Revisionist History - Project Dillard

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

A historically Black university in New Orleans is beloved by everyone – except the US News best colleges rankings. We hack our way back into the algorithm and show how Dillard University can rise to the top. Part two of a two-part series. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. 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, Ph.D. from Georgia State. Your father is a very well-known pastor in Atlanta.

Yeah. That's right. He's Walter Sr. You're Walter Jr. Well, we have different mill names. So he's Walter Lee and I'm Walter Mark because he felt like Walter Lee was country. So he didn't give me that. But yeah, that's my dad.

Yeah. that. But yeah, that's my dad, yeah. I would encourage you, should you ever be in New Orleans, to pay a visit to Dillard. Hear the choir perform if you can, and walk around the campus, as I did with Walter Kimbrough. We're in, this area of New Orleans is Gentilly?

It's called 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 stroll around campus, look up 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, Granite, and Tweed. Pomona, Wellesley, Bowdoin.

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 bottomless pit into which U.S. News dumps all the colleges that they consider too mediocre to merit 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 $30,000 a year. A third of them are the first in their families to go to college.

Virtually all are black. Dillard is a part of a group of HBCUs. They've called the Black Ivy League. So Morehouse, Spellman, Howard, Hampton. Dillard was in part of a group of HBCUs. They've called the Black Ivy League. So Morehouse, Spellman, Howard, Hampton. Dillard was in that group, too. And so some people, you know, buy into that a lot and take pride in that when 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 are 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, oh, it'd be fun to make fun of U.S. News. But the more I did it, the angrier I got. A not very sophisticated group of people in Washington, D.C. 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. That's what it is. Exactly. I mean, that's exactly what it is. I call the U.S. News rankings a perpetuation of privilege. That's what I've always called it. That's all it is. It's a perpetuation of privilege. That's what I've always called it. 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 their services again, this 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 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 listened 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 graders. 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 Grants. 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 remaining school characteristics, we end up with over 90%. 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 $19,000 a year. And Dillard's endowment is a minuscule $105 million. A top-ranked school like Williams College has $2 billion more 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%. 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? What's the worst part? And she said the worst part for her was Thanksgiving and Christmas. I was like, why? She said, because I had to figure out what I was going to 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 going to 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 $30,000 a year, there's going to be a lot of that. For a school like us that you're 75% Pell Grant eligible, if you have a six-year graduation rate that's over 50%, 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 I just can't control. I can't control those family pieces. And I just can't control that. Just for contrast, the graduation rate at a school like Bowdoin, currently number six on the liberal arts college rankings, 95%. Everyone graduates.

Maybe because one in every five students at Bowdoin comes from a family with an income in the top 1%. The worst part of Christmas for a Bowdoin student is deciding which of their houses to go to. No one's dropping out of Bowdoin, 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. My first conclusion in the Project Dillard investigation.

Why is Dillard at the bottom of the rankings? They enroll the wrong kind of student. 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 lucky 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 I'll be a better school. It's rare that you see higher education leaders say that less equals more. So 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 that, in this case, more is better than less. More is better than less. I mean, look, 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, absolutely, I would be better. But that would be false. There's no correlation between how much you pay Malcolm and how good Malcolm's writing is.

Right, but I'm not sure that analogy works in this particular case because you're dealing with a budget and it's buying many different things than one human being's skill. 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 the 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 two billion. That would improve your scores on their ranking. But if your goal was to get bigger,

then 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. But that's, Walter, that's nuts. Yeah, 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. The kind 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 have asked you have asked the question, which which is the central question. All this, which is you're absolutely right. It makes no sense. Why does it matter that you have rich white students? For some reason, the US 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 induce them to come to your school. And I would like to talk about an inducement, which is, suppose we were to build at 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? OK, 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. $2 million 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 rooms. You will never see drywall, for example. No drywall. No drywall. At two million per key, drywall is like verboten. Dirty word. Another example that we're doing is 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? 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 gonna say okay you know little what's her name i don't know jenny 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 funder's daughter,

and all the other little Jennys out there decided as a result to come to Dillard. Dillard would start to rise immediately in the rankings. Why? Because those Jennys 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 Jennys 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 called her back in to double check the math. Run the numbers on a Dillard full of Jennys 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. 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. Yep. 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 that 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 rebuild 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, 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 aced. I mean, teacher-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, Swarthwell. 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? We are little black sheep who have gone astray. 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? We, God, have mercy on such as we. Ba, ba, ba. 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 physics program, and people didn't talk about it, that at the time, I think, was number two in the country for producing African-Americans who get undergraduate degrees in physics.

I think right now we rank 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, five. 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 wasn't formed until 1925, I believe, but they 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 leave STEM, the STEM field 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 hit on an important factor here, the difference between what HBCUs do and what these highly selective, often referred to as predominantly white institutions or PWIs do, and one is more geared 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 call Dr. Kimbrough 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 miss 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. 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've gotten in the way.

I probably wouldn't be in school anymore, unfortunately, because my freshman year, I experienced a loss in my family. And it was very, very difficult. And had it not been for the faculty and the students here who cared about me, like some of the students here sitting next to me, I don't think that I would still be in school. 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 it 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 not as well prepared to pursue a science degree. So 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 got to have a chance to ask him a question. So I did. And I said, you know, how do we, you know, justify havingtime 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.

And there's an 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 the formula. It is the formula. Rankings place us all in a world with a clear set of rules that 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. 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 U.S. News thing right now? Oh, yeah, I would love, yeah. But there are going to be folks who, like I said, they are so, this is important. You're a persuasive guy. 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 stand up and preach. Yeah. I would need to have that sermon from the mount to really try to make it happen. Until we meet again. Amen. Lebel, Lee Mingistu, and Jacob Smith, with Eloise Linton and Ana Naim. 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, Hedda Fane, Carly Migliore,

Maya Koenig, Daniela Lacan, 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 Gladwell. 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 buy 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.