Many sites such as US News, Forbes, and Niche have been releasing their college ranking lists for years. While these sources often give insight as to what factors play into their “ranking formula”, none of them allow the user to create their own formula. That is where The Ranking Hat comes into play. Our application will allow users to access a database of college data, manipulating certain attributes to their own will, culminating in a ranking that matches the weightings they provided.
We found our data through Data.gov, and were lead to the College Scorecard, which is provided by the US Department of Education (https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/). From here we were able to download massive sets of data. Using a mixture of pre-existing ranking formulas from US News, Forbes, etc. and our own intuition, we decided which attributes we wanted to use for our database.