"U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings are out today – and they feature a new social mobility ranking.
Last year, U.S. News introduced a social mobility factor to its main rankings, but they didn’t change much. Princeton University was No. 1 and Harvard University was No. 2. They had those ranks the prior year. And they have them this year as well.
The problem was that the ranking did not consider how many low-income students a college graduated; it considered how those low-income students were treated. So if a college didn’t educate very many low-income students, but those who were there fared well, and the college treated them well, a college did well on the ranking.
This year the magazine applied the same formula, but it also created a separate social mobility rank – using the same criteria it added to the overall rankings, but only those two criteria. Those factors are the Pell Grant graduation rate, and a comparison of the Pell rate to the non-Pell rate." …
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/09/09/us-news-adjusts-rankings-methodology