Opportunity Lens is a student-led research initiative examining how economic conditions shape educational opportunity and student decision-making across countries — through interviews, data analysis and public research.
Behind most university decisions sits a quieter set of constraints: what a family can afford, what a scholarship might cover, what a visa or a plane ticket costs. Those constraints are hard to see from the outside, and they rarely show up in a transcript or an application.
Opportunity Lens exists to make that quieter layer visible — not by guessing at it, but by asking students directly, across different countries, and recording what they say in a structured, comparable way.
Through interviews, structured data collection, qualitative coding and descriptive analysis, the project aims to identify recurring economic barriers and decision-making patterns — then publish the findings publicly, with the same limitations and sample sizes shown alongside every result.
How do economic conditions influence students' educational aspirations, university choices and access to opportunities across different countries?
This question is provisional but intentionally stable — the dataset, the coding framework, and the final report are all built to answer it directly rather than drifting toward a different question mid-project.
Interviews are coded against the same barrier and decision framework regardless of where a student is from, so patterns can be compared honestly.
Every public statistic shows its sample size. The project would rather show "n = 6" than imply a claim the data can't support.
New interviews, findings, and papers are added over time — this is a research process made visible, not a one-time report.