Academic mobility search engine [more ideas]
Academia worldwide is going through a process of standardization, and the Anglo-Saxon model is becoming ubiquitous. More and more, the various courses, study programmes, degrees, research/teaching positions are becoming comparable across universities, countries, continents.
An academic job search engine would parse the web pages of all universities and research institutes for programmes and openings and/or provide an interface for voluntarily submitting this information. Then students can search for a study programme for example:
Subject: Biochemistry
Level: Master's
Duration: 1-2 years (60-120 credits)
Language of instruction: English
and get a list of relevant programmes worldwide with detailed description, tuition fees, scholarships, admission criteria, list of courses, etc. Social aspects of such a site can include sharing tags, reviews, recommendations with other users, most importantly with people who have taken part or know the university, etc.
Besides study programmes, the system would let people search for research/teaching jobs, such as:
Subject: Differential geometry
Level: Phd level research
Work language: German, English
and get a list of available positions with university/lab name, leading professor, detailed description of topic, criteria for admission, list of publications relevant to the work, salary/funding details, description of the region/country, etc.
Currently most such positions are advertised on the websites of the institutes, but there is no place with the aggregated information, besides traditional search engines. Most often people find out about various institutes through encountering someone's work or through personal recommendations or in a completely random way. Making all the information available in one place would allow a more systematic selection, and could especially help lesser known labs that do good work but find it hard to get their information across to applicants. Whereas in IT there are already several search engines for looking for specific jobs (senior Java programmer, beginner php/MySQL programmer, etc.), as far as I know there is no such site for academic positions.
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