“Our project is much more of an analysis than it is any attempt at a comprehensive ranking,” says David Leonhardt, who heads The Upshot, the ‘Times’ division that will produce the new ratings.
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By Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 29, 2014

The New York Times is entering the college-ratings game. Sorta. Kinda.

Next month it plans to unveil “a new ranking of colleges and universities based on their ability to attract underprivileged kids.” Or at least that’s how the project is billed on the agenda for the Schools for Tomorrow conference that the newspaper is holding next week in New York City.

That the Times is getting into ratings is notable. And it is doing so in a way that is likely to please many opponents of the popular rankings by U.S. News & World Report (due out the day after the Times is scheduled to unveil its new project). Critics of the U.S. News rankings argue that they contribute to a lack of socioeconomic diversity, by creating incentives for colleges to spend on things like bigger faculty salaries and smaller class sizes, rather than student aid for financially needy students.

“Having The New York Times shine light on the fact that an institution has very little economic diversity could have a powerful shaming effect” and be “an important counterweight,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a proponent of class-based affirmative action. “Right now,” he added, “it’s easier to hide.”

But the extent of that shaming effect is hard to predict. For one thing, theTimes project may not be the kind of consumer-focused ranking that is familiar to readers of U.S. News, the New York Times Company’s promotional language notwithstanding. That puts the Times’s project more in the vein of the Washington Monthly’s College Guide, which focuses on how much colleges contribute to t