Shortlist

A junior decides where to apply mostly by going to look. Shortlist works out which campuses are worth the drive.

The average college-bound student sees five or six schools before deciding, and each visit is a long drive or a flight, a hotel, missed work, a weekend gone. Shortlist asks eight questions about what she wants her days to be like, places the matching schools on a map of drive time from her house, and groups them into trips the family can take.

It started with Zach's niece, a junior about to start her college tours, and her mother, who is a travel agent. One of them needed to know which schools to see, and the other knew how to plan the trips.

Two schools in the same tier are not the same place to be eighteen

At DePaul you sign a lease at nineteen in Lincoln Park, ride the L instead of parking, and find no football team at all. At Michigan State you live on campus for two years inside a one-mile radius and spend fall Saturdays at a Big Ten game with seventy-five thousand people. Neither is better. One of them is wrong for you, and no ranking will say so: the tools that exist sort on program strength and admit odds, and neither tells a sixteen-year-old what her Tuesday looks like.

Every question is a filter on something colleges report

Where you start and how many hours is too far. City, campus near a city, college town, or somewhere small. Under 3,000 students or over 30,000. Whether you want the stadium on Saturdays. Fraternities and sororities. Where everyone lives freshman year. What you might study, and one thing you already do that should follow you there, like tennis. None of it guesses at a personality type. Each answer checks against an attribute a school publishes, so a student can see right away whether the list sounds like her.

The results are a map, and the line you drew stays on it

Matches land on a dial centered on where you start, at their real bearing and drive time, with an orange ring at the limit you set. A school a little past the ring stays on the list and says so ("past your 5h limit") instead of dropping out. From Indianapolis with a five-hour limit, the top ten run from Louisville at 2h20 to Washington University in St. Louis right at the line.

Then the ten schools group by region. From Indianapolis that is four trips, including Notre Dame, Loyola and Northwestern in one weekend: leave Friday after school, home Sunday. Each school links to its own visit page for booking. Shortlist doesn't hold tour schedules, because a link goes stale slowly and a schedule goes stale every term.

The match answers to the family

Most college search sites are paid by the colleges, through sponsorships, recruiting fees or district contracts, and a match the schools fund answers to the schools. Shortlist would never sell a place in its results. The assessment and the list stay free. What a family would pay for is the guide: every school written up properly, what to ask on each tour, the trips grouped and ordered, and what each place costs before aid.

The hard part is a sentence no dataset contains

Federal data will say Michigan State enrolls about 50,000 students. It will not say most of them stay inside a one-mile radius, and that second sentence is the product. Every school in the demo needs a written life sentence, four spec-plate lines, and three things to look at on the visit. Taking the demo from 24 schools to 122 took an afternoon for the attributes. The writing kept up for 77 of them.

77 of 122 schools have a written page

The other 45 show the gap instead of filling it with generic prose: a "no page yet" badge in the list, a spec plate generated from attributes, and a note saying so.

A first regional version of 200 schools is roughly 1,600 pieces of writing, drafted, reviewed and kept true. The demo's 122 schools were typed in by hand. The real thing would read enrollment, setting, housing and programs from federal IPEDS data and the Common Data Set, refreshed once a year. Nobody has been asked for money yet. Shortlist ends where ScholarSpring begins: with a list of schools, and the question of what they cost.