In case you have not heard yet, we released “Wellesley’s Quick College Cost Estimator” on Wednesday morning. This is the brainchild of Professor Phillip Levine in Econ department. With just six fairly simple and straightforward questions, you get a good first approximation for the best estimate of what a student’s family is expected to pay to go to Wellesley. Though we don’t have a daughter, I could not resist the urge to check it out and as a parent of two sons (one is still a senior in College), I was pleasantly surprised to see the expected family contributions for various combination of the numbers. Of course, this is due to Wellesley’s generous Financial Aid policy. I strongly urge you to check this out.

This is a collaboration project that we can all be proud of. Yes, it had the usual pain points of meetings, revisions after revisions, and last minute integration of design and programming. But all these don’t matter, because, you forget all of that when you look at the final product, how much it is being used, all the press we have gotten so far and the feedback. Here are some viewpoints from the press:

• NY Times – Getting a Clearer Picture of College Costs
  
• The Chronicle of Higher Education – Wellesley College Offers Easy Estimator of What Families Might Pay
• Associated Press – School says tool shows tuition could be affordable
• Boston.com – Is Wellesley College too expensive? Try this online estimator and you maybe surprised

There are many more, but these give you enough viewpoints.

We began brainstorming implementation of a web application of Phil’s model (I will take the liberty to address him this way here on) , sometime in June. The first prototype looked pretty ordinary, but highly functional. Admission & Financial Aid and Phil himself, observed several focus groups navigate through the system, which resulted in some significant modifications. The most significant one being moving from a single sheet with six questions to walking them through each question. I should give a lot of credit to all those who were involved for their patience, especially to Phil!

Along the way there were numerous changes to the text. Some generating questions like “Really? this word makes more sense than the other?”, but they all turned out to be extremely important for the professionals in this business as well as the parents & students. This took us considerable time and effort. In retrospect, all of this work is worth the trouble, because we have not received many emails on the use of the tool. And we have a record number of hits on the site from all over the world.

Because of the organic nature of the project, there was a lack of project management. Change requests were coming from multiple places and it was never clear whether to make the changes or wait. The summer vacations, and other distractions such as the start of the football season, exciting months for the Red Sox, US Open tennis, FedEx Cup tournaments etc etc. added some delays to the project.

We were caught by a pleasant surprise with 4 days to go. A new design (a beautiful one) came into the picture and we had a weekend in between. In the spirit of true collaboration, many staff members came to rescue and we incorporated the design into the code fairly quickly. The key to this was that the designer, from the Public Affairs, knew exactly what the geeks in LTS needed to translate his design into a usable product. This made ALL the difference in the world.

Not knowing the kind of server load to expect, Tuesday night we had an emergency Google Hangout with our systems and network folks, who did their magic and cloned the machine running the application. They also set up a DNS round robin ready to deploy when needed. While we were testing, we had protected it with a password, but we needed to remove that in the last minute. When we did that, we realized quickly that we were no longer reporting to Google Analytics (Thank you SO MUCH GA for real-time tracking!). We quickly fixed that and we were in good shape.

A very patient faculty member, staff members from Admission and Financial Aid, Public Affairs and LTS all came together nicely and we produced something that is easy to use, elegant and useful in record time. It will be an eye opener for many parents and prospective students who will see how affordable an institution like Wellesley can be. And all those who participated in this collaboration have something tangible like this to look at and celebrate.