I’m happy to announce my latest side project, College Rankings.
Last month, the Department of Education launched the College Scorecard, a new tool that “provides students and families the critical information they need to make smart decisions about where to enroll for higher education” (press release).
It’s really nice — the site is simple, easy to get around, and mobile friendly. And they released and awesomely documented all the data behind it so that others can slice and dice the info and build additional tools with it.
One thing that the College Scorecard doesn’t have is rankings. However, this didn’t stop NPR’s Planet Money. They reached out to three higher ed experts and asked them how they’d weight the various variables to create a rating, which they then turned into three different top-50 lists.
I wanted to take this one step futher and allow anyone to decide which pieces of information were most important to them and come up with their own top (and bottom) colleges list. You can select from up to eight different variables (for now) and assign weights from ‘not important’ to ‘very important’. Give it a whirl here, and let me know what you think!
brendansudol.github.io/college-scorecard-rankings
And if you’re curious about the code behind it, I made it using ReactJS and everything is on GitHub.