What this actually is

Facts, not opinions

The reports behind this site are the Erfahrungsberichte returning students write for their home university, most of the time because it’s a condition of their exchange grant. We read the public ones, extract structured facts out of them (a rating, a rent figure, whether credits were recognised), and aggregate those facts per destination. We don’t summarise, interpret, or editorialise the reports. The numbers you see are medians and means over what students actually reported.

Why some numbers are missing

A single report is an anecdote, not a statistic. We only show a rating once there are at least three reports behind it, that’s the current rule for the ratings you see on every destination page (academic quality, social life, housing, support). Below that threshold we say “not enough data yet” instead of showing a number that would really just be one person’s opinion dressed up as data. We also always show the sample size (n) next to every number that does clear the bar, so you can judge its weight yourself rather than trust it blindly.

Some destinations show “not enough data yet” on almost everything, and others show a full row of numbers. That gap is entirely about how many reports exist for that destination, some host universities get picked by dozens of students a year, others by one student once. It isn’t a bug and it isn’t us hiding anything, it’s an honest reflection of how thin the underlying data actually is.

Why we never show the reports themselves

We never republish a student’s original report, and we never quote from one. The reports we work from were written for, and published by, their home university, and that’s where they stay. What we gathered them for is analysis, to compute the aggregate numbers you see here, not to host or redistribute the text. Where we can link to the original report on the university’s own server, we do, and that link always points outward rather than to a copy on this site. This isn’t just a design choice, it’s a deliberate limit we hold to out of respect for how the reports were shared in the first place. If you want to read a student’s actual words, the link on each destination page takes you to where they were originally published.

Using these numbers

The aggregate figures on this site, the report counts, the averages, the year ranges, are our own work, computed from many reports. You are welcome to cite them, quote them, or build on them, in a thesis, an article, a student guide, an information session, anywhere. All we ask is that you name HonestAbroad and link back to the destination page you took a number from, so a reader can see the n and the date range behind it.

That permission covers our numbers and nothing else. The underlying reports belong to the students who wrote them and the universities that published them, and we are in no position to license those to anyone, which is exactly why you won’t find their text here (see above). The same goes for institution logos, which carry their own licences and trademarks.

Why a few destinations show a real logo

Most destinations show a generated initials tile, because using a university’s logo without checking its licence is a real legal risk, not just a copyright one, trademarks are involved too. For a small, license-checked set of destinations we show the institution’s own logo instead, sourced from Wikimedia Commons and verified there as public domain or Creative Commons licensed, with attribution where that licence requires it. Showing a logo identifies the institution. It is not an endorsement, sponsorship, or partnership claim.

What’s not here yet

This is an early build. There’s no submission form yet for students to contribute their own report directly, and a few of the metrics on every destination page (recognition rate, rent, whether people would recommend it) aren’t live yet because extracting them reliably needs a further processing pass we haven’t run. Those rows show plainly as not available rather than being hidden, for the same reason everything else on this page says what it is honestly.