Speaker 1: Pushkin. In New Orleans, a few miles from the French Quarter,
Speaker 1: there is a small liberal arts college called Dillard University.
Speaker 1: The campus is an elegant cluster of one hundred year
Speaker 1: old white buildings bordering a large lawn. Long rows of
Speaker 1: live oaks run down either side of the green. It
Speaker 1: looks like a postcard from the nineteen thirties, and because
Speaker 1: this is New Orleans, the school acquires amazing The president
Speaker 1: of Dillard is Walter kimbro Tall, mid fifties, close crop
Speaker 1: terre pencil than mustache. Bachelor of Science from the University
Speaker 1: of Georgia, master's degree Miami University, PhD from Georgia State.
Speaker 1: Your father is a very well known pastor in Atlanta. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. He's he's Walter Senior, you're Walter Junior. Well
Speaker 1: we have different middle names, so he's Walter Lee and
Speaker 1: I'm Walter Mark. Because he felt like Walter Lee was country,
Speaker 1: so he didn't give me that. But yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: my day. Yeah. I would encourage you, should you ever
Speaker 1: be in New Orleans to pay a visit to Dillard.
Speaker 1: Here the choir perform if you can, and walk around
Speaker 1: the campus as I did with Walter Kimbro. So we're
Speaker 1: in this area of New Orleans is Gentilis, Callegent Tilly.
Speaker 1: The area is very residential. It was middle class African
Speaker 1: American community. So a lot of things. We're gonna sort
Speaker 1: of walk this win, make a loop. Then when you
Speaker 1: finished your droller on campus, look up Dillard on the
Speaker 1: US News and World Report Best College's Rankings website. They're
Speaker 1: on the Liberal Arts college list, which usually has some
Speaker 1: combination of Williams, Amherst and Swarthmore at the top. But
Speaker 1: keep going down the long winding road of elite private
Speaker 1: American education, gilded with Ivy Granted and Tweed, Pomona, Wellesley, Bowden,
Speaker 1: keep going, and after you get to the fancy schools,
Speaker 1: and the tier below the fancy schools, and the tier
Speaker 1: below that tier, there is a bottomless pit into which
Speaker 1: US News dumps all the colleges that they considered too
Speaker 1: mediocre to mari a proper assessment. Dillard is in the
Speaker 1: bottomless pit. My question was why. That's the mystery that
Speaker 1: led me all the way down to New Orleans to
Speaker 1: see Walter Kimbro. What does America's premier ranking system have
Speaker 1: against Dillard University. My name is Malcolm Glabwe. You're listening
Speaker 1: to Revision's History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
Speaker 1: This episode is a continuation of my investigation of the
Speaker 1: strange annual American ritual known as the US News Best
Speaker 1: College's Rankings. I decided I'd pick a school in order
Speaker 1: to better understand how the rankings work, make it a
Speaker 1: case study, analyze its performance on the bewildering set of
Speaker 1: metrics used by the mysterious US News algorithm. Let's call
Speaker 1: this investigation Project Dillard. About three quarters of the student
Speaker 1: body at Dillard are PELL Grant eligible, meaning they qualify
Speaker 1: for federal assistance. The average family income of the students
Speaker 1: is just over thirty thousand dollars a year. A third
Speaker 1: of them are the first in their families to go
Speaker 1: to college. Virtually all are black. Diller is a part
Speaker 1: of a group of HBCUs they've called the Black Ivy League,
Speaker 1: so more house spellman Howard Hampton Dillard was in that
Speaker 1: group too, And so some people, you know, buy into
Speaker 1: that a lot and take pride in that, and when
Speaker 1: they're they're broke, you won't necessarily know that this is
Speaker 1: a student that comes from a family they're really sort
Speaker 1: of struggling because they put it together and they're able
Speaker 1: to carry themselves like they've been solidly middle class all
Speaker 1: their life, and they haven't. US News tells us that
Speaker 1: schools ranked higher on their list are better than schools
Speaker 1: ranked lower on their list, And I want to figure
Speaker 1: out what US News means by that word better. Why
Speaker 1: is it that the black Ivy League is not treated
Speaker 1: with the same reverence as the white IVY League. I
Speaker 1: started this story on a little bit of a lark
Speaker 1: because I thought it would be fun to make fun
Speaker 1: of US News. But the more I did it, the
Speaker 1: angrier I got. A not very sophisticated group of people
Speaker 1: in WASHINGTDC came up with a standard by which we
Speaker 1: measure higher education in this country, and that standard is
Speaker 1: massively biased against people who want to serve underserved populations,
Speaker 1: and they have made the lives of people like you
Speaker 1: and your students more difficult as a result. Right, That's
Speaker 1: what it is, exactly, That's I mean, that's exactly what
Speaker 1: it is. I call, you know, the US News rankings
Speaker 1: a perpetuation of privilege. That's what I've always called it.
Speaker 1: That's all it is. It's a perpetuation of privilege. In
Speaker 1: last week's episode, I consulted with a group of statisticians
Speaker 1: at Read College who had hacked their way into the
Speaker 1: secret US News algorithm. I decided to call on the
Speaker 1: services again, this time to help me with the puzzle
Speaker 1: of Dillard University's rank. My name is Lauren Rabe. I
Speaker 1: am an environmental studies economics major at Read College and
Speaker 1: I'm a senior. Tell me how how did Kelly recruit
Speaker 1: you for this project? Kelly Kelly McConville a professor Reid
Speaker 1: who enjoys canjoling her students into various acts of statistical mischief.
Speaker 1: Kelly just message for me one day and was like, hey, you,
Speaker 1: I have a project that might be fun for you.
Speaker 1: We just get to play with data and make some
Speaker 1: models and try to predict some things and hold on,
Speaker 1: hold on. Your first question was can I make graphs true?
Speaker 1: I think we need to go back to the mysterious
Speaker 1: variable that makes up such a large portion of the
Speaker 1: US News algorithm, the Peer Assessment Score. US News asks
Speaker 1: every college president, provost, and admissions dean in the country
Speaker 1: to rank the academic reputation of every other college in
Speaker 1: their category on a scale of one to five. If
Speaker 1: you listen to the previous episode, you'll know that I
Speaker 1: couldn't figure out how all those college presidents came up
Speaker 1: with their peer assessment grades. I tried. I interrogated Bob Morse,
Speaker 1: who runs the rankings. I had a long interview with
Speaker 1: a mysterious deep throat figure named Dean as we did
Speaker 1: a peer assessment lightning round. I looked into whether hot
Speaker 1: sauce could sway the graders in the end. Let's be honest,
Speaker 1: I got nowhere. But then I realized I could ask
Speaker 1: the Reed college hackers to do a statistical analysis what
Speaker 1: factors actually correlate with the peer assessment score. That was
Speaker 1: my assignment for Lauren Rabe. We were focusing on a
Speaker 1: few variables. College endowment, which is just how much money
Speaker 1: they have in the bank. We were looking at tuition,
Speaker 1: so how much it costs for a student to attend,
Speaker 1: the percent of students that are white, the percent of
Speaker 1: students that receive Hell grants. And I found that endowment
Speaker 1: by itself, just the size of the endowment predicts half
Speaker 1: of the peer asessment score, So we can explain half
Speaker 1: of the assessment's The pure assessment score just by how
Speaker 1: much money a school has in the bank, and then
Speaker 1: once we start adding the other the remaining school characteristics,
Speaker 1: we end up with over ninety percent ninety one point
Speaker 1: three percent to be precise. It seems pretty clear that
Speaker 1: you can predict the reputation assigned to every college in
Speaker 1: the country with almost perfect accuracy, just by spending a
Speaker 1: few minutes on Google. Dillard's reputation score is two point
Speaker 1: six a terrible score, by the way, but now we
Speaker 1: know why. It's not because there's something very wrong with
Speaker 1: Dillard's reputation. It's because Dillard falls short in all of
Speaker 1: the areas that make for a high score. There aren't
Speaker 1: a lot of white people on campus, the tuition is
Speaker 1: low compared with top liberal arts colleges. It's nineteen thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a year, and Dillard's endowment is a minuscule one
Speaker 1: hundred and five million dollars. A top ranked school like
Speaker 1: Williams College has two billion more dollars in the bank
Speaker 1: than Dillard. The next thing US News really cares about
Speaker 1: is graduation rates. What percentage of a freshman class get
Speaker 1: their degree within six years. US News rewards schools for
Speaker 1: having high graduation rates and they punish schools for low
Speaker 1: graduation rates on the theory that a schools graduation rate
Speaker 1: tells you something about how well it educates and inspires
Speaker 1: its students. This metric seems to make a lot more
Speaker 1: sense than peer assessment scores. Right at Dillard, the graduation
Speaker 1: rate is around fifty percent. How can we call a
Speaker 1: school good if half its students don't graduate? But when
Speaker 1: I asked Walter Kimbro about this, here's what he said.
Speaker 1: I was doing one of my one one meetings with
Speaker 1: a freshman student last week, and the question I asked,
Speaker 1: what's the best part about being a college student? What's
Speaker 1: the worst part? And she said the worst part for
Speaker 1: her was Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's like why, she said,
Speaker 1: because I had to figure out what I was gonna do,
Speaker 1: where I could live. It was very powerful the way
Speaker 1: that she said. I was like, because I was like,
Speaker 1: what do you mean? Why is that the worst part
Speaker 1: of college? She said, I don't know where I was
Speaker 1: gonna stay. Think of how difficult it must be for
Speaker 1: that student to focus on staying in school. How can
Speaker 1: you plan for the future when your life right now
Speaker 1: is so unstable? And what happens when someone in your
Speaker 1: family gets ill or loses their job or has an accident,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, the cost of sending you
Speaker 1: to school becomes overwhelming. If the average family income of
Speaker 1: your student body is just over thirty thousand dollars a year,
Speaker 1: there's going to be a lot of that. For a
Speaker 1: school like us that you're seventy five pale Grant eligible.
Speaker 1: If you have a six year graduation rate that's over
Speaker 1: fifty percent, it's almost miraculous because there are so many
Speaker 1: other factors that I just can't control. I can't control
Speaker 1: those family pieces, and I just can't control that. Just
Speaker 1: for contrast, the graduation rate at a school like Boden
Speaker 1: currently number six on the Liberal Arts College rankings. Everyone graduates,
Speaker 1: maybe because one in every five students at Boden comes
Speaker 1: from a family with an income in the top one percent.
Speaker 1: The worst part of Christmas for a Bowden student is
Speaker 1: deciding which of their houses to go to. No one's
Speaker 1: dropping out of Boden, not with Daddy paying for everything.
Speaker 1: Graduation rates don't tell you how good a school is.
Speaker 1: They tell you what kind of students a school is admitting.
Speaker 1: My first conclusion in the Project Dillard Investigation why is
Speaker 1: Dillard at the bottom of the rankings They enroll the
Speaker 1: wrong kind of student. Halfway through Project Dillard, I had
Speaker 1: the idea of conducting a thought experiment. Most of the
Speaker 1: things that US News cares about have to do with money.
Speaker 1: That's how you raise your academic reputation score. Wealthy students
Speaker 1: are also way more lucky to graduate from school. That
Speaker 1: boosts your school as well. But there are many other
Speaker 1: variables in the US News rankings that are also really
Speaker 1: just about how much money a school has in the bank.
Speaker 1: Variables like faculty resources, financial resources per student, average, alumni
Speaker 1: giving rate, graduate indebtedness, and on and on. Since I
Speaker 1: was curious about this, I asked Robert Morse, who runs
Speaker 1: the US News rankings, what is the basis for the
Speaker 1: assumption that the more mind a school has, the better
Speaker 1: quality the education to school is providing. There's a number
Speaker 1: of points. One is that you hardly ever hear a
Speaker 1: college president say cut my budgets, take away my programs,
Speaker 1: fire my faculty, reduce my sports, and I'll be a
Speaker 1: better school. It's rare that you see higher educational leaders
Speaker 1: say that less sequels. More so that this is spending
Speaker 1: for students on academic programs and on aspects of the
Speaker 1: education like that you have a greater chance of having
Speaker 1: a richer academic experience. And if you have less spending,
Speaker 1: then you're going to have less. And we're saying that
Speaker 1: in this case, more is better than less, more is
Speaker 1: better than less. I mean, look, I mean, let's assume
Speaker 1: I'm getting paid two hundred thousand dollars a year. If
Speaker 1: you candom in at Malcolm, if I gave you four
Speaker 1: hundred thousand, would you be a better writer? I would
Speaker 1: say absolutely, I would be better. But that would be false.
Speaker 1: There's there's no correlation with how much you pay Malcolm
Speaker 1: how good Malcolm's writing is. Right, But that's I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that that analogy works in this particular case, because
Speaker 1: you're dealing with, you know, a budget, and it's buying
Speaker 1: many different things than than than one humans, human being
Speaker 1: skill in your analogy, your your article isn't going to
Speaker 1: be any better, even though maybe you'd get some incentive
Speaker 1: to work more. All right, all right, for the purposes
Speaker 1: of this thought experiment, let's stipulate, as the lawyers say
Speaker 1: that more money is better than less money and simply
Speaker 1: proceed with the question of what would happen if Walter
Speaker 1: kimbro were to wake up one morning and decide to
Speaker 1: do things the US News way. Let's further stipulate that
Speaker 1: after this change of heart, a miracle occurs and someone
Speaker 1: gives Dillard University a lot of money, let's say two billion,
Speaker 1: a nice round number. What happens in the real world
Speaker 1: If you gave Walter Kimbroke two billion, the first thing
Speaker 1: he would do is make Dillard bigger, give more students
Speaker 1: the benefit of a Dillard education. The problem is that
Speaker 1: yet another of the categories employed by the US News
Speaker 1: algorithm is student selectivity. How academically elite is the freshman
Speaker 1: class you admit each year, And the fastest way to
Speaker 1: an elite freshman class, of course, is to let in
Speaker 1: as few freshmen as possible. So I give you two billion,
Speaker 1: you would that would improve your scores on their ranking.
Speaker 1: But if your goalways to get bigger, then they would
Speaker 1: They would ding you for that. They would hurt me,
Speaker 1: They would hurt you. They don't want you to get bigger.
Speaker 1: That's right, I mean, but that's Walter's nuts. Yep, that's right, Yes,
Speaker 1: it's nuts, of course it is. And if you're confused
Speaker 1: right now, join the club. But let's put all that
Speaker 1: aside for a moment. We're doing a thought experiment here
Speaker 1: a product Dillard, and we're going to play by every
Speaker 1: rule for Dillard to rise in the rankings. It's pretty
Speaker 1: clear that the school needs to attract a different kind
Speaker 1: of student, the kind who is wealthy enough that they
Speaker 1: give lots of money to the endowment once they graduate.
Speaker 1: The kind who isn't worried about when they're going to
Speaker 1: eat and where they're going to sleep, the kind who
Speaker 1: checks all the US news boxes. And how do you
Speaker 1: attract that kind of student amenities? The big point of
Speaker 1: this is that in order to raise their ranking, this
Speaker 1: little black school in the South has got a start
Speaker 1: attracting more rich white students. So my idea is, well,
Speaker 1: the only way they're going to attract rich white students
Speaker 1: is if they have fanciers. I called up my old
Speaker 1: friend Vanessa, she's in the luxury real estate business. But why,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, stupid question, but why does a rich white
Speaker 1: student raise a ranking? Oh? My god, such a good
Speaker 1: question you have asked. You have asked the question which
Speaker 1: is the central question all of this, which is what
Speaker 1: you're apps You're right, it makes no sense. Why does
Speaker 1: it matter that you have rich white students? For some reason,
Speaker 1: the US news algorithm is calculated in such a way
Speaker 1: that if you have rich white students, you do better.
Speaker 1: But in order to get rich kids, you have to
Speaker 1: you have to induce them to come to your school.
Speaker 1: And I would like to talk about an inducement, which
Speaker 1: is suppose we were to build at Dillard an incredibly
Speaker 1: fancy dorm. The daughter of the hedge fund guy from
Speaker 1: New York I wanted to walk in and say, Wow,
Speaker 1: how much is it going to cost? What are we
Speaker 1: talking about here? You're saying that you want to provide
Speaker 1: a dorm that looks like a hotel suite that they
Speaker 1: stay in when they're with their parents on a luxurious vacation. Yes,
Speaker 1: and what does that cost? Okay, So the way we
Speaker 1: calculate pricing is cost per key, right, So we spend
Speaker 1: a minimum of two million dollars per key, not including
Speaker 1: the land. Two million dollars per key. That's what the
Speaker 1: wealthiest are expecting in terms of high quality living these days.
Speaker 1: We have very fine materials that we have throughout the rooms.
Speaker 1: You will never see drywall, for example, No DRYWALLA two
Speaker 1: per key drywall is like for boat dirty word. Another
Speaker 1: example that we're doing is swimming pools on the terraces
Speaker 1: recessed into the balcony. Oh wow, and in every room.
Speaker 1: That's one of our new projects. So wait, so you
Speaker 1: could do this. You could totally do this in the
Speaker 1: worlds of course, to go to our college. Example, the
Speaker 1: college came to you and said, I want a dorm
Speaker 1: for two I want a wow dorm for two hundred students.
Speaker 1: You think you could do that for four hundred million dollars? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we could. Yeah, you think you could. The kid,
Speaker 1: the eighteen year old's going to walk in with daddy,
Speaker 1: and Daddy's gonna say, okay, you know, little what's her name?
Speaker 1: I don't know, ginger Jenny. Jenny. Jenny's going to be
Speaker 1: happy here, Jenny's going to be happy. We were laughing
Speaker 1: about this because it's absurd, right, But just imagine that
Speaker 1: Walter Kimbro actually built the dorm that Vanessa was imagining,
Speaker 1: and that little Jenny, the hedge funder's daughter and all
Speaker 1: the other little Jenny's out there, decided as a result
Speaker 1: to come to Dillard. Dillard would start to rise immediately
Speaker 1: in the rankings. Why because those Jennies are all going
Speaker 1: to graduate and the algorithm will love that. And after graduation,
Speaker 1: the Jenny's will make generous gifts to Dillard's endowment because
Speaker 1: Walter will give them naming rights for the brand new
Speaker 1: Dillard University Student spa. Then the other college presidents will
Speaker 1: google that big endowment number and start to give Dillard
Speaker 1: a higher peer assessment score, which will in turn lead
Speaker 1: to more Jennies taking Dillard seriously, until the parents of
Speaker 1: Beverly Hills and Palm Beach and the Upper east Side
Speaker 1: will casually let it drop at the country club. That
Speaker 1: can you believe it, Little Jenny has gotten into Dillard.
Speaker 1: Remember Kelly McConville of Reed College, the leader of my
Speaker 1: consulting band of hackers. A caller back in to double
Speaker 1: check the math, run the numbers on a Dillard full
Speaker 1: of Jennies through her simulated US News algorithm. So Williams
Speaker 1: is the top ranked liberal arts college with an endowment
Speaker 1: of over two point eight billion dollars. So if we
Speaker 1: take Williams financials and put them in for Dillard, Dillard
Speaker 1: goes from one sixty one to being tied for one
Speaker 1: oh three. So this is positive. It is interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we haven't changed any of the fundamentals in the classroom.
Speaker 1: We haven't changed the enthusiasm of the teachers. We haven't changed,
Speaker 1: you know, the spirit of the students. We haven't changed.
Speaker 1: All we've done is that we have plunked a very
Speaker 1: large amount of money in the bank account of Dillard exactly.
Speaker 1: That vaults them from the bottom of the path to
Speaker 1: essentially the middle. Yeah. Okay, okay, let's keep going. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so next you gave us a slightly trickier one where
Speaker 1: we're now going to layer on top of all the
Speaker 1: test scores. Oh I nearly forgot test scores. Another key
Speaker 1: US News factor. In all likelihood, our Jennies had private
Speaker 1: tutors to help them raise their SAT scores. They went
Speaker 1: to private prep schools that take standardized tests. Really seriously,
Speaker 1: this is a variable with Jenny's name written all over it.
Speaker 1: So what if Walter Kimbro told all of his lower
Speaker 1: achieving students to go home and rebuild all of Dillard
Speaker 1: around only the highest test score Jennies? What would that
Speaker 1: do for the school's rank? Now, they went from one
Speaker 1: oh three to forty three, so that one of sixty
Speaker 1: slabs just by adjusting those two variables. They're just like,
Speaker 1: to hell with this antiquated notion of trying to educate
Speaker 1: a large swath of students who want to come to
Speaker 1: New Orleans to attend a HBCU. We're just cream skimming
Speaker 1: from now on, right, Okay, can we get them higher
Speaker 1: than forty three? She said, sure we can, and began
Speaker 1: going through the remaining items on the US News checklist,
Speaker 1: and lo and behold, this was a test our shiny
Speaker 1: New Dillard haste. I mean, teacher student ratios they're tiny.
Speaker 1: Now we told half our students to go home. Faculty
Speaker 1: resources ginormous. We're loaded. I mean, I don't know what
Speaker 1: school we're looking at now, but this school, after cranked
Speaker 1: all of those things, turned all of those dials, means
Speaker 1: this New Dillard is ranked third. Wow. So that is
Speaker 1: how we can get Dillard into the tippy tap tier
Speaker 1: of the liberal heart colleges. So it's williams Amherst Dillard
Speaker 1: Swarth Bark. Yes, project Dillard has given us a new
Speaker 1: school with a very different soundtrack. Can we convince Yale
Speaker 1: to lend them the Whiffin poofs? Who are bartray a
Speaker 1: preacher's kid like Walter Kimbro would know the Biblical lesson
Speaker 1: here Mark eight thirty six, for what shall it profit
Speaker 1: a man if he shall gain the whole world and
Speaker 1: lose his own soul? Such as when Walter Kimbro gave
Speaker 1: me his tour of the Dillard camp, he talked about
Speaker 1: the things that made Dillard special. We have certain things.
Speaker 1: When I got here, I realize that we have this
Speaker 1: physics program and people didn't talk about it that at
Speaker 1: the time, I think was number two in the country
Speaker 1: for producing African Americans who get undergraduate degrees in physics.
Speaker 1: I think right now we rank number three, but if
Speaker 1: you do it per capita, we're number one. We've been
Speaker 1: number one for a while. In twenty nineteen, Dillard produced
Speaker 1: thirteen African American physics grads, according to Department of Education numbers,
Speaker 1: Harvard produced one. In the past ten years, Dillard has
Speaker 1: graduated thirty five black physics grads, Harvard five. Now you
Speaker 1: might say that's just because Harvard doesn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of black students. That's not true. Harvard admitted over three
Speaker 1: hundred black undergraduates this year, which is about the same
Speaker 1: as Dillard. Okay is it because Dillard students are smarter
Speaker 1: than Harvard's, more capable of handling physics. Not true Harvard's
Speaker 1: Harvard they get the best high schoolers in the nation,
Speaker 1: So why is Dillard doing so much better? It turns
Speaker 1: out that this same pattern is true of HBCUs as
Speaker 1: a group. When it comes to producing graduates in STEM science, math, engineering,
Speaker 1: and technology, Black schools punch way above their weight. Walter
Speaker 1: Kimbro brought up the other big HBCU in New Orleans
Speaker 1: just down the road from Dillard, Xavier University. Not terribly
Speaker 1: big or rich either. Xavier was in four until nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty five, I believe, but they've really gained a variety
Speaker 1: because they really leaned in on sending the people to
Speaker 1: medical school, and so they send more people to medical
Speaker 1: school African Americans any school in the country. The explanation
Speaker 1: seems to be that at most schools, there's a huge
Speaker 1: problem in STEM with what educators referred to as leakiness.
Speaker 1: Students start out majoring in science and math, but then
Speaker 1: they change and the problem is most pronounced at selective schools.
Speaker 1: These institutions cream off the top, so to speak. That's
Speaker 1: Mitchell Chang Educational researcher at UCLA who has studied the problem,
Speaker 1: and those who don't make it to the top find
Speaker 1: themselves losing a confidence to continue and leave STEM the
Speaker 1: STEM field and they're pursuit of the STEM degree altogether.
Speaker 1: But at the hundred or so historically black colleges in
Speaker 1: the United States, places like Dillard, the STEM pipeline isn't leaky.
Speaker 1: If I was a Martian looking at this, I would say, well,
Speaker 1: Harvard should be able to identify every one of these
Speaker 1: struggling students and encourage them and help them and tutor
Speaker 1: them and get them through. That doesn't happen. I think
Speaker 1: you kind of hit on an important factor here, the
Speaker 1: difference between what HBCUs do and what these highly selective
Speaker 1: often referred to as predominantly white institutions or pwis do,
Speaker 1: And one is, you know, more geared toward creaming off
Speaker 1: the top and the other one being much more developmental,
Speaker 1: meeting students where they're at and lifting them and developing
Speaker 1: them to achieve their potential. Meeting students where they're at.
Speaker 1: Mitchell Chang is talking about academic culture, about places that care,
Speaker 1: and at this HBCUs seem to excel while I was
Speaker 1: visiting Dillard's campus. Walter Kimber arranged for me to meet
Speaker 1: a group of students eight or syllabus around a conference table,
Speaker 1: and this is all the students ended up talking about
Speaker 1: what it felt like to be at Dillard I could
Speaker 1: get I could call it Arter Kimber right now and
Speaker 1: say hey, I'm doing this, can you help me? And
Speaker 1: he'll answer the phone. It's not straight to voice melt.
Speaker 1: So I think that's a really big high. My advisors
Speaker 1: are the best. They invested me. If I miss class,
Speaker 1: she will call me right after class is over to
Speaker 1: make sure I'm okay. One and two, Why did I
Speaker 1: miss class? Because it's important to go to class. I
Speaker 1: feel appreciate it. Like I mean, I can name pretty
Speaker 1: much all the administration in this room, or like I
Speaker 1: could walk in there and I could see somebody I
Speaker 1: know for sure and just have a genuine connection relationship.
Speaker 1: It's a true family. And I feel like as much
Speaker 1: as I pour in, they pour back. Another student talked
Speaker 1: about how if you'd gone to a big university, things
Speaker 1: happening back home might have gotten in a way. I
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't be in school anymore. Unfortunately, because my freshman year.
Speaker 1: I experienced a loss in my family and he's very,
Speaker 1: very difficult, and had it not been for the faculty
Speaker 1: and the other students here who cared about me, like
Speaker 1: some of the students here sit makes to me, I
Speaker 1: don't think that I would still be in school. Do
Speaker 1: students at other small schools feel this way? Of course
Speaker 1: they do. Students at Williams and Amherston's Swarthmore probably feel
Speaker 1: part of a family too. But historically black colleges have
Speaker 1: managed to take that community feeling and translate it into
Speaker 1: a very effective academic culture. And they're doing in a
Speaker 1: way where they're not getting the same talent pool. They're
Speaker 1: getting students who are more likely to be first generations,
Speaker 1: students from lower income families, and who are not as
Speaker 1: well prepared to pursue a science degree. So it's quite
Speaker 1: remarkable a school helps its students succeed at the subject
Speaker 1: they came to college to pursue. It creates a culture
Speaker 1: geared to helping students reach their potential, and it does
Speaker 1: all that for a price that working families can ford
Speaker 1: on a charming campus in the middle of an amazing city.
Speaker 1: Doesn't that sound like the definition of an elite school.
Speaker 1: Some years ago, Walter Kimbro heard that an editor from
Speaker 1: US News was coming to speak at the nearby event. Well,
Speaker 1: I was like, clinic schedule, I've got to go here
Speaker 1: to US News guy. And I was like, and I
Speaker 1: gotta have a chance to ask him a question. So
Speaker 1: I did, and I said, you know, how do we,
Speaker 1: you know, justify having a ranking system that basically measures privilege?
Speaker 1: And if I want to have a good ranking, I
Speaker 1: need to make sure I keep out poor students, black students,
Speaker 1: part time students, non traditional students. If I do those things,
Speaker 1: my ranking is high. And he couldn't answer the question.
Speaker 1: He said, well, you know, it's America and this is
Speaker 1: how we measure married and blah blah blah. There's an
Speaker 1: older gentleman afterwards came and laughed me. He said he
Speaker 1: didn't want to answer to that question because that's the
Speaker 1: whole game. It's like, it's just a formula. It is
Speaker 1: the formula. Rankings place us all in a world with
Speaker 1: a clear set of rules that more is better than less,
Speaker 1: rich is better than poor, white is better than black.
Speaker 1: None of us think we want to be part of
Speaker 1: that world. But when college presidents dutifully send in their
Speaker 1: forms every year to US News. When high school students
Speaker 1: battle with each other over who gets to go to
Speaker 1: the higher rank school, when parents boast about how Jenny
Speaker 1: got into this school or that school, we're all complicit
Speaker 1: in the game. Will you promise me that you'll just
Speaker 1: stand up and just say, ladies and gentlemen, can we
Speaker 1: all just agree to drop out of the US News
Speaker 1: thing right now? Oh? Yeah, I would love Yeah. But
Speaker 1: they're gonna be folks suit Like I said, they're so
Speaker 1: this is this is important. You're a persuasive guy. I
Speaker 1: think I feel like you could do that. You think
Speaker 1: I could do it. You have a little bit of
Speaker 1: your dad and you just just stand up and preach. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't need to have Ranny to have it. So
Speaker 1: I'm in front the mount to really try to make
Speaker 1: it happen. Vision's History is produced by Mio LaBelle, Lee Mingustu,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Smith, with Eloi's Lynton and On a Name.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Gara,
Speaker 1: mastering by Flawn Williams, Engineering by Martin Gonzalez, fact checking
Speaker 1: by Amy Gaines. Special thanks to the Pushkin Crew head
Speaker 1: a Thing Carl Miklear, Maya Kanig, Daniello, Lacon, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrell, and of course, Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 1: Special thanks also to the Dillard University Choir and their director,
Speaker 1: Samuel Davenport. I'm Mountain Bobwe don't forget my latest book,
Speaker 1: The Bomber Mafia, which is an expansion of several episodes
Speaker 1: from the last season of Revisionist History. You can find
Speaker 1: it wherever books are sold, but by the audiobook at
Speaker 1: Bomber Mafia dot com and you'll get a bonus listeners guide,
Speaker 1: and you can listen in the podcast app you're using
Speaker 1: now