Inspiration
One of us was helping their little sister pick between two colleges. The sticker prices were basically the same, so it looked like a coin flip. Then we actually sat down with a spreadsheet and added in fees, housing, loan interest, and the scholarship that only covered freshman year. The "cheaper" school ended up costing like $40k more over four years.
Nobody had told her that. All the info was technically out there, just buried in a bunch of PDFs nobody reads. We kept calling it the tuition trap and eventually just made it the name.
What it does
You drop in your financial aid offers and Tuition Trap shows you what four years actually costs. It splits out tuition vs. fees, aid that renews vs. aid that doesn't, and what your loan payments look like after you graduate. Then it ranks your schools by what you'll really pay instead of the number on the front page.
How we built it
[Frontend] for the UI, [backend] for the cost math, [database] for school data. School numbers come from the [College Scorecard API], and we used [LLM/OCR] to read uploaded aid letters since every school formats them differently. Loan estimates are just amortization with current federal rates.
Challenges we ran into
Aid letters are chaos. No standard format, no standard wording, and half of them don't clearly say what's a grant and what's a loan. Getting the parsing to work ate most of our time, and we had to build a manual entry fallback for when it fails.
We also got a little paranoid about accuracy. Telling someone the wrong number about their college costs is worse than telling them nothing, so we show ranges and where the data came from.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
It works on real letters, not just the fake ones we made. We tested [N] actual offers and got usable results from almost all of them. It also backed up the whole reason we built it: the cheapest school on paper usually isn't the cheapest school.
What we learned
Way more about financial aid than we wanted to know. Front-loaded scholarships, subsidized vs. unsubsidized loans, and the fact that "cost of attendance" means something different at every school. Also that the math was the easy part. Cleaning data and getting people to trust the output was the hard part.
What's next for Tuition Trap
More schools, support for grad and transfer students, and a summary you can send to your parents. After that we want to add appeal help, because most people have no idea you can negotiate an aid offer.
