Project Dillard | Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell

in New Orleans a few miles from the French Quarter there is a small liberal arts college called Dillard University the campus is an elegant cluster of 100 year old white buildings bordering a large lawn long rows of Live Oaks run down either side of the green it looks like a postcard from the 1930s and because this is New Orleans the school choir is amazing [Music] the president of Dillard is Walter Kimbrough tall mid-50s close cropped hair Pencil Thin Mustache Bachelor of Science from the University of Georgia master's degree from Miami University PhD from Georgia State your father is a very well-known Pastor in Atlanta yeah that's right he's Walter senior you're Walter Jr well we have different middle names so he's he's Walter Lee and I'm Walter mark because he felt like Walter Lee was country so he didn't give me this but yeah that's that's my dad yeah I would encourage you should you ever be in New Orleans to pay a visit to Dillard here the choir perform if you can and walk around the campus as I did with Walter Kimbrough [Music] Gentilly the area is very residential it was middle class African-American community so a lot of things we're going to sort of Walk This Way and make a loop then when you've finished your stroller on campus Dillard on the U.S news and World Report best colleges rankings website they're on the liberal arts college list which usually has some combination of Williams Amherst and Swarthmore at the top but keep going down the long Winding Road of elite private American Education gilded with Ivy granted and Tweed Pomona Wellesley Bowden keep going and after you get to the fancy schools and the tier below the fancy schools and the tier below that tier there is a bottleness pit into which U.S news dumps all the colleges that they consider too mediocre to make a proper assessment Dillard is in the bottomless pit my question was why that's the mystery that led me all the way down to New Orleans to see Walter Kimbrough what does America's Premier ranking system have against Dillard University my name is Malcolm Gladwell you're listening to revisionist history my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood this episode is a continuation of my investigation of the strange annual American ritual known as the U.S news best colleges rankings I decided I'd pick a school in order to better understand how the rankings work make it a case study analyze its performance on the bewildering set of metrics used by the mysterious U.S news algorithm let's call this investigation project Dillard about three quarters of the student body at Dillard are Pell Grant eligible meaning they qualify for federal assistance the average family income of the students is just over thirty thousand dollars a year a third of them are the first in their families to go to college virtually all are black Dylan is a part of the a group of hbcus they've called the black ivy league so Morehouse Spillman Howard Hampton Dillard was in that group too and so some people you know buy into that a lot and take pride in that and when they're they're broke you won't necessarily know that this is a student that comes from a family that really sort of struggling because they put it together and they're able to carry themselves like they've been solidly middle class all their life and they haven't U.S News tells us that schools ranked higher on their list are better than schools ranked lower on their list and I want to figure out what U.S news means by that word better why is it that the black ivy league is not treated with the same reverence as the white Ivy League I started this story on a little bit of a lark because I thought it would be fun to make fun of us news but the more I did it the angrier I got a not very sophisticated group of people in in Washington DC came up with a standard by which we measure higher education in this country and that standard is massively biased against people who want to serve underserved populations and they have made the lives of people like you and your students more difficult as a result right that's what it is exactly that's I mean that's exactly what it is I I call you know the U.S news rankings of perpetuation a privilege that's what I've always called it this is that's all it is it's a perpetuation of privilege in last week's episode I consulted with a group of statisticians at Reed College who had hacked their way into the secret U.S news algorithm I decided to call on this Services again it's time to help me with the puzzle of Dillard University's rank my name is Lauren Rabe I am an Environmental Studies economics major at Reed College and I'm a senior tell me how how did Kelly recruit you for this project Kelly Kelly mcconville a professor at Reed who enjoys cajoling her students into various acts of statistical mischief Kelly just messaged me one day and was like hey you I have a project that might be fun for you we just get to play with data and make some models and try to predict some things and hold on hold on your first question was can I make graphs that's true I think we need to go back to the mysterious variable that makes up such a large portion of the U.S news algorithm the peer assessment score U.S news asks every College president Provost and admissions Dean in the country to rank the academic reputation of every other college in their category on a scale of one to five if you listen to the previous episode you'll know that I couldn't figure out how all those College presidents came up with their peer assessment grades I tried I interrogated Bob Morse who runs the rankings I had a long interview with a mysterious deep throat figure named Dean as we did a peer assessment lightning round I looked into whether hot sauce could sway the graters in the end let's be honest I got nowhere but then I realized I could ask the Reed College hackers to do a statistical analysis what factors actually correlate with the peer assessment score that was my assignment for Lauren Rabe we were focusing on a few variables College Endowment which is just how much money they have in the bank we were looking at tuition so how much it costs for a student to attend the percent of students that are white the percent of students that receive Pell Grant and I found that endowment by itself just the size of the endowment predicts half of the peer assessment score so we can explain half of the assessments the peer assessment score just by how much money a school has in the bank and then once we start adding the other the remaining School characteristics we end up with over 90 percent 91.3 to be precise it seems pretty clear that you can predict the reputation assigned to every College in the country with almost perfect accuracy just by spending a few minutes on Google Dillard's reputation score is 2.6 a terrible score by the way but now we know why it's not because there's something very wrong with Dillard's reputation it's because Dillard falls short in all of the areas that make for a high score there aren't a lot of white people on campus the tuition is low compared with top liberal arts colleges it's nineteen thousand dollars a year and Dillard's endowment is a minuscule 105 million dollars a top-ranked school like Williams college has two billion more dollars in the bank than Dillard the next thing U.S news really cares about is graduation rates what percentage of a freshman class get their degree within six years U.S news rewards schools for having High graduation rates and they punish schools for low graduation rates on the theory that a School's graduation rate tells you something about how well it educates and inspires its students this metric seems to make a lot more sense than peer assessment scores right at Dillard the graduation rate is around 50 percent how can we call a school good if half its students don't graduate but when I asked Walter Kimbrough about this here's what he said I was doing one of my one-on-one meetings with a freshman student last week and the question I asked what's the best part about being a college student was the worst part and she said the worst part for her was Thanksgiving and Christmas tell you what I should say because I had to figure out what I was gonna do where I could live it was very powerful the way that she said I was like because I was like what do you mean why is that the worst part of college she said I didn't know where I was gonna stay think of how difficult it must be for that student to focus on staying in school how can you plan for the future when your life right now is so unstable and what happens when someone in your family gets ill or loses their job or has an accident and all of a sudden the cost of sending you to school becomes overwhelming if the average family income of your student body is just over thirty thousand dollars a year there's going to be a lot of that for a school like like us that your 75 Pell Grant eligible if you have a six year graduation rate that's over 50 percent it's almost miraculous because there are so many other factors that I just can't control I can't control those family pieces and if I just can't control that just for contrast the graduation rate at a school like Bowden currently number six on the liberal arts college rankings 95 percent everyone graduates maybe because one in every five students at Bowdoin comes from a family with an income in the top one percent the worst part of Christmas for a Bowdoin student is deciding which of their houses to go to no one's dropping out a Bowden not with Daddy paying for everything graduation rates don't tell you how good a school is they tell you what kind of students a school is admitting first conclusion in the project Dillard investigation why is Dillard at the bottom of the rankings they enroll the wrong kind of student [Music] halfway through project Dillard I had the idea of conducting a thought experiment most of the things that U.S news cares about have to do with money that's how you raise your academic reputation score wealthy students are also way more likely to graduate from school that boosts your school as well but there are many other variables in the U.S news rankings that are also really just about how much money a school has in the bank variables like faculty resources Financial Resources per student average alumni giving rate graduate indebtedness and on and on since I was curious about this I asked Robert Morse who runs the U.S news rankings what is the basis for the assumption that the more money a school has the better quality of the education the school is providing there's a number of points one is that you hardly ever hear a college President say cut my budgets take away my programs fire my faculty reduce my sports and and I'll be a better school it's rare that that you see higher education leaders say that that less equals more so that this is spending for students on academic programs and on aspects of the education like that you have a greater chance of having a richer academic experience and if you have less spending then you're going to have less and we're saying that in this case more is better than less more is better than less I mean look I mean let's assume I'm getting paid 200 000 a year if you came to me and said Malcolm if I gave you 400 000 would you be a better writer I would say ABS absolutely I would be better but that would be false there's there's no correlation between how much you pay Malcolm and how good Malcolm's writing is right but that's I'm not sure that that analogy Works in this particular case because you're dealing with you know a budget and it's buying many different things and then then then one humans human being's skill in in your analogy your article isn't going to be any better even though maybe you'd get some incentive to work more all right all right for the purposes of this thought experiment let's stipulate as the lawyers say that more money is better than less money and simply proceed with a question of what would happen if Walter Kimbrough were to wake up one morning and decide to do things the U.S news way let's further stipulate that after this change of heart a miracle occurs and someone gives Dillard University a lot of money let's say 2 billion a nice round number what happens in the real world if you gave Walter Kimbrough 2 billion the first thing he would do is make Dillard bigger give more students the benefit of a Dillard education the problem is that yet another of the categories employed by the U.S news algorithm is student selectivity how academically Elite is the Freshman Class you admit each year and the fastest way to an elite Freshman Class of course is to let in as few freshmen as possible so I give you 2 billion you would that would improve your scores on their ranking but if your goal was to get bigger then they would they would ding you for that they would hurt me they would hurt you they don't want you to get bigger that's right I mean but that's Walter that's nuts yep that's right yes it's nuts of course it is and if you're confused right now join the club but let's put all that aside for a moment we're doing a thought experiment here at project Dillard and we're going to play by every rule for Dillard to rise in the rankings it's pretty clear that the school needs to attract a different kind of student mind who is wealthy enough that they give lots of money to the endowment once they graduate the kind who isn't worried about when they're going to eat and where they're going to sleep the kind who checks all the U.S news boxes and how do you attract that kind of student amenities the big point of this is that in order to raise their ranking this little black school in the South has got to start attracting more rich white students so my idea is well the only way they're going to attract rich white students is if they have fancier dorms I called up my old friend Vanessa she's in the luxury real estate business but why I'm sorry stupid question but why does a rich white student raise a ranking oh my God such a good question you've asked you've asked the question which which is the central question all this which is you're absolutely right it makes no sense why why does it matter that you have rich white students for some reason the U.S news algorithm is calculated in such a way that if you have rich white students you do better but in order to get rich kids you have to you have to induce them to come to your school and I would like to talk about an inducement which is suppose we were to build a Dillard an incredibly fancy dorm the daughter of the hedge fund guy from New York I wanted to walk in and say wow how much is that going to cost what are we talking about here you're saying that you want to provide a dorm that looks like a hotel suite that they stay in when they're with their parents on a luxurious vacation yes and what does that cost okay so the way we calculate pricing is cost per key right so we spend a minimum of two million dollars per key not including the land two million dollars per key that's what the wealthiest are expecting in terms of high quality living these days we have very fine materials that we have throughout the the rooms you will never see drywall for example no drywall so no drywall a two million per key drywall is like verbot dirty word another example uh that we're doing is um swimming pools on The Terraces recessed into the balcony oh wow and in every room that's one of our new projects so wait so you could do this you could totally do this in New Orleans of course to go to our college example the college came to you and said I want a dorm for two I want a wow dorm for 200 students you think you could do that for 400 million dollars yeah I think we could yeah you think you could the kid the 18 year old's gonna walk in with Daddy and dad is going to say okay you know little what's her name I don't know Ginger Jenny Jenny Jenny's gonna be happy here Jenny's going to be happy we were laughing about this because it's absurd right but just imagine that Walter Kimbrough actually built the dorm that Vanessa was imagining and that little Jenny the Hedge funders daughter and all the other little jennies out there decided as a result to come to Dillard Dillard would start to rise immediately in the rankings why because those jennies are all going to graduate and the algorithm will love that and after graduation the Jennys will make generous gifts to Dillard's endowment because Walter will give them naming rights for the brand new Dillard University student Spa then the other college presidents will Google that big endowment number and start to give Dillard a higher peer assessment score which will in turn lead to more Jenny's taking Dillard seriously until the parents of Beverly Hills and Palm Beach and the Upper East Side will casually Let It Drop at the country club that can you believe it little Jenny has gotten into Dillard remember Kelly mcconville of Reed College the leader of my Consulting band of hackers I call her back in to double check the math run the numbers on a Dillard full of Jenny's through her simulated U.S news algorithm so Williams is the top-ranked liberal arts college with an endowment of over 2.8 billion dollars so if we take Williams financials and put them in for Dillard Dillard goes from 161 to being tied for 103. so wait this positive is adjusting yeah so we haven't changed any of the fundamentals in the classroom we haven't changed the enthusiasm of the teachers we haven't changed you know the spirit of the students we haven't changed all we've done is that we have plunked a very large amount of money in the bank account of Dillard exactly that vaults them from the bottom of the pack to essentially the middle yeah okay okay let's keep going yeah so next you gave us a slightly trickier one where we're now going to layer on top of all that the test scores oh I nearly forgot test scores another key U.S news factor in all likelihood our Jennys had private tutors to help them raise their SAT scores they went to private prep schools but take standardized tests really seriously this is a variable with Jenny's name written all over it so what if Walter Kimbrough told all of his lower achieving students to go home and rebuilt all of Dillard around only the highest test score Jenny's what would that do for the school's rank now they went from 103 to 43. so that went up 60 slots just by adjusting those two variables they're just like to hell with this Antiquated notion of trying to educate a large swath of students who want to come to New Orleans to attend a HBCU we're just cream skimming from now on right okay how can we get them higher than 43. she said sure we can and began going through the remaining items on the U.S news checklist and lo and behold this was a test our shiny new Dillard haste I mean teach your student ratios they're tiny now we've told half our students to go home faculty resources ginormous we're loaded I mean I don't know what school we're looking at now but this school after we cranked all of those things turned all of those dials means this new Dillard is ranked third wow so that is how we can get Dillard into the tippy top tier of the liberal arts colleges so it's Williams Amherst Dillard Swarthmore yes project Dillard has given us a new school with a very different soundtrack can we convince Yale to lend them the whiff and poofs a preacher's kid like Walter Kimbrough would know the biblical lesson here Mark 8 36 for what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul when Walter Kimbrough gave me his tour of the Dillard campus he talked about the things that made Dillard special we have certain things when I got here I realized that we have this this physics program people didn't talk about it that at the time I think was number two in the country before producing African Americans who get undergraduate degrees in physics I think right now we ranked number three but if you do it per capita we're number one we've been number one for a while in 2019 Dillard produced 13 African-American physics grads according to Department of Education numbers Harvard produced One in the past 10 years Dillard has graduated 35 black physics grads Harvard 5. now you might say that's just because Harvard doesn't have a lot of black students that's not true Harvard admitted over 300 black undergraduates this year which is about the same as Dillard okay is it because Dillard students are smarter than Harvard's more capable of handling physics not true Harvard's Harvard they get the best high schoolers in the nation so why is Dillard doing so much better it turns out that this same pattern is true of hbcus as a group when it comes to producing graduates in stem science math engineering and Technology black schools punch way above their weight Walter Kimbrough brought up the other big HBCU in New Orleans just down the road from Dillard Xavier University not terribly big or rich either Xavier was informed until 1925 I believe but they've really gained a notoriety because they really leaned in on sending the people to medical school and so they send more people to medical school African-Americans any school in the country the explanation seems to be that at most schools there's a huge problem in stem with what Educators refer to as leakiness students start out majoring in science and math but then they change majors and the problem is most pronounced at selective schools these institutions cream off the top so to speak that's Mitchell Chang educational researcher at UCLA who has studied the problem and those who don't make it to the top find themselves losing the confidence to continue and and leave stem the stem field and and their pursuit of a stem degree altogether but at the hundred or so historically black colleges in the United States places like Dillard the stem pipeline isn't leaky if I was a martian looking at this I would say well Harvard should be able to identify every one of these struggling students and encourage them and help them and tutor them and get them through that doesn't happen I think you kind of uh hit on an important factor here the difference between what hbcus do and what these highly selective often refer to as predominantly white institutions or pwis do and one is you know more gear toward creaming off the top and the other one being much more developmental meeting students where they're at and lifting them and developing them to achieve their potential meeting students where they're at Mitchell Chang is talking about academic culture about places that care and at this hbcus seem to excel while I was visiting Dillard's campus Walter Kimbrough arranged for me to meet a group of students eight or so of us around a conference table and this is all the students ended up talking about what it felt like to be at Dillard I could get I could call Dr Kimber right now and say hey I'm doing this can you help me and he'll answer the phone it's not straight to voicemail so I think that's a really big high my advisors are the best they invested me if I missed class she will call me right after class is over to make sure I'm okay one and two why did I miss class because it's important to go to class I feel appreciated like I mean I can name pretty much all the administration in this room or like I could walk in there and I could see somebody I know for sure and just have a genuine connection relationship it's a true family and I feel like as much as I pour in they pour back another student talked about how if you'd gone to a big university things happening back home might have gotten in the way I probably wouldn't be in school anymore unfortunately um because my freshman year um I experienced the loss um in my family and it was very very difficult um and had it not been for um The Faculty um and the other students here who cared about me like some of the students here um sitting next to me I don't think that I would still be in school [Music] do students at other small schools feel this way of course they do students at Williams and Amherst and Swarthmore probably feel part of a family too but historically black colleges have managed to take that Community feeling and translate it into a very effective academic culture and they're doing in a way where they're not getting the same talent pool they're getting students who are more likely to be first generation students from lower income families and who are uh not just well prepared to pursue a science degree so uh it's quite remarkable a school helps its students succeed at the subject they came to college to pursue it creates a culture geared to helping students reach their potential and it does all that for a price that Working Families can afford on a Charming campus in the middle of an amazing City doesn't that sound like the definition of an elite school some years ago Walter Kimbrough heard that an editor from U.S news was coming to speak at a nearby event well I was like clear the schedule I've got to go here to U.S news guy and I was like and I gotta have a chance to ask him a question so I did and I said you know how do we you know justify having a ranking system that basically measures privilege and if I want to have a good ranking I need to make sure I keep out poor students black students part-time students non-traditional students if I do those things my ranking is high and he couldn't answer the question he said well you know it's America and this is how we measure Merit and blah blah blah there's a older gentleman afterwards came and laughed at me he said he didn't want to answer that question because that's the whole game it's like it's just a formula it is the formula [Music] rankings placed us all in a world with a clear set of rules the more is better than less rich is better than poor white is better than black none of us think we want to be part of that world but when College presidents dutifully send in their forms every year to U.S news when high school students battle with each other over who gets to go to the higher ranked school when parents boast about how Jenny got into this school or that school we're all complicit in the game [Music] will you promise me that you'll just stand up and just say ladies and gentlemen can we all just agree to drop out of the US News thing right now oh yeah oh yeah be folks who like I said they are so this is this is important you're a persuasive guy I think I feel like you could do that you think I could do it you have a little bit of your dad in you right just just stand up and preach yeah okay I would need to have that right I need to have this so I'm in front of the mount to really try to make it happen foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] our editor is Julia Barton original scoring by Luis Guerra mastering by flan Williams engineering by Martin Gonzalez fact checking by Amy Gaines special thanks to the Pushkin crew head of thane Carly migliori Maya Koenig Daniella Lacon Maggie Taylor Eric Sandler Nicole Morano Jason Gambrell and of course Jacob Weisberg special thanks also to the Dillard University choir and their director Samuel Davenport I'm Malcolm [Music] don't forget my latest book the bomber Mafia which is an expansion of several episodes from the last season of revisionist History you can find it wherever books are sold but by the audiobook at bombermafia.com and you'll get a bonus listener's guide and you can listen in the podcast app you're using now

Channel: Malcolm Gladwell

Views: 15,121

Keywords: Revisionist History podcast, Malcolm Gladwell, Malcolm Gladwell podcast, Malcolm Gladwell College Rankings, Malcolm Gladwell US News and World Report College Rankings, Columbia University College Rankings Scandal, Columbia University Cheating Scandal, History Podcast, Pushkin Industries, Dillard University, HBCUs, HBCU Rankings

Id: 9JEnc97n2IE

Length: 34min 35sec (2075 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 08 2023