A project idea I've got [closed]

Question

Next year I will be doing a final year project at Uni. I've already thought of one and was wondering what you guys think of it.

I want to create a University Information Search for prospective students who are trying to look for an affordable University to attend. It will depend on the student's family income and the grades they get. They enter in those two parameters (and some more) and it comes up with a list of suitable Unis based on their criteria.

This is not about the price of tution fee. It's mostly to do with the cost of living. Stuff like:

Rent (if living in a private flat). Student Accomadation. Cost of traveling to your home and back (for holidays). ...and some other stuff stuff I haven't thought about yet.

It'll mostly be GUI driven with some textual information. I'm also thinking of using it as a website interface.

What do you guys think? Can I program something like this Java?

If there's any holes you see in my idea please tell me.

Answer 1

My concern with your project is just the sheer size of it. For example, if you're planning on doing this for an entire country's schools, then you have a lot of manual labor ahead of you.

• The US has an estimated (as of 2005) 4,140 different colleges and universities that offer degrees. The UK has 352 (which is definitely much better, but still a lot.)
• The land area of the US is 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million square km), with a population of nearly 310 million. This makes the population density roughly 87.4 people/sq mi (33.7/sq km). The UK has a lower population (62 million) but a higher density (254.7/sq km or 659.6/sq mi) That is a lot of houses that could possibly be for rent.
• There is no easy way to aggregate your information. Every university has a different way to find out the information you need.
  • Each university has a different website setup (and some are purely in Flash). Some websites may be sorely outdated, and others may be non-existent or simply provide no information and students need to call/e-mail/speak with an advisor to find out anything.
  • You will need to find information on the specific university such as tuition, whether they offer priority residency on campus or not, the cost of residing on campus, how large the campus is, what their acceptance criteria are, and so on and so forth. Plus, some schools will charge fees that you don't really find out about until after you've registered for the school.
  • Other costs of living will apply, too. Food is a major one. Are there grocery stores nearby? How much are meal plans at the university?
  • You need to also be able to find places nearby for rent, which is also impossible because there are so many different mediums to advertise an available place. Some are listed on craigslist, others are listed through real estate magazines, others only through the specific university's "off-campus housing" listings (if one exists). I don't know what university is like in the UK, but I imagine it shares some similar traits.

There are things out there like Google Maps that can definitely help you with some of these things, like distance calculations and locating extra things (like my food example I listed earlier).

If you could somehow solve all of these problems, you would actually revolutionize the way students choose their university.

However, if you're doing it for a project, then I would say just limit your scope to a local state (or if not in the US, a local province/territory/small country). That would certainly be viable. For an entire country though, I would say it's pretty much impossible.

Answer 2

Yes, you can program something like that in Java. Sounds like a good idea. Useful.

Answer 3

This may well be useful, but the programming side probably isn't going to be the main problem. Accumulating the data is.

You would have to get hold of statistical data for:

• average cost of living in various areas
• average rent stats
• other cost of living factors like additional inner-city fees for owning a car, transportation....
• school tuitions, cost for childrens' day-care...
• uni tuitions

what might be relatively easy to do is the "driving home" calculation, but I imagine the rest is going to be a bitch to get hold of - although I think the data exists in some form in every country and state..