Education Trust

The Education Trust was established by the American Association for Higher Education as a special project to encourage colleges and universities to support K-12 reform efforts. Part of Education Trust's mission is to provide research and wide public dissemination of data identifying achievement patterns among different groups of students. The Education Trust came to WebFirst with a goal of creating an advanced “peer comparison” tool to allow policymakers, researchers, and journalists to search higher educational institutions. This tool also dynamically generates advanced line and bar graphs, representing the data by race, gender, and a number of other factors. WebFirst answered the challenge by designing a website that accomplishes the goals set out by Education Trust.

Behind the website, an algorithm was developed to weight each factor for determining peering between two universities. Comparison factors include selectivity, Carnegie classification, average SAT scores, and minority representation. Together with Education Trust, WebFirst developed a detailed requirements document and a design document.