Philly high schoolers develop easy app to help predict the true cost of college

High school students trying to assess what a college education might mean for their financial situation can get some clarity with a new app — one designed and built by fellow high schoolers.

Called Finiverse, the tool was created by around 40 students from across Philadelphia, who’ve been gathering each Monday evening at the University of Pennsylvania to work on it.

After a beta last summer, the full platform launched last week.

“I think a lot of students when they’re going to college, they don’t really think about the financing aspect,” said Finiverse co-creator Sindi Banaj. A current sophomore at Penn’s Wharton School, she started working on the project as a senior in high school.

Users of the app can see how factors like financial aid might affect the cost of attending various schools, Banaj said, and even estimate how majoring in different subjects might affect repayment plans.

The project is run out of Wharton’s Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance. When the center opened in 2019, director David Musto told Technical.ly, the team wanted to start something that could involve the Philadelphia school community. Student loans seemed an obvious choice.

“It sounds like the right thing to go after,” said Musto, who teaches finance, “because it’s a big financial decision that you have to make at such a young age.”

The app was completely developed, coded and designed by the students. They even came up with the name, he said, which comes from the idea that it offers “a multiverse approach to financial decision making.”

Add Finiverse to school district admissions resources?

The app is available at finiverse.org, no download required. High schoolers and their families can input their state of residence and various colleges they’re considering to compare the schools’ sticker prices.

Users can also estimate financial aid by calculating their Student Aid Index, aka the amounts they can expect from the school and/or federal Pell Grants. Doing that allows the app to show the net price — what each school would cost up front.

“The prestige of a school doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s inaccessible for me because of my financial situation,” said Maryem Bouatlaoui, another Wharton sophomore who started working on the app as a high school senior.

Finiverse also covers what students can expect post grad, by asking about their choice of study and career plans and offering risk simulations.

Bouatlaoui and classmate Banaj learned details about how financial aid is calculated while developing the app — that public schools have a lower sticker cost, but offer less institutional aid than private universities — which provided key context as they went through their own college admissions process, they said.

Developing the app opened the 20-year-olds’ eyes to the lack of college admissions resources in the Philadelphia public school system, they said. Both attended Central High School where they only had a handful of college guidance counselors helping hundreds of students.

The pair would like to see the School District of Philadelphia incorporate Finiverse into the resources offered for college admissions guidance.

“They can give them a tool to help each of these students work out their own needs by themselves and come with questions,” Bouatlaoui said. “I see this facilitating the relationship between counselors and students.”