Afford Education

Find your best college match and financial aid package with us!

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Inspiration

Find your best college match and financial aid package with us!

While some of us are gifted with unconditional support to pursue higher education, others simply do not consider it an option, because they cannot afford to. Whether it be the ever-increasing college tuition, or the ever-decreasing admission rates for colleges, higher education seems rise farther and farther from those who are less privileged.

The resources that are currently available help solve these problems are often not as accessible as they should be. Sometimes they are buried deep under an ugly .gov website, other times they are simply too complicated to use. Even college counseling is targeted and marketed towards those who already excel in school, rather than those who need the guidance the most to continue their education.

So we decided to make a college search/match platform that is inclusive for underprivileged students, and a chrome extension that walks them through FAFSA, the most important financial aid application.

What It Does

AffordEducation.tech

  • College Search platform with filters such as type of institution and competitiveness
  • Tuition Calculator for all searchable colleges
  • Estimated tuition calculated based on user input

FAFSA Helper Chrome Extension

  • Displays the exact lines of tax forms requested by FAFSA questions
  • Clarifies and simplifies the legal jargon on FAFSA

How we built it

  1. Gathered data about colleges and FAFSA
  2. Created framework for chrome extension
  3. Sorted gathered data and formatted into database
  4. Built user friendly website to display data aggregated in database

Challenges

  • Inconsitent formatting of sites scraped for data
  • Dealing with large amounts of data
  • Acquiring ssl certificates
  • Outdated static files
  • unreliableness of FAFSA application (errors, failures

Accomplishments We Are Proud Of

  • Successfully scraping websites for data
  • Successful chrome extension
  • Integrating price calculator for each school
  • Successfully calculating expected tuition based on user input
  • Successfully implementing search filters

What we learned

  • Deploying apps on Google Cloud
  • Working with data with inconsistent format
  • Making a chrome extension that enhances page functions
  • Using databases to store and filter data

What's next?

  • Adding more filters for college search
  • Expanding college database
  • Adding more features to speed up FAFSA application
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