The value of the diploma is directly linked to the value of the college. When you break it down a college diploma is only worth as much as the reputation of the college.
What about the education itself? Do the awesome professors actually teach? Are the social circles at the college going to lead the student where they want to go in life? What about potentially-burdensome loans at the end of it?
I think we need to get away from the idea of college admissions as a tournament with Harvard at the top. "Good" depends on many things and different students may best be served by different universities.
> This move feels almost as though it was intended to stir up unnecessary controversy.
I mean probably not, otherwise they would let the students see the scores.
I think it was put there to help the elite colleges defeat the lawsuits against them by being able to say, "see, we used an objective measure of hardship from a third party!".
It seems like yet another opaque metric to be gamed by the people with the resources to spend optimizing for those sort of things.