Terms of service

1. Who you are dealing with

Evidence Based Education Solutions is the trading name of Evidence Based Education Solutions OÜ, a company registered in Estonia on 12 August 2024 under registry code 17046360. The consultancy service described in these terms is provided by that company. Contact: info@ebesonline.org.

By using this website or sending a consultation request, you accept these terms.

2. What the service is

EBES is an independent education consultancy. We help international students understand, compare, shortlist and apply to universities across seventeen European countries. In practice that means talking through your situation, explaining how admissions work in a given country, checking your shortlist against the entry requirements as published, and telling you where your application is strong and where it is weak.

We are independent, and that means something specific. We take no commission from any university. We accept no sponsored placements, no referral fees, and no payment of any kind from any institution. We do not act as an agent or representative of any university, and no university has authority over what we tell you. Students are our only clients. If we recommend a course, it is because we think it fits you.

3. What the service is not

This is where we would rather be blunt than reassuring.

• We do not guarantee admission. Admissions decisions are made by universities, on their criteria, in their own time. We have no influence over them and we claim none.
• We do not guarantee a visa or residence permit. Immigration decisions are made by national authorities. We are not immigration lawyers or licensed migration advisers, and nothing we say is legal advice on immigration.
• We do not guarantee scholarships or funding. We can point you at what exists and tell you how competitive it is. We cannot make anyone award you money.
• We do not guarantee any outcome at all: not a place, not a grade, not a job afterwards, not a ranking, not a timeline.
• We do not submit applications in your name unless we have agreed that with you in writing, separately from these terms.
• We do not give tax, financial, legal or medical advice.

What we offer is informed guidance and an honest second opinion. The decisions, the applications and the deadlines remain yours.

4. Information on this website

The tuition figures, degree levels, programme lists, entry requirements and ranking positions shown on this site are compiled from universities’ own published pages and from the published tables of recognised ranking bodies. The date they were compiled is stated where the figures appear.

Universities change these things. Tuition is revised, programmes are withdrawn, entry requirements are tightened, teaching languages change, deadlines move, and rankings are republished annually on shifting methodologies. Figures on this site can therefore be out of date without us knowing.

The university’s own admissions page is the source of record. Before you make any decision that costs you money or time (paying a fee, booking travel, declining another offer, committing to a deadline), check the figure on the university’s own website, and if it matters, ask their admissions office to confirm it in writing. If you find something here that no longer matches, please tell us at info@ebesonline.org and we will correct it.

Outbound links go to university admissions pages and to ranking bodies. We do not control those sites, we are not responsible for their content or accuracy, and their own terms and privacy policies apply once you leave ours.

5. Your side of it

We ask that you:

• give us accurate information about your grades, qualifications, language tests and circumstances. Advice based on inaccurate information will itself be inaccurate, and that is not a fault we can correct at our end;
• meet the deadlines yourself, and check them at source;
• use the site and our advice for your own application, not to run a competing service or to resell our work;
• do not use the consultation form to send spam, abuse, or bulk commercial messages.

We may decline to work with someone, or stop working with someone, if any of the above is not holding. If we do, we will say so plainly and we will delete your data on request.

6. Fees

Fees, where they apply, are agreed with you in writing before any paid work starts. Sending the consultation form costs nothing and commits you to nothing. There is no obligation to proceed after an initial exchange, on either side.

7. Limitation of liability

In plain language: we will do our work carefully and honestly, but we cannot be held responsible for how an admissions committee, a visa office or a university finance department decides to act.

Specifically, EBES is not liable for a rejected application, a refused visa, a declined scholarship or any other decision made by a third party; for a figure published by a university that turns out to be wrong or that changes after we relayed it; for a deadline you missed; for money spent on fees, deposits, travel, tests or accommodation in reliance on a decision you made; or for loss of an opportunity, loss of earnings, or any other indirect or consequential loss.

Where we are liable to you for something that is genuinely our fault, our total liability is limited to the fees you have actually paid us for the work in question.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or any consumer rights under Estonian or EU law that cannot be contracted out of. If you are a consumer, these terms do not take away rights the law gives you.

8. Your data

How we handle personal data is set out in the privacy policy, and summarised on how we handle your data. Those pages form part of these terms.

9. Intellectual property

The text, comparisons and country guides on this site are our work. You are welcome to read them, quote a sentence with attribution, and share a link. Please do not republish pages wholesale or reuse the material in a commercial product without asking us first. Ask at info@ebesonline.org. We usually say yes.

10. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The version on this page, with the date at the top, is the version that applies. Changes are not retroactive: work already agreed with you is governed by the terms in force when we agreed it.

11. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of Estonia, and disputes fall to the courts of Estonia. If you are a consumer resident in another EU or EEA country, you keep whatever protections and forums your own national law gives you; this clause does not remove them.

Before any of that, please just write to us. Email info@ebesonline.org, describe the problem and what you would like done about it. We are one person, we read everything, and almost every disagreement is resolved in an email exchange. We will reply within 14 days.

Estonian consumers may also refer a dispute to the Consumer Disputes Committee at the Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority. Consumers elsewhere in the EU may use the European Commission’s online dispute resolution platform.