When I was picking colleges a few years ago, I made my own rankings. At the time, I knew more about what I didn't want than what I did want, and none of the too

When I was picking colleges a few years ago, I made my own rankings. At the time, I knew more about what I didn't want than what I did want, and none of the tools I found supported searching that way. The US department of education collects extremely comprehensive data on colleges every year, and makes the data public. I loaded these CSVs into SQLite and made a bunch of queries to filter schools out, then dumped the rest to a spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet I weighted each column and sorted the rows. The weights were tunable so I could emphasize different factors in the sorting. The process was successful in that it turned up some surprising results I wouldn't have otherwise considered! I've wanted to write a post on my website about this process for a while, but haven't gotten around to it. In the meantime, for anyone looking to do something similar, the data is here: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data