CollegeTrue

Inspiration

As high‑school students thinking about college, we kept hearing the same advice: “follow your passion” and “go where you feel happiest.” That sounded nice, but it ignored the biggest question almost nobody wanted to answer directly: can we actually afford this college without running into a lifetime of debt?

Most college tools focus on rankings, admit rates, and vibes, while the hard financial reality is buried in net price calculators, confusing aid letters, and dozens of tabs. We built CollegeTrue because we wanted a brutally honest, easy‑to‑use tool that takes your intended major and family income and shows whether a college is financially reasonable or a potential debt trap.

What issue are you solving?

Most U.S. high school students choose colleges based on rankings, prestige, or campus vibe, while the key question “can we actually afford this college without a lifetime of debt” is buried in confusing net price calculators and financial aid buzzwords. There is no simple tool that directly compares colleges in terms of real financial fit given a student’s intended major and family income.

How does your project address it?

CollegeTrue is a web app that gives students a financial reality check. Users enter up to three colleges, their intended major, and family income. The app estimates annual net price, 4 year total cost, and a monthly payment equivalent, then compares that to an expected age 25 salary for the chosen major. This gives a clear at a glance view of which colleges are financially sustainable and which might be a debt trap.

How we built it

We built CollegeTrue as a fully client‑side app using HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. On the data side, we connect to the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard API to pull tuition, net price, debt, and earnings data when available, and fall back to local benchmark estimates when the API is rate‑limited or missing values. On top of that, we implemented a simple financial model that turns those inputs into 4 year cost, 10 year loan payments, and loan burden as a percent of an estimated starting salary, then render the results as scorecards, burden bars, and a life timeline.

What was the hardest part of the build?

The hardest part was working with real world education data from the College Scorecard API. It is complex, has many fields, and often has missing or inconsistent data. We had to design a fallback strategy so the app still works when the API fails, and simplify the financial math and UI so the output is honest but easy for students to understand.

What we learned

We learned how to work with a real government API, including handling rate limits and missing data, and how to design fallback logic so the product still works in less than ideal conditions. We also learned how important it is to be explicit about modeling assumptions when you are turning raw cost and salary numbers into something students can actually use for decisions, and how small UI choices affect whether users trust and understand the results.

Built With

• css
• github
• html
• javascript
• u.s-department-of-education-college-scorecard-api