College Offer Comparison Calculator

Every individual row — like Tuition, Room & Board or Internship access — is converted to a 0–100 score so that dollars, ratios, and subjective sliders can all be compared on the same scale.

For objective fields (tuition, debt, salary, class size), the score is calculated against fixed real-world anchors — for example, net cost is anchored from $2,000 to $75,000. This means scores are stable: adding or removing an offer does not change existing scores. Fields where early gains matter more (salary, debt) use a log curve so that going from $40k to $60k salary counts for more than $160k to $180k.

For subjective sliders (campus fit, career services, gut feel), the score is exactly what you enter — your honest 1–100 judgment.

Each field row has a 1–5 dot weight that controls its importance within its category. A field with weight 3 counts three times as much as a field with weight 1 when calculating the category score.

Example: In Cost & Aid, Net Cost has weight 3 and Work-Study has weight 1. If an offer scores 80 on Net Cost and 40 on Work-Study, the category score is the weighted average: (80×3 + 40×1) / (3+1) = 70. If both had weight 1, it would be (80+40)/2 = 60. The higher weight on Net Cost pulls the result toward the number that matters most.

You can change any field weight by clicking the dots in the label column. The defaults reflect typical importance — Net Cost matters more than Work-Study, Total Debt matters more than Loan Rate — but adjust them to match your situation.

Each category (Cost & Aid, Academics, Career Outcomes, etc.) produces a single 0–100 score that is the field-weight-averaged score of all fields inside it. This collapses 4 fields into one number that represents how each offer performs across that dimension.

The category score row (shown in pink at the bottom of each section) is what feeds into the overall score. Individual field scores affect the overall score only through their category.

The slider in each dark pink section header controls how much that entire category counts toward the final overall score. A category with weight 14 (Career Outcomes, the default) counts more than twice as much as one with weight 6 (Intangibles).

Example: If Cost & Aid has weight 10 and scores 65, and Career Outcomes has weight 14 and scores 80, Career Outcomes contributes more to the overall score even though Cost scored reasonably well — because its weight is higher.

The overall score is a weighted average of all ten category scores, using these sliders as the weights. To make cost the dominant factor, raise its weight. To treat everything equally, set all sliders to the same value.

The Overall Score row shows the final weighted average across all categories for each offer. Offers within the tie tolerance band (default: 1 point) are treated as co-winners — the model is not precise enough to distinguish a 73.4 from a 73.9 as meaningfully different.

The Ranking Sensitivity panel below the table shows how fragile the current winner is. If a category is labeled Fragile, a small change to its weight would flip the result — which means the ranking in that dimension is not decisive and you should weigh it accordingly.

This is a multi-criteria decision aid, not a statistical model. The scores are ordinal comparisons, not utility measurements. The weights express your priorities, not objectively correct importance. Two offers 2 points apart are essentially tied.

Use it to surface which offer wins on which dimensions, spot where the choice is genuinely close, and make sure you haven't overlooked a category that actually matters to you — not to get a single number that tells you what to do.