What did we do?

Anyone who has had to pay for secondary education has wondered how that tuition money is used. Thankfully the university is a public institution; thus, its financial records and documents are publicly available. However, if one wanted a comprehensive breakdown of university finances, they would have to navigate numerous web pages and piece the information together through vague video presentations and financial documents. These documents that detail the university budget also require advanced knowledge of excel and considerable free time to take in. Most importantly, records do not readily show how an individual tuition payer’s money flows through the system, as tuition is aggregated into one revenue stream within said documents. 

We alleviate this issue in two parts; first, a public tuition dashboard built on the CU COVID Dashboard structure that provides both high and low-level overviews of tuition at CU Boulder. The second part of this solution comes in additions to Buff Portal, a new button for students to easily print their bill (a much-requested feature), and a direct link built right into Buff Portal to this new dashboard. Initially, we envisioned that the dashboard would cater to students in hopes that they might be able to find an overview of their tuition based on their college, fiscal year, and residency. However, due to privacy laws restricting the specificity of this financial data, we concluded that this would not be feasible. Thus, we shifted towards the aforementioned model. We strongly feel that this solution is more accessible and informative, as prospective students and parents can find the information, whereas the original breakdown would’ve only been available to current students and their parents.

How did we do it?

The first course of action was several semi-structured interviews not only to gauge public opinion on the current options available for tuition information but also to get opinions on the changes we wanted to make and how these changes would affect their view of CU. Next was the locating and gathering of relevant information and data. Then we began pre-processing of available information using both Python and aggregation of Excel workbooks. Using this data, we explored a number of different visualization tools and went through dozens of future designs. Then we brought it all together in a functional wireframe prototype in Adobe XD.

Semi-Structured Interviews

To begin, each team member conducted numerous interviews to gauge whether or not there was even a desire among the student body and tuition payers to have access to this information. Additionally, it was helpful for the team to understand how people felt about CU as a whole, as we hypothesized that financial transparency could create greater trust between tuition payers and the university. The sentiment from these interviews was varied; some felt that if they knew how the university spent their tuition money, it might differentiate their opinion of CU, whether positive or negative. However, most interviewees agreed that the information should be more accessible with additional breakdowns of what their money is going towards at the university. Also, us merely bringing up the subject of CU’s finances piqued interest among the interviewees. Many respondents requested a follow-up upon the project’s completion to confirm or deny their suspicions regarding university finances. 

Gathering and Cleaning of Financial Documents 

To find the financial documents necessary for the dashboard, we delved deep into CU’s web pages and found the yearly budget and cost of attendance breakdowns. In addition to this data not being readily apparent, we encountered a few roadblocks when parsing and analyzing the data. First, due to the complexity of the university budgetary Excel workbooks, loading them into Pandas data frames in Python proved to be too complex for this project's scope. Specifically, the workbooks’ format had been updated several times over the last 20 years, making even a moderately complex algorithm only viable for around seven years. Therefore, instead of relying on more automated forms of data preprocessing, we manually transferred the relevant information over to new spreadsheets for analysis. While this took several weeks to complete, we felt this was a surefire way of getting accurate information because we were uncertain about our ability to develop an algorithm to automate the same process effectively. 

Visualizing the data

The Tableau visualizations currently available have numerous issues: They were challenging to understand and embedded into the webpage using Tableau’s API, which is a bit of an eyesore, not to mention it was hidden behind multiple web pages. These visualizations were also heavily focused on macro-level overviews of the budget and tuition, which left many of the core questions of this project unanswered.

After encountering some logistical issues regarding Tableau’s API, we began our initial graphs in Altair. Altair was a strong starting point for us as we were able to figure out the style and purpose of each chart due to Altair’s ease of use. However, after encountering some limitations with legend customization, we switched to Plotly. The Plotly graphs offered an improved look and added an interactive element to the plots; again, we encountered some issues with graph customization, and after that, we pivoted to Flourish. Flourish is a web-based data visualization platform that allows us to take the concepts we developed in Plotly with more profound and more superficial customization tools. Some quick data restructuring and Flourish quickly became the software of choice for the final data visualizations that would live within our dashboard.

Prototypes

To address CU’s lack of transparency, we used the feedback from interviews to inform the decision-making process when constructing our two prototypes. The prototype is a redesign of the existing student portal called Buff Portal. Here students can register for classes, contact career services, and access their tuition bills. The second prototype allows tuition-payers to view their tuition bill without navigating to multiple websites. The third prototype is a dashboard containing detailed breakdowns of the use of students’ tuition money with the ability to be filtered by college, fiscal year, and residency. 

Buff Portal Landing Page

Buff Portal, the University of Colorado Boulder’s student portal, allows students to access various things such as class registration, health and wellness help, professional development resources, student life information, and more. The Buff Portal interface is made up of ‘cards,’ where each box houses a particular module that then redirects the user to other web pages (Figure 1). In addition to the ladder, Buff Portal also provides tuition and fee information, such as student tuition bills and payment plans. What Buff Portal does not offer is an easy-to-access way of viewing student tuition bills without having to click through multiple web pages and even navigate to another website. Additionally, Buff Portal does not offer a way for students and parents to view where their tuition money is going.

In order to rectify these absences, we recreated the module card titled “Tuition and Fees.” Currently, this card contains three button options: Balance Summary, Account Setup, and More Items (Figure 2). Under Balance Summary, the user can view their principal campus balance and if they have a payment plan. Furthermore, the user can navigate to view/pay their bill, view payment plans, or view financial aid. This section of the Tuition and Fees card, however, does not include any other information about tuition and payments (Figure 3).

To address this issue, we reconstructed the “Tuition and Fees” card to contain a Tuition Summary instead of a Balance Summary (Figure 4).  Next, we replaced and added five buttons under Tuition Summary: Pay Bill, View Bill, Bill History, Tuition Breakdown, and View Payment Plans (Figure 5). This new prototype allows users to pay their bills separately from viewing their account and gives people the option to view their Bill History, which is presently not an option.

View Bill

Tuition Bills are a subject matter discussed daily between students, parents, and faculty.  More specifically, students tend to want an easier way to view a PDF of their bill as it is typically challenging to find and access, usually taking around 3-4 clicks and logging into another website. On the current BuffPortal website, Pay Bill and View Bill are under the same button, leading to a lack of options for users. We created a simple, one-click process to address this hassle that allows students and parents to view their semesterly tuition bills with ease. Additionally, we added a ‘Bill History’ feature that brings users to their previous bills, all in one place. Because of the new, broken-down button options, we have made, users such as students and parents can quickly and easily access their current and past tuition bills.

Tuition Dashboard

The amount of tuition CU Boulder charges is astronomical, leading to many complaints and confusion regarding the university’s financial transparency. We drew on these criticisms to create a tuition dashboard that stands on its own as a public website. Additionally, a button to access a tuition breakdown was added to the Tuition and Fees module serving as a second access point. 

The Tuition Dashboard contains a detailed breakdown of CU Boulder tuition from in-state and out-of-state undergraduate and graduate students using data visualizations. On top of that, we went even further and added a feature that allows current and past students to filter their tuition by college, year, and residency. The idea to add a year filter was based on the assumption that alumni would be interested in seeing a breakdown of their own tuition from their years as a student. Broken up into four sections, each section of the dashboard contains pertinent information regarding CU’s finance. The four sections are Tuition, State vs. Student University Funding, Revenue to Expenditures for FY 2021 – 2022, and finally, the filter function. 

Landing Page

Based on CU Boulder’s COVID-19 Ready Dashboard (Figure 7), the prototyped Tuition Dashboard landing page has a short description of the dashboard as well as what the dashboard contains. This allows users to quickly glance at what information they will be consuming and if it is what they are looking for (Figure 8).

Tuition

The dashboard is the first set of visualizations for tuition (Figure 9). The first visualization, CU Boulder Tuition Trends, shows how the cost of education has changed over time. The second Visualization, Operating Expenses, shows proportions that contribute to the overall budget for FY 2021-2020. All information has been adjusted for inflation of 2022 USD.

State vs. Student University Funding

The next section of visuals is State vs. Student University Funding. Here, we can compare the financial burden of the funds allocated for each individual student (Figure 10) compared to the amount of state funding over time.

Revenue to Expenditure for FY 2021–2022 

Below, Figure 11 shows our most complex visualization; this Sankey Diagram visualizes 2 billion dollars in revenue and expenditures. The description above is also crucial as it explains one of the biggest misconceptions our respondents had about the budget (that being what tuition money funds vs other sources of funding). Additionally, the description outlines the three different types of funding. The visualization is fully interactive, with any pathway being able to be highlighted and the individual funds to be separated into their own Sankey diagrams for a closer look.

We note that Figure 12 displays the flow of revenue to expenditures for the education and general funds. It is the most important fund to visualize as it is the funding that contains and distributes tuition money. Because of this importance, we placed it first on the Sankey chart.

Filter

The last feature of the Tuition Dashboard is the ability to filter tuition and tuition uses by college, fiscal year, and residency. We chose to add this unique feature because past students, current students and parents, and prospective families may want to view how a specific college’s tuition and allocation of the money has changed over the years. Additionally, this will add another level of transparency to CU’s financial uses, which is often complained about among current students.

Findings

In the end, we did find out where our tuition money goes and we feel we did an excellent job creating a dashboard that effectively shows this information as well as a plethora of other statistics that give a holistic picture of just how much tuition has changed in the last 20 years. The reactions to this were only positive, including those geared towards the university, because the actual answers to where this tuition money went turned out to be in line with expectations or in some cases, exceeded expectations as many of the common misconceptions were addressed with our visuals (that being tuition funding athletic events and paying for new buildings).

What we can conclude from this project is that CU is in need of a system like this, as its implementation not only leads to a deeper understanding of an oft wondered question but also that the average opinion of CU would improve as a result. This improvement in the collective opinion of CU could ease some of the natural tension that has become the norm in many institutions as college tuition has continued to rise. We can also conclude that the current system in place, while legal as it does provide all required data, is wholly inadequate and does not serve its intended purpose of making data simple.

Limitations

First and foremost, Adobe XD was limited in a couple of unanticipated ways. First, its lack of web-based collaboration made it difficult to sync up progress on the wireframe between team members. Second, creating drop-down menus in Adobe XD is fairly complex and because part of our prototype relies so heavily on drop-down menus, this took a significant amount of time that could have been saved by some other wireframing tools that have built-in dropdown functionality. Additionally, it would take more time to hard code an actual web page that could be integrated into the existing CU website. If the prototype was an actual functional web page, then the Sankey diagram would be interactive, but it is currently not. Finally, one aspect that would make the prototype even more informative is the addition of graduate student options for the dropdown menu filter, as currently, there is only data for undergraduate students.

Final Takeaways

This whole project challenges the status quo concerning large institutional financial data that tends to lean into minimal reporting and obfuscation of information in the name of making things simpler for people to understand. But if there is one clear takeaway from this project, its that the complexity of the data or unfamiliarity of the users isn’t the issue, its the quality of the visualizations and explanations. As it stands, we could not find one major institution that had implemented what we had conceptualized today; this is undoubtedly a mistake on the part of these institutions. Financial transparency is too often seen as a threat to institutional reputations, but we believe that is mainly because it is nearly impossible to calculate the negative impact of the current system. But over and over  during this project, this system was criticized and critiqued by nearly every stakeholder, whereas ours, albeit merely a prototype, met with praise and interest. Therefore I urge any reader of this to challenge their opinion on what affordances are to be expected from our public institutions and truly embrace an era where the stakeholders of these systems are treated as intelligent and curious individuals who have the right to know exactly how their money is spent.