Terms of Service

These terms govern your use of Macademia. You accept them when you create an account; please read them with our Privacy Policy.

1. What Macademia is

Macademia is a neutral reverse-admissions marketplace. Candidates create a profile; business schools and universities discover and reach out to candidates who fit their programmes. We facilitate the connection. We are not a party to any application, admission, scholarship, or enrolment decision, all of which rest solely with the institution.

Macademia is provided by Macademia UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Wiener Str. 61, 60599 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, registered at the Amtsgericht Düsseldorf under HRB 114262. Where these terms say "we" or "us", they mean that company. The managing director and contact details are in the Imprint.

2. Accounts

• You must provide accurate information and keep your login credentials confidential.
• You are responsible for activity under your account.
• Recruiter accounts must be created with a genuine institutional work email; one workspace is provisioned per institution domain.
• You must be at least 16 years old to use Macademia.

3. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Misrepresent your identity, institution, or qualifications.
• Scrape, harvest, or misuse other users’ personal data, or contact candidates outside the platform without a lawful basis.
• Upload unlawful, infringing, or harmful content, or attempt to disrupt or gain unauthorised access to the service.
• Use the platform to discriminate unlawfully against candidates.

4. Your content

You retain ownership of the information and content you provide. You give Macademia a limited, non-exclusive licence to host, process and display it only to operate the service — for example, showing a published profile to institutions. You can edit or remove your content, or delete your account, at any time.

5. Your profile, and what makes it visible

Creating a profile does not show it to anyone by itself. Once you have finished onboarding — which asks for your CV, a phone number and a short set of answers — your profile is published automatically — that is what makes you visible to universities — and we tell you this is coming before it happens. The phone number must be given and either confirmed by a one-time code or handed to us to confirm: if you choose the latter, your profile is public in the meantime and we contact you to confirm the number. Notifications about your applications reach you by email and in the app. Two of them also reach you by text message — a university unlocking your profile, and a university replying — sent to the number you confirmed at signup. We do not ask your permission for those two and we will not pretend we did: they are never marketing, each has its own switch in Settings, on until you turn it off, and a link to that switch travels inside every message. WhatsApp is a further channel, off until you switch it on, which we ask you about once your profile is live. Switching it on sends the same two that way, and the rest stay on email and in the app unless you turn each one on in Settings. You can unpublish at any time. Five consequences are worth stating here rather than leaving them to be discovered:

• A university sees your profile without your name or photo until it unlocks you by spending one of its credits. That is the university's decision; you are not asked to approve it.
• If you do not use Macademia for 60 days, your profile stops being shown to universities. Nothing is deleted, we email you before it happens, and you become visible again as soon as you sign back in.
• The student app has a league table that shows your first name, your initials, your country of residence and the points and level you have reached to other students. It does not wait for you to publish. You can switch it off in Settings and keep the rest of the app.
• Once an application reaches ACCEPTED or ENROLLED, you remain on that programme's cohort list — name and photo included — whether or not your profile is still published. It is limited to the programme that admitted you.
• Even before you publish, shortlisting or applying to a school contributes to an aggregate count we may share with a school that is not yet a customer, to show demand. The school is told how many, never who, and never a figure small enough to point at anyone. We do this on our legitimate interests, not your consent, and you can object — our Privacy Policy sets out both.

Our Privacy Policy describes each of these in full, including the figures we calculate about you and show to universities.

6. What it costs

Macademia is free for candidates. You pay nothing to create a profile, to publish it, to be discovered, to be contacted by a university, or to use any feature of the student app. We will never charge you for admission, for placement, or for being ranked more favourably — no such thing is for sale.

Universities pay. An institution buys a licence covering how many recruiters may use the workspace, and separately spends a credit each time it unlocks a candidate's identity. This is how we are funded, and it is why the paragraph above can be true.

Prices, credit volumes and payment terms for institutions are agreed in that institution's own order form or contract. These Terms do not set them, and nothing here obliges an institution to spend a credit on anyone.

7. Fairness and neutrality

Macademia is designed to be neutral and composition-based. We do not use special-category data (such as gender, nationality, or age) in matching or ranking. Institutions remain solely responsible for their own admissions decisions and for complying with the laws that apply to them.

8. Availability

We aim to keep Macademia available and reliable, but the service is provided “as is” and “as available”. We do not guarantee uninterrupted access, and we may change, suspend, or discontinue features.

9. Liability

To the extent permitted by law, Macademia is not liable for indirect or consequential losses, or for admissions outcomes, decisions, or communications made by institutions or candidates. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

10. Termination

You may stop using Macademia and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate accounts that breach these terms or applicable law.

11. Changes

We may update these terms when the service or applicable law changes. We will post the new version with its effective date and give registered users notice of material changes. Where a change requires fresh acceptance, we will ask for it before it applies.

12. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

If you are a consumer, that choice does not deprive you of the protection of any mandatory provision of the law of the country where you habitually live (Art. 6(2) Rome I). You may bring proceedings in the courts of that country, and only those courts may hear a claim brought against you.

If you are an institution or otherwise contracting in the course of business, the place of jurisdiction for all disputes arising from these Terms is Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

The European Commission's Online Dispute Resolution platform was permanently discontinued on 20 July 2025, so we provide no link to it. We are neither obliged nor willing to participate in dispute-resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board (§36 VSBG). None of this affects your right to complain to a data-protection authority, which is described in our Privacy Policy.

13. Contact

Questions about these terms? Email hello@macademia.education. For anything about your personal data, write to privacy@macademia.education instead — it reaches the same people, and keeps data requests in one place. Our full company details are in the Imprint.

See also our Privacy Policy and Imprint · Image credits.