Speaker 1: Pushkin. Once upon a time in the middle of the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, when the Cold War still raged and a
Speaker 1: man named Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, there were
Speaker 1: three major weekly news magazines in the United States. Time
Speaker 1: Magazine was number one, with millions upon millions of copies
Speaker 1: in circulation, Newsweek was number two, and What News Magazine
Speaker 1: came in third place, a sleepy little publication based in Washington,
Speaker 1: DC known as US News and World Report. One of
Speaker 1: the magazine's managing editors in those years, Peter Bernstein, remembers
Speaker 1: the day when everything changed. It was a very exciting time,
Speaker 1: I mean, because more had just taken over. There were
Speaker 1: a lot of people buzzing around, mort being Mortimer B. Zuckerman,
Speaker 1: a Canadian billionaire who bought US News and World Report
Speaker 1: with dreams of becoming a media baron. There are a
Speaker 1: ton of really good ideas sort of in the magazine,
Speaker 1: and I think it's fair to say our feeling was
Speaker 1: that the execution could have been a lot better. And
Speaker 1: one of the things we wanted to do was distinguish
Speaker 1: ourselves from Time and Newsweek, because we were the third
Speaker 1: And how do you distinguish yourself if you're always coming
Speaker 1: in third. If a Canadian billionaire with visions of grandeur
Speaker 1: is breathing down your neck, you do something audacious. You
Speaker 1: create something that no educated parent could possibly ignore, a
Speaker 1: scheme to examine every American college and university and rank
Speaker 1: them from top to bottom. We were looking to reinvent
Speaker 1: the magazine, and the college rankings became part of that.
Speaker 1: So Bernstein and his colleagues began collecting a mountain of
Speaker 1: statistics on the universities and colleges of the United States.
Speaker 1: To make sense of those numbers, they came up with
Speaker 1: an algorithm, a secret algorithm that could assign every school
Speaker 1: a score of one through one hundred, regardless of its size,
Speaker 1: or emission or complexity, an algorithm to capture the elusive
Speaker 1: quality of academic excellence. Finding those points of data and
Speaker 1: putting them into a ranking, as you can appreciate, is
Speaker 1: a complicated task. Yes, full of value, judgments, full of problems, challenges, dangers,
Speaker 1: But we were undaunted and forced it. I love that
Speaker 1: you're laughing about this. It was a very heady time,
Speaker 1: and we thought, and we did really challenged Time and
Speaker 1: Newsweek at their game. The rankings became an institution. News surged,
Speaker 1: careers were forged, fortunes made. I mean, what's fancy today
Speaker 1: is that time and news we had basically disappeared. The
Speaker 1: rest of US News has basically disappeared, but the rankings
Speaker 1: are as strong as ever. Well, it's nice to know
Speaker 1: in this world of affirmer that something can last. But
Speaker 1: and as a journalist, you know who you know when
Speaker 1: your work is used for for old fish after a day,
Speaker 1: it's nice to see that something has an impact for
Speaker 1: a while. Peter left US News long ago, but he
Speaker 1: and his colleagues had added something new to the American
Speaker 1: academic calendar beyond freshman week finals commencement. There's now the
Speaker 1: day the new rankings come out. The new thirtieth edition
Speaker 1: of Best Colleges was just released this morning, and we've
Speaker 1: got it. You're seeing that two thousand The list for
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen was Princeton University, followed by Harvard Attentions Scholars.
Speaker 1: America's vest colleges have been revealed. The US News and
Speaker 1: World Report is out with its Angle list, and we've
Speaker 1: got the inside scoop on half. The algorithm that's developed
Speaker 1: is undergoing a constant state of evolution over the years.
Speaker 1: How often are you tweaking it? I thought you might
Speaker 1: ask about this. I mean I did go online and
Speaker 1: look at it, and I was glad to see they
Speaker 1: are tweaking it on a regular basis, at least it
Speaker 1: looking if you look at their methodology. And of course
Speaker 1: they've also been reacting to competition. I mean, you know
Speaker 1: a lot of people have been critical of the rankings
Speaker 1: and whether this mythology really this methodology excuses it. Peter,
Speaker 1: that is like the definition of a Freudian slip. You're
Speaker 1: you're talking about you, you're talking about your brain child,
Speaker 1: and you refer to it as mythology. That's true. I
Speaker 1: couldn't have come up with that one consciously. At what
Speaker 1: point did the US news methodology become a mythology? Let's
Speaker 1: find out. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to
Speaker 1: my podcast, Revisionist History, about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood. In
Speaker 1: this episode, I ask, how is it that a promotional
Speaker 1: gimmick from the nineteen eighties turned into a fetish object
Speaker 1: for American higher education? How do these rankings work and
Speaker 1: why does everyone take them so seriously? We're going to
Speaker 1: launch a Revisionist History investigation. One that will take us
Speaker 1: to all kinds of strange places, to the bond markets,
Speaker 1: to Portland, Oregon, to New Orleans. We'll meet a mysterious
Speaker 1: college administrator who asked to be identified only as Dean,
Speaker 1: as well as a band of hackers who agreed to
Speaker 1: join our cause. All right, all right, so we're ready
Speaker 1: to go. It's very siding now before we start, can
Speaker 1: both of you guys introduce yourselves. So I'm Kelly McConville,
Speaker 1: and I'm assistant professor of statistics at Read College. I'm
Speaker 1: flying too, and I'm a international student who is currently
Speaker 1: studying at UNC's grad school. So these are some of
Speaker 1: my accomplices, and here's why I needed them. US News
Speaker 1: will tell you what variables they use to determine whether
Speaker 1: a school is good or mediocre, but they won't disclose
Speaker 1: exactly how they combine those variables into a score. I mean,
Speaker 1: why would they. It's their secret sauce they charge forty
Speaker 1: dollars a year for premium access to their findings. This
Speaker 1: is a big business. So I figured my only chance
Speaker 1: at really getting under the hood of the ranking algorithm
Speaker 1: was to find out if anyone had in effect hacked
Speaker 1: the algorithm. And it turns out someone had. It was
Speaker 1: a group of students at Read, a small liberal arts
Speaker 1: college in Portland, Oregon, under the leadership of their professor
Speaker 1: Kelly McConville. Tell me how on earth this whole project
Speaker 1: of looking at US News rankings? How did it begin? So?
Speaker 1: I teach a course called Statistics Practicum, and in that course,
Speaker 1: the students complete a semester long empirical research project, and
Speaker 1: I solicit those projects and the data from other READ
Speaker 1: faculty and staff. Every year, US News asks for a
Speaker 1: lot of data from schools, but the Read administration had
Speaker 1: stopped supplying that data. They decided they didn't believe in
Speaker 1: the rankings anymore. But still the magazine kept generating a
Speaker 1: ranking for Read anyway, and someone in the Read administration
Speaker 1: came to Kelly McConville and said, ever since we dropped out,
Speaker 1: our US News ranking has plummeted. We think they've been
Speaker 1: punishing us. Can you double check their math? That was
Speaker 1: our task. We were tasked with recreating the model and
Speaker 1: then seeing what our ranking would be if we did
Speaker 1: supply data. Yeah, So tell me the two of you
Speaker 1: walk me through how does one go about conceptually trying
Speaker 1: to answer this question. They use a model that's called
Speaker 1: a weight in some model that means they take about
Speaker 1: twenty or so different factors about a school, like class
Speaker 1: size and graduation rates. They wait each of those factors
Speaker 1: based on how important they think the factor is, and
Speaker 1: then they sum up all those pieces and then calibrate
Speaker 1: it so that the highest scores at a hundred, and
Speaker 1: then based on those scores, they rank of schools. The
Speaker 1: Red team had to build their own version of the
Speaker 1: US News algorithm from scratch, trying to get as close
Speaker 1: to it as possible. We grabbed all the variables we
Speaker 1: could from open government sources, and we built a model
Speaker 1: that isn't trying to recreate the US News weight in
Speaker 1: some model. Instead, it's just trying to predict the US
Speaker 1: New score of a school with a high degree of accuracy.
Speaker 1: Whying how how close did you get? I'll say fairly close.
Speaker 1: The only school that's outside of like a reasonable range
Speaker 1: of predicted score in the test set is Read really,
Speaker 1: and all other schools are like within a reasonable prediction
Speaker 1: interval of their scores, meaning the Read Students identical Twin
Speaker 1: algorithm is so good that when they run their rankings
Speaker 1: of American colleges. Their list looks almost exactly like the
Speaker 1: US News list, with one exception Read College. Wait, so
Speaker 1: they were messing with you based on our finding, it
Speaker 1: seems reasonable they did something. In twenty nineteen, US News
Speaker 1: put Read in ninetieth place. Where do you think you
Speaker 1: should be ranked? Thirty sixth Oh? Wait? What that much
Speaker 1: of a difference? Yeah, that's bananas. Oh why they really
Speaker 1: did a number on Read. Now we don't need to
Speaker 1: go much further into the ensuing beef between Read and
Speaker 1: US News. The magazine calls the undergraduates analysis quote inaccurate.
Speaker 1: But just imagine my joy when I ran across Hawaiian's analysis. Here.
Speaker 1: I was searching for some way to understand the secret
Speaker 1: algorithm cooked up by Peter Bernstein and his pals back
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties, and loan behold, a bunch of
Speaker 1: undergraduates at Read College had cracked the code. And were
Speaker 1: they motivated to help me? Absolutely? Because US News dist
Speaker 1: their school. My first question to Kelly and her team
Speaker 1: was where should I start? And they said, start with
Speaker 1: a little something called the Pere Assessment score. Can you
Speaker 1: give me a more precise, sort of statistical sense of
Speaker 1: just how important is it like okay, So we find
Speaker 1: that the pure assessment score is has the largest effects,
Speaker 1: So it has a coefficient of like six point five eight.
Speaker 1: In other words, like, if you hold everything else constant
Speaker 1: and you like increase the pure assessment scorer by one unit,
Speaker 1: your overall score will increase by six point five eight.
Speaker 1: The pure assessment score was at the heart of the
Speaker 1: US News secret sauce, a measure of reputation, one of
Speaker 1: the most powerful elements in the whole ranking system. So
Speaker 1: if I'm a school and I'm anxious to move up
Speaker 1: the US News rankings, the thing I should really be
Speaker 1: focused on is trying to boost my reputation score. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had my marching orders, and I knew where I
Speaker 1: had to go. Next to the guardian of the US
Speaker 1: News gates that dragon at the mouth of the cave,
Speaker 1: Robert Morse. Robert Morse, the man who runs the US
Speaker 1: News rankings, is an older man, white hair, very preppy, nice,
Speaker 1: if a bit lugubrious, heavy hangs the head to where's
Speaker 1: the crown? I called him up. I wanted to understand
Speaker 1: the mysterious variable that the Reed College hackers had told
Speaker 1: me was so important. Describe again how is the reputation
Speaker 1: score generated? So we send out three surveys per school
Speaker 1: and then they respond. They rate the schools on a
Speaker 1: scale of five to one or no response. So who
Speaker 1: are the three people at each school who are asked
Speaker 1: to fill out the survey? There is in the provost
Speaker 1: and the enrollment manager or the head of admissions. The
Speaker 1: surveys arrived via email once a year to everyone who
Speaker 1: matters in American Higher ed. If you're at a liberal
Speaker 1: arts college, you're given a list of all two hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty two other liberal arts colleges in your category.
Speaker 1: If you're part of a big university, you get a
Speaker 1: list of the three hundred and eighty eight other big
Speaker 1: universities in the United States. Your job is to rank
Speaker 1: the schools on your list on a scale of one
Speaker 1: to five, five being amazing, one being there's a serious
Speaker 1: problem here. And on what basis are people making those judgments? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean that's a good question. I mean, we asked
Speaker 1: them to base it on their view of the school's
Speaker 1: reputation for undergraduate academic quality. But I mean, how would
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, we believe that the aggregate some
Speaker 1: of all the raiders who are a leader in higher education.
Speaker 1: You know their presidents and provos and mission dean. So
Speaker 1: they're not rookies. When you aggregate their views at any
Speaker 1: given time, they're representing where those schools stand in the marketplace.
Speaker 1: I mean, so it's it's an assessment of their of
Speaker 1: their feelings about other schools. Well, they're leaders in higher education,
Speaker 1: so it's based on their knowledge of the other schools
Speaker 1: that they've gathered or through meetings or for exposure. Do
Speaker 1: they necessarily know a lot about all the schools they're rating.
Speaker 1: I don't know. If I rate a restaurant on Yelp,
Speaker 1: it's because I've eaten there, right, yes, But here when
Speaker 1: I rate a university on the US News ranking, it's
Speaker 1: not because I've attended that university or taught there. It's just, well,
Speaker 1: you may have. We shouldn't say that you didn't. But
Speaker 1: if you're saying, have the people who rated the schools
Speaker 1: been on every campus or taught at that school or no?
Speaker 1: In depth their course catalog? No, Does some of them
Speaker 1: have greater degrees of knowledge about the schools they're rating, yes?
Speaker 1: Does some of them have lesser degrees of knowledge? Yes?
Speaker 1: So I think it varies from having substantial knowledge to
Speaker 1: far less knowledge. In my naivete, I had imagined that
Speaker 1: there would be some level of rigor to this crucial
Speaker 1: variable in the US news waited in some model a
Speaker 1: methodology that I could study, analyze, learn from. But Morse
Speaker 1: wasn't being very helpful, so I tried to draw him out.
Speaker 1: I mean, I was fascinated that there's a little clump
Speaker 1: where BYU bring him young. Yeshiva and Gonzaga are all
Speaker 1: ranked right in the same roughly equally in the National
Speaker 1: University's rank. So a Mormon school, Conservative Jewish school, and
Speaker 1: a Jesuit school. And I was trying to think, what
Speaker 1: is the rabbi who runs Yeshiva know about bring them young?
Speaker 1: And what does the Jesuit priest who runs Gonzaga know
Speaker 1: about Yeshiva. It's a good point, like is Gonzaga giving
Speaker 1: George ten to five and giving Boston College of five?
Speaker 1: And we're not looking at how people are raiding other schools.
Speaker 1: We are doing a trim mean, so we take off
Speaker 1: a few of the highest ratings and a few of
Speaker 1: the lowest ratings in an effort to eliminate some of
Speaker 1: the strategic voting that you're alluding to well, I don't
Speaker 1: know if that's strategic voting. I'm wondering if it's just that.
Speaker 1: If I'm president of Gonzaga, I'm powerfully motivated to believe
Speaker 1: that the Jesuit education is the best education out there.
Speaker 1: So when I look at Georgetown, I think they're doing
Speaker 1: the right thing. And when I look at Shiva, I say,
Speaker 1: where's the New Testament? Why are they not using the
Speaker 1: New Testament? I mean, this is just natural human biases.
Speaker 1: I just don't know what they have to do with
Speaker 1: the quality of the institution. Well, I don't have a
Speaker 1: different answer. Devoted listeners of revisionist history will remember how
Speaker 1: years ago I fell for Rowan University in New Jersey,
Speaker 1: a love ruin. But Rowan is ranked one hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty seventh in the National University's List dismal mediocre, and
Speaker 1: why because its pure assessment score is a forgettable two
Speaker 1: point four. How on earth have the university presence of
Speaker 1: America come to the collective decision that they hate Rowan
Speaker 1: University way way down in South Jersey. I call up Ali,
Speaker 1: Who's mind the school's president? How many university presidents have
Speaker 1: visited Roan in the last five years from other colleges, oh,
Speaker 1: two or three, one from Canada, one came who was
Speaker 1: part of an accreditation and I believe another one was
Speaker 1: a friend. That's it. Yes, So when they're giving you
Speaker 1: a score, on what basis are they using for giving you?
Speaker 1: How do they know anything at all about Rowan? Again,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I can only speak for myself. I
Speaker 1: can assure you that I really don't know much aboard
Speaker 1: the institutions that I'm asked to rank or school I
Speaker 1: just don't have enough tools. Now. It's not like university
Speaker 1: presidents don't know anything about grading. They were all teachers
Speaker 1: themselves once. But when it comes to grading schools, it
Speaker 1: seems like they might just be mailing it in. Next,
Speaker 1: I called up the head of admissions at a major university.
Speaker 1: You've heard of it, trust me, but I can't tell
Speaker 1: you what it is. And we altered the voice to
Speaker 1: protect this person's identity. Of course we did. We had
Speaker 1: to look how US News treated read college. My source
Speaker 1: told me to address them only as dean. I am
Speaker 1: certain and I am far more qualified to be a
Speaker 1: member of the Baseball Writers Association of America and vote
Speaker 1: on the Hall of Fame than I am to assess
Speaker 1: other institutions for the US News and World Report. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I proposed a Dean that we do an exercise. I'd
Speaker 1: name a school at random, and then the two of
Speaker 1: us would try to peer assess it. Florida State, never
Speaker 1: been there? Have you been there? I've not been there?
Speaker 1: I think three point two? Syracuse? Yes. I stopped for
Speaker 1: coffee there once in a way driving back to my
Speaker 1: mom's house in Canada. I don't know if that counts.
Speaker 1: I don't think it does. I think it counts. You're
Speaker 1: going to experience I gotta sankerience the weather. But there's
Speaker 1: no there were no students there. It was Christmas. But
Speaker 1: I will say this, my cousin went to Syracuse and
Speaker 1: had a good time. Oh so, and so you would
Speaker 1: rate it based on that. Let's give Syracuse some love.
Speaker 1: Three point nine, No, four point zero. University of Washington, Seattle. Yes,
Speaker 1: you've been there, Yes I have. Would you do when
Speaker 1: you're there? Um? I walked around. I think that counts.
Speaker 1: It counts. I said to Dean, you can see the
Speaker 1: mountains from there, the space needle. Let's go big. University
Speaker 1: of Washington at Seattle four point two have you ever
Speaker 1: been to william Mary? I have you? I love I
Speaker 1: love history, I love colonial Williamsburg. Do you remember what
Speaker 1: school you gave will Him and Mary? I probably gave
Speaker 1: them a four or five? Really you went for five?
Speaker 1: Is the second oldest college in the US. Do you
Speaker 1: think that affected your judgment on that? I'm sure it did.
Speaker 1: Dean and I went on for quite some time. We
Speaker 1: had a long chat about Southern Methodist University in Dallas
Speaker 1: and whether or not the great football team the school
Speaker 1: had in the nineteen eighties should count in their favor.
Speaker 1: Dean said no. I said yes, Now, was all this
Speaker 1: a helpful exercise? Not really? But then again neither with
Speaker 1: my conversation with the Wizard of the Rankings, Robert Morris.
Speaker 1: One suggestion that has been made to me by people
Speaker 1: who do the rankings is that the thing they rely
Speaker 1: on to make their reputation scores for other universities is
Speaker 1: the only source they have of reputation scores for the
Speaker 1: other universities, which is the previous years US News rankings.
Speaker 1: Is this circular? If they're telling you that, then that's
Speaker 1: not our expectation and of how people are doing their
Speaker 1: ratings versus looking at the ranking table and looking at
Speaker 1: the score. We believe that there's more thought going into
Speaker 1: it than that, But we haven't done any kind of
Speaker 1: social science research to prove or disprove that point. You
Speaker 1: haven't done any right, Yeah, they haven't done any social
Speaker 1: science research. Only one person gave me much insight into
Speaker 1: the mechanics of the peer Assessment score, and that was
Speaker 1: Ali Hushmund, president of Rowan. His advice was, you have
Speaker 1: to take matters into your own hands. So what does
Speaker 1: he do? He makes his own hot sauce. And he
Speaker 1: told me that Rowan sends out free samples to every
Speaker 1: college president in the country. That's not too really did
Speaker 1: he did? No that I make hot sauce. That would
Speaker 1: have me schooling, I hope, yes. Well, I want to
Speaker 1: know about your hot sauce. What kind of hot sauce
Speaker 1: do you have? Oh? I make serious, serious hot sauce.
Speaker 1: But I actually grow from seeds all the way to
Speaker 1: the packaging. And there are three levels up heat. The
Speaker 1: lowest one is called Ali's nasty, which is kind of mine,
Speaker 1: and then the one next to it it happened as
Speaker 1: a heat is called a nasty delicious, And then the
Speaker 1: one with Carona Reaper is called nasty vicious, and I
Speaker 1: will send you a package the nasty vicious can get you.
Speaker 1: But this isn't gonna help your cause. This is gonna
Speaker 1: hurt your cause. If you're if you're giving some some
Speaker 1: university president in the middle of the Midwest is like
Speaker 1: it happens to have a little bit of vicious. They're
Speaker 1: gonna they're gonna curse your name problem. When I when
Speaker 1: I figured that no, no publicity is a bad bad publicity,
Speaker 1: did I try the nasty vicious? Oh? Yes, I did,
Speaker 1: on a scale of one to five five point oh.
Speaker 1: In the middle of my investigation of the pure assessment
Speaker 1: score and its many implications, I had a conversation with
Speaker 1: a professor at Duke named Bill Mayu. Mayo was friendly
Speaker 1: with some bond traders and he was talking with some
Speaker 1: of them one day when they mentioned that they were
Speaker 1: having difficulty with bonds issued by historically black colleges HBCUs
Speaker 1: as they're known. If you're a bond trader, you worry
Speaker 1: about moving the bonds, that you have an inventory, and
Speaker 1: they just mentioned, you know, hey, we're having a really
Speaker 1: hard time placing these HBCUs schools because people don't want
Speaker 1: to hold them. The way the bond market works is
Speaker 1: that an institution needs money. Let's say a university wants
Speaker 1: to build a dormitory that costs fifty million dollars. The
Speaker 1: school can't raise all that money on its own, so
Speaker 1: it goes to a Wall Street bank, which purchases a
Speaker 1: bond a promise of repayment from the university. Then the
Speaker 1: bank breaks that bond into many hundreds and hundreds of
Speaker 1: pieces and sells those pieces to wealthy investors or insurance
Speaker 1: companies or hedge funds. So when may you hears that
Speaker 1: banks are struggling to sell bonds for historically black colleges,
Speaker 1: he wonders, is this just some apocryphal Wall Street story
Speaker 1: or is it true? Luckily, is a simple way to
Speaker 1: test this. The price the bond trader charges is called
Speaker 1: the gross spread. If it's super easy to find buyers
Speaker 1: for the bonds, the gross spread is likely to be low.
Speaker 1: If the trader has difficulty finding buyers, the spread can
Speaker 1: get quite pricy. So if the bonds from black schools
Speaker 1: are harder to move than bonds from white schools, the
Speaker 1: spread should be higher. And are they Yes, they are?
Speaker 1: May you and his colleagues compared black schools with non
Speaker 1: h b c us that were otherwise identical. The spreads
Speaker 1: for the historically black schools were twenty percent higher in
Speaker 1: the bond market. A twenty percent difference in spreads is huge.
Speaker 1: Mayo and his co researchers then went one step further.
Speaker 1: They zeroed in on three states in the Deep South,
Speaker 1: and those three states were so those are Louisiana, Mississippi,
Speaker 1: and Alabama. And what's the difference in spread in those states?
Speaker 1: Not twenty percent? Thirty seven percent. Mayo and his colleagues
Speaker 1: have given us a scientifically rigorous measurement of just how
Speaker 1: much of a burden black institution's face in the real world.
Speaker 1: You've put a number on reputation. What is the reputational
Speaker 1: cost of being a school that overwhelmingly accepts and educates
Speaker 1: black kids in Louisiana. The reputation cost is thirty percent.
Speaker 1: That's one way to think about it. But I would
Speaker 1: say it's the racial component of reputation. A spread is
Speaker 1: a reputation and score, isn't it. Investors don't know the
Speaker 1: precise ins and outs of all the institutions they're asked
Speaker 1: to buy. How could they there are literally hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of bonds on a market at any given time,
Speaker 1: so the investors proceed on a feeling, a feeling about
Speaker 1: how worthy and how safe and how legitimate the institution
Speaker 1: getting the loan. Is. You see a black school and
Speaker 1: you say to yourself, I don't value that HBCU quite
Speaker 1: as highly as the white school across town. So you
Speaker 1: give the black school a discount, which is what prejudice is,
Speaker 1: by the way, a discount. The black life does not
Speaker 1: matter as much as the white life. And who are
Speaker 1: these people imposing a discount on black schools. They're wealthy,
Speaker 1: successful people who are simply checking a box. I like
Speaker 1: this bond, I like this one a lot. I don't
Speaker 1: like this one. They are, I suspect, not a whole
Speaker 1: lot different from the college administrators who as sign a
Speaker 1: number to their peers for the US News rankings every year,
Speaker 1: motivated by the same unconscious biases. I like the school
Speaker 1: four point two, I like this one a lot four
Speaker 1: point five. I don't like this one two point four,
Speaker 1: even though I don't really know anything about it. So,
Speaker 1: if you were the president of a historically black college
Speaker 1: in one of those states with a reputational discount for
Speaker 1: being black is thirty seven percent. How do you think
Speaker 1: you'd feel about your peer assessment score? I thought i'd
Speaker 1: called Walter Kimbro, president of Dillard University, a historically black
Speaker 1: college in Louisiana, And so when I start to look
Speaker 1: at the formulas and dig into it, I was like,
Speaker 1: this isn't a real good measurement of what we do.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's a measurement of privilege. Dillard's reputation score
Speaker 1: is two point six. That's not good. You can't ever
Speaker 1: get to the top of the US News rankings with
Speaker 1: a peer assessment score of two point six. Maybe that
Speaker 1: sounds defeat is, but it's it's not defeatist. It's realistic.
Speaker 1: It's nobody's gonna just go and say this school, with
Speaker 1: all these black people, is great in their haste to
Speaker 1: compete with Time and Newsweek way back when, maybe all
Speaker 1: US News did was create a system that allowed the
Speaker 1: presidents and deans of every college in the country to
Speaker 1: assign a number to their prejudice to disguise mythology as methodology.
Speaker 1: Next week on Revisionist History, we take up the cause
Speaker 1: of Dillard University and I enlist my old friends at
Speaker 1: Ree College to help me out. So that is how
Speaker 1: we can get Dillard into the tippy tap tier of
Speaker 1: the Liberal Hearts colleges. So it's Williams Amerst Dillard swarth Wark. Yes.
Speaker 1: Revision's History is produced by Meal Bell, Leeman Gistu and
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith, with Eloise Linton and on a NYE. Our
Speaker 1: editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Gera, mastering
Speaker 1: by Flawn Williams, and engineering by Martin Gonzalez. Fact checking
Speaker 1: by Amy Gaines. Special thanks the Pushkin crew head A Fane,
Speaker 1: Carl Migliore, Maya Kanig, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano,
Speaker 1: Jason Gambrel and of course Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Glama.
Speaker 1: If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries,
Speaker 1: consider becoming a Pushnik. Pushnik is a podcast subscription that
Speaker 1: offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for four dollars and
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Speaker 1: nasty vicious. Okay, guys, but you hold on the websites
Speaker 1: with do simultaneously. Yep, okay, one, two, three, Oh, I
Speaker 1: like that it comes on. It's oh, go all ee,
Speaker 1: go all ee because it's really good. It's good. Hold on,
Speaker 1: I'm okay. It's very spicy for a very long time,
Speaker 1: because am I, it's not eating me as hard as idea,
Speaker 1: I'm take a second bite. My cheens struggling anyway, where's
Speaker 1: my Harvard hot saus I don't get I don't see
Speaker 1: any Harvard hort sauce. No one's sending me hot sauce
Speaker 1: from New even are they now