell you where to apply.
- We will not accept payment for placement, mention or ordering, from anyone, ever.
- We will not publish fabricated question and answer markup to win a search result.
- We will not present an estimate as though it came from a government.
- We will not link to an agent, an admissions service or a recruitment company, including as a citation.
Related: how we are funded · how education agents actually earn · contact and corrections.
