Status: idea (2026-10-03). After student-profile.md (a home ZIP) and school-identity/links.md (the campus-visit link); the travel-cost line waits for Net Price Estimator: What This Family Would Pay. Part of ideas.
Built 2026-10-05 as product/home-and-distance.md: the home (a full address, not only a ZIP), Explore's "Distance from home" filter with a nearest-first sort, and distance with a drive time on saved lists. What remains here: the map view and its drive-time rings, nearest airports, visit trips, and the travel-cost line.
Question it answers
How far is it? What does getting home for Thanksgiving cost? Which of these could we see in one trip? Distance is the first filter most families apply and the one the site doesn't have. CollegeIQ answers "what is the place like" (coastline, parks, sunny days); this answers "where is it relative to us".
Why it's fresh
Real-estate and travel sites are map-first (Zillow, Redfin, Airbnb); college sites are list-first. Wanderlog turns a list of places into a route with drive times; Edmunds counts fuel in the cost of a car. Quad already has coordinates for all 1,893 colleges (campus-profile.md, which named a map view as a possibility) and will have a visit-booking link per college. No routing service, no third-party calls, no cost per visitor.
Data
| Need | Source | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Campus coordinates | location.lat / location.lng (IPEDS HD) |
Built, all 1,893 colleges |
| Home | The student profile gains an optional home ZIP; ZIP → centroid from the Census Gazetteer ZCTA file (public domain, about 33,000 rows, a reference file in the repo) | Treated like every profile value: never sent to analytics, deleted with the account |
| Distance and drive time | Great-circle distance; drive time = distance × 1.25 ÷ 55 mph, shown as "about 7½ hours" and rounded to the half hour | A road factor, not a route |
| Nearest commercial airport | Airports with scheduled passenger service from BTS T-100 data, with coordinates | A small reference table: "nearest airport SAV, 70 miles" |
| Cost of a trip home | Driving: miles × the IRS standard mileage rate for the year (cited, versioned). Flying: the BTS Consumer Airfare Report's average fare for the airport pair (quarterly, public) when both ends have a commercial airport within 90 miles; otherwise driving | Trips a year is a family input (default three round trips) |
Display
- Explore map view (
?view=map): a dot per college from lat/lng, colored by the current measure (admit rate, average paid, or a ten-year direction), with the same filters as the other views. Signed in with a ZIP: rings at 2, 4, and 8 hours' drive and a filter "within N hours' drive" or "one flight". - Profile hero (signed in): "410 miles from home · about 7½ hours' drive · nearest airport SAV". Signed out: nothing.
- Saved list: distance per row; sort by distance. Visit trips: the list clustered into drivable groups (greedy: colleges within two hours of one another), each with total driving distance, suggested days (one college per half day), and every college's visit-booking link from links.md; the trip goes to the calendar feed proposed for lists and to a map link.
- Net price estimator (guardian): a "Getting home" line, trips × cost, added to the four-year projection with its sources; the student sees the line, never the inputs.
- Compare: a distance row when signed in.
- Glossary:
drive-time-estimate.
Rules
- Distance is a straight line with a road factor; the page says so and never claims minutes.
- The map centers on the ZIP centroid, never a street; a college's exact coordinates are public, a home is not.
- "Within one flight" uses nonstop airport pairs from the same BTS data.
Map implementation (open)
Two options, decided when built. An SVG map of the United States with projected dots: no tiles, no third party, works in both themes and offline, and the state pages in trends/states.md already draw a tile map. Or MapLibre with a self-hosted or free vector tile source: street-level detail around a campus, at the cost of a dependency and a tile host. Recommendation: SVG first; the visit link already serves "what's around the campus".
Tier
Map view and distance free (public coordinates and a ZIP the visitor typed). Visit trips with Plus (a list tool). The travel-cost line with Pro, as part of the whole-list projection.
Complexity
Large: a new kind of view (the map), a new profile field with a reference file, and lines in lists, Compare, and the estimator.
Open questions
- ZIP centroids and the airport table add about a megabyte; publish them as a separate reference file, not in
schools.json. - International students have no ZIP; a country picker with the nearest U.S. gateway airport is a later addition.
- Should the map replace the grid as the default view on wide screens? Measure with telemetry after it ships.