Stupid article. Good for schools that provide merit scholarships. That means they are rewarding hard work and the likelihood of success at college.
Students have NEVER (as a whole....there may be an odd exception) looked at a college to see what job prospects they provide. They do look at party life, athletics, subjects taught, and other things.
This article is confused and scattered in its analysis. it presumes that all people should go to college and that college somehow by itself makes your life better. Both are incorrect. What you study matters more than where. Not all people should be college educated though it is nice if everyone is well read.
So overall I rate this a big bleeeech
The biggest improvement that the assessment could make is to provide an estimate of "Net dollars above expected future income per dollar spent at this college." This would be easy to determine based on the expected incomes of particular SAT scores (which correlate highly with intelligence, which correlate highly with income.) I'm willing to bet real money that you'd find many of the big name schools would actually have negative results in this area. If you also broke that down by major, you'd find very large negative and positive net results per educational dollar at the same school for different fields of study. No surprise there either, but it might bring home the stark reality of how "useful" a philosophy or Wimmins Studies degree is.
I'm pleasantly surprised to see colleges paying increasingly for quality students. There was virtually no merit-based money available when I started my undergraduate career in 1973.