But one thing it should do is encourage students to think more seriously about what matters to them when choosing a college - which subjects hold the greatest interest, how important is campus diversity, or how valued is a lively social scene or a winning football team. To what extent the NYT’s new ranking alternative will displace other systems remains to be seen.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

What if you want to go to a college in the South and assign equal weights to two criteria: lowest sticker price and graduates with the highest earnings ten years after college. How about a student who weights two factors equally - earnings and racial diversity? The top five schools would be:

CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

What about a student who cares only about low net price? The top five colleges turn out to all be part of the City University of New York:

Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT).

California Institute of Technology (CIT).

Here are the top five schools, unfiltered by any other factor like size or location: That factor would be assigned a weight of 100, while all the other factors would have weights set to 0. Take a student for whom the only thing that matters is a school’s academic profile. Here are a few examples of the different rankings depending on how much weight is assigned to the various criteria: It also allows the results to be filtered by the size of institution a student prefers to attend, its location, and an assortment of other factors such as whether the school is public or private, whether it has a religious orientation or not, whether it emphasizes STEM degrees or humanities majors, or whether its students are all men or all women.

It then calculates a ranking based on that unique set of weights. It’s sad that we’ve spent decades trying to build a more representative leadership class, but we’ve ended up with an educated elite who doesn’t know much about the rest of America and doesn’t seem notably more competent than the elites who preceded it.The tool allows users to assign whatever weight they choose - ranging from 0 to 100 - to each of these ten factors. If the Supreme Court ditches racial preferences, it becomes overwhelming. The case for Kahlenberg’s proposal gets stronger every year. Based on data from Harvard and the University of North Carolina, they built an admissions model that would end racial preferences and preferences for the children of faculty members and alumni, but boost applicants from poor families and disadvantaged neighborhoods.Īt Harvard, under this model, the share of African American, Hispanic and other underrepresented minority students would rise, and the share of first-generation students would more than triple.

Writing in Dissent this year, Kahlenberg, an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case seeking to overturn affirmative action, describes an exercise he did with Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono. Furthermore, he continues, if you structure the programs well, you can lift up the poor and middle class while simultaneously redressing the iniquities that have historically been visited upon African Americans.

Nytimes books to read before college