College Move

Inspiration

As a low-income racial and gender minority, I have been personally interested in identifying colleges that have the greatest impact on my learning and future income. Many lists online use superficial metrics that do not predict the causal effects of colleges on graduation rates or income.

2 out of 3 high-ability, low-income community college students who could have transferred to a selective college instead end up ‘under-matched’ to a less selective college due to a lack of guidance on where to apply to college. This lost potential not only impacts these college students personally, but society as a whole. The Harvard economist Raj Chetty calculated that 75% of innovation in America is lost due to the wasted potential of women, people of color, and low-income people.

What it does

College Move helps over 5.6 million community college students create a list of colleges for transfer by displaying a tailored college list based on college quality (instructional spending per student, faculty-to-student ratio, percentage of full-time faculty, and percentage of tenured faculty) and peer diversity (percentage of students of color, women, and men).

How we built it

We coded over 680 lines in 17 hours using IPEDS data for 550+ colleges, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jekyll, Papa Parse, Repl.it, and GitHub Pages.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest obstacle was figuring out how to connect the 550-row, 113-column IPEDS data to our website to construct personalized college lists.
With much Googling, we overcame this obstacle by using Papa Parse, a multi-threaded CSV parser that runs on web pages.

Other notable obstacles included:

• Getting around GitHub Pages' static-only limitation
• Creating two different types of filters (checkbox and range) that would work together
• Debugging code

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Ranking colleges based on institution quality and peer diversity is a tall task. Finally sifting through 113 metrics for over 550 colleges to construct a definitive list was a cathartic journey.

What we learned

Coding: Papa Parse is a great, easy-to-use multi-threaded CSV parser that runs on web pages.

Data: It's surprising that in our college list:

• Selective colleges can and do have strong student diversity: 2 out of 3 Stanford University students are people of color, and Barnard College is a women's college.
• Safety colleges (that admit more than 60% of applicants) can have high institutional quality despite low selectivity. Notable ones include: Loma Linda University, Purdue University-Main Campus, and University of Delaware.
• The only excluded outlier and most interesting university was Gallaudet University, a federally chartered university for the Deaf/Hard of Hearing community. On institutional metrics alone, this university's institutional quality is on par with universities like Stanford, Harvard, and Yale.

Soft Skills: Communication with other teammates is important to not only coordinate coding, but in the design process to ensure that all ideas are truly considered to generate the largest pool of ideas possible.

What's next for College Move

By refining the code for this project, it can become a valuable resource for community college students. Improvements include:

• Filters for the college lists to include specific criteria by using some variation of Quicksort.
• UI by improving the CSS and adhering to the principles of UI design.
• Immersion by hyperlinking the names of selective colleges to their financial aid policies for low-income students.

Built With

• css
• github
• html
• ipeds
• ipeds-data-for-550+-colleges
• javascript
• jekyll
• papa-parse
• repl.it