The site is the brainchild of Martin Pfister, the previous owner of major Swiss study travel agency Pro Linguis (sold to Kaplan in 2008), whose family has operated in the language training and education industry since 1955.

“After the sale of our business, people kept on asking us for advice to find the best school or education for them,” Pfister explained. “But finding the best school or education is not as easy as it seems, as many different criteria have to be taken into consideration.”

By using Educationstars, prospective students can read detailed reviews and make comparisons. General information about schools and agencies is also available. “The most important point for future students is that they can not only see if a former student recommends this school, but they can click on the detailed questionnaire and see exactly how the rater awarded points,” explained Pfister.

Educators pay to list their institution on the site which is available in multiple languages. Currently, the site is in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese. Swedish and Turkish will follow this month, Korean and Japanese in July and August.

“Finding the best school is not as easy as it seems, as different criteria have to be taken into consideration”

The site claims to have more than 3,500 education providers listed and 25,000 validated ratings. Schools are charged on their total number of classrooms, with packages beginning at €690 for smaller schools with 1-5 classrooms, going up to €15,600 for universities with more than 1,000 classrooms.

“It is a win-to-win situation for all – students who are interested in a course, students who want to share their experience and schools, educational institutions and agencies who want to present their offerings,” said Pfister. He said the new site worked in a similar way to travel industry ratings sites for hotels, empowering the student as a consumer.

“There already exist lots of online rating platforms for many different lines of business and this gave us the idea to design a rating platform for the language training and education industry.”

Schools also benefit from a healthy dose of word-of-mouth exposure and access to market intelligence. They can run evaluations on their student ratings, modify the rating questionnaires that go out to students, and compare statistics with competitors’ anonymously.

Pfister said the site’s long-term goal was to provide a rating platform “where every possible education type can be rated”. Already, comparisons between certain language schools in a given destination are viewable on the site.

He told The PIE News, “Since our start last week we got a lot of positive feedback from the schools. It seems like a lot of schools have waited for such a platform where they can prove their quality to potential students.”