I last posted about a business idea for an automated College counselor, one which would guide students to make better college and career choices. I can now announce that Schools-Over.com has launched in beta, and attempts to deliver on that goal!

School’s Over currently provides two core features: a search feature for high-value degree programs, and a comparison tool enabling students to enter their current admissions offers to see which offers the best lifetime value*.

Much of the data for School’s Over comes from the Department of Education’s College Scorecard program, which has built a solid application for exploring the DOE’s newly released data on graduate salaries by College Program. School’s Over uses this data and extends it by projecting salaries for the 70% of programs lacking salary data. School’s Over also projects total Lifetime Value for each degree, so that students know at a glance whether a college program is worthwhile, or whether it’s a debt trap.

With the beta launch we’ve taken an initial step toward providing automated guidance counseling – please try it out and give us your feedback!

*Lifetime value for a college degree is defined as the NPV over a 45 year career, taking into account the cost of tuition, the opportunity cost of lost wages during college, and the net after-tax difference in wages realized by graduating from a particular college program versus simply going to work after high school. The discount rate used in the NPV calculations is the average federal student loan rate, currently just below 6%.