Summary of tuitionshock.us
Our hack, tuitionshock.us, is a heatmap of the cost for community colleges and universities in the United States.
Our goal was to show the disparity between a 2-year education and a 4-year education while also highlighting the privilege of access to higher education in more expensive cities and states. We added the following filtering options to our heatmap to help highlight cost differences:
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Degree length
- 4-year
- 2-year
- Both
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School type
- Private
- Public
- Both
-
Tuition type
- In-state
- Out-of-state
The dataset we used was provided by the U.S goverment college scorecard online tool (linked below). As is the nature of a heatmap schools without a definite address or failed to report their cost of attendance to the U.S goverment are NOT included in the list or as locations on the map.
link: collegescorecard.ed.gov
The data collected was pulled from the U.S Department of Education College Scorecard database. We collected this data using the Open Data Maker HTTP API, which allowed us to use HTTP queries for JSON formatted packets based on a variety of fields. Some examples of fields are a specific school, state schools only, or degree level rewarded.
Server: Flask 🚀
Database: MongoDB Atlas 📊
Frontend: HTML + CSS + JavaScript 🌐