Quad

New featurePull request #1

Quad v0.2: a new look and every 4-year U.S. college

The site becomes "Quad", with a full redesign and real federal data on 1,893 four-year colleges instead of a 20-school sample.

What's new

A new look. Bold Bricolage Grotesque headings, electric violet with a lime accent, a warm light mode and a deep indigo dark mode, and a Light / Dark / System switch. Each topic (admissions, size, test scores, access, diversity) has its own color, and every chart palette was checked for color-blind safety in both themes.

Pages that go from overview to detail:

  • Home: search with suggestions, "What kind of school are you after?" shortcuts, an admissions landscape chart (admit rate against SAT), leaderboards, a clickable state map, and preset head-to-head matchups.
  • Explore: card, sortable table, and chart views; filter sliders with the distribution drawn behind them; removable filter chips; a phone filter panel; pagination.
  • School profiles: a sticky section menu, summary tiles, an "out of 100 applicants" graphic, an admissions funnel, a check-your-SAT/ACT tool, national "where it ranks" charts, and similar schools.
  • Compare: up to four schools, automatic "key differences", an overlaid profile chart, grouped bars, and a full numbers table.
  • Glossary: 31 searchable terms. Every metric has an ⓘ or dotted-underline pop-up that works on hover, keyboard, and tap.

Real data. 1,893 four-year colleges from the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard and the IPEDS admissions survey. Ranks and medians are national: each college is compared with every college that reports the same measure.

Behind the scenes

  • npm run sync-data builds data/schools.json from the Scorecard API and the newest IPEDS admissions file, then applies hand-checked corrections from data/overrides.json (such as Vanderbilt's Common Data Set).
  • Search and Compare look schools up through /api/schools, so the full list never goes to the browser.
  • Most school fields can now be empty (open-admission and test-blind colleges); the site shows "not reported" rather than treating a missing value as 0.
  • Fixed seven wrong school IDs from the old sample data.

Known limits at launch

  • 42 online-only colleges are left out by default.
  • No acceptance rate is shown for colleges with fewer than 10 applicants.
  • Cost and outcomes data was collected but not yet shown. It arrived in the next release.