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.
Speaker 2: It was a very exciting time. I mean, because Moore
Speaker 2: had just taken over. There were a lot of people buzzing.
Speaker 1: Around mort being Mortimer B. Zuckerman, a Canadian billionaire who
Speaker 1: bought US News and Will Report with dreams of becoming
Speaker 1: a media baron.
Speaker 2: There are a ton of really good ideas sort of
Speaker 2: in the magazine, and I think it's fair to say
Speaker 2: our feeling was that the execution could have been a
Speaker 2: lot better. And one of the things we wanted to
Speaker 2: do was distinguish ourselves from Time and Newsweek, because we
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 2: We were looking to reinvent the magazine, and the college
Speaker 2: 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 mission or complexity, an algorithm to capture the elusive
Speaker 1: quality of academic excellence.
Speaker 2: Finding those points of data and putting them into a ranking,
Speaker 2: as you can appreciate, is a complicated task. Yes, full
Speaker 2: of value, judgments, full of problems, challenges, dangers, But we
Speaker 2: were undaunted and precede it.
Speaker 1: I love that you're laughing about this.
Speaker 2: It was a very heady time, and we thought, and
Speaker 2: we did a rarely challenge time in news. We get
Speaker 2: their game.
Speaker 1: The rankings became an institution. This news surged, careers were forged,
Speaker 1: fortunes made. I mean, what's fasci today is that time
Speaker 1: and newsic have basically disappeared. The rest of US News
Speaker 1: has basically disappeared. But the rankings are as strong as ever.
Speaker 2: Well, it's nice to know in this world of effemera
Speaker 2: that something can last. But and as a journalist, you
Speaker 2: know who you know when your work is used for
Speaker 2: for old fish after a day, it's nice to see
Speaker 2: that something hasn't impact for a while.
Speaker 1: Peter left US News long ago, but he and his
Speaker 1: colleagues had added something new to the American academic calendar
Speaker 1: beyond freshman week, finals commencement. There's now the day the
Speaker 1: new rankings come out.
Speaker 3: The new thirtieth edition of Best Colleges was just released
Speaker 3: this morning, and we've got it.
Speaker 4: You're seeing the two thousand.
Speaker 5: And the list for twenty nineteen was Princeton University, followed
Speaker 5: by Harvard Tied.
Speaker 6: Scholars of America's best colleges have been revealed. The US
Speaker 6: News and World Report is out with its angle list,
Speaker 6: and we've got the inside scoop on how.
Speaker 1: The algorithm that's developed is undergoing a constant state of
Speaker 1: evolution over the years. How often are you tweaking it?
Speaker 2: I thought you might ask about this. I mean I
Speaker 2: did go online and look at it, and I was
Speaker 2: glad to see they are tweaking it on a regular basis,
Speaker 2: at least it looking if you look at their methodology.
Speaker 2: And of course they've also been reacting to competition. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know a lot of people have been critical of
Speaker 2: the rankings and whether this mythology really this methodology?
Speaker 1: Excuse me, that's it, Peter. That is like the definition
Speaker 1: of a Freudian slip. You're talking about your you're talking
Speaker 1: about your brain child, and you refer to it as mythology.
Speaker 2: That's true. I couldn't have come up with that one consciously.
Speaker 1: At what point did the US news methodology become a mythology?
Speaker 1: Let's find out. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening
Speaker 1: to my podcast, Revisionist History about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood.
Speaker 1: In this episode, I ask, how is it that a
Speaker 1: promotional gimmick from the nineteen eighties turned into a fetish
Speaker 1: object for American higher education? How do these rankings work
Speaker 1: and why does everyone take them so seriously? We're going
Speaker 1: to launch a revisionist history investigation, one that will take
Speaker 1: us 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 this very now. Before we start, can both
Speaker 1: of you guys introduce yourselves.
Speaker 5: So I'm Kelly McConville, and I'm an assistant professor of
Speaker 5: statistics at Reed College.
Speaker 4: I'm playing too, and I'm an international student who is
Speaker 4: currently studying at UNC's High school.
Speaker 1: So these are some of my accomplices, and here's why
Speaker 1: I needed them. Us News will tell you what variables
Speaker 1: they use to determine whether a school is good or mediocre,
Speaker 1: but they won't disclose exactly how they combine those variables
Speaker 1: into a score. I mean, why would they. It's their
Speaker 1: secret Sauce they charged forty dollars a year for premium
Speaker 1: access to their findings. This is a big business. So
Speaker 1: I figured my only chance at really getting under the
Speaker 1: hood of the ranking algorithm was to find out if
Speaker 1: anyone had in effect hacked the algorithm, and it turns
Speaker 1: out someone had. It was a group of students at Reed,
Speaker 1: a small liberal arts college in Portland, under the leadership
Speaker 1: of their professor Kelly mcconvill. Tell me how on earth
Speaker 1: this whole project of looking at US News rankings? How
Speaker 1: did it begin?
Speaker 4: So?
Speaker 5: I teach a course called Statistics Practicum, and in that course,
Speaker 5: the students complete a semester long empirical research project, and
Speaker 5: I solicit those projects and the data from other READ
Speaker 5: faculty and staff.
Speaker 1: Every year, US News asks for a lot of data
Speaker 1: from schools, but the Read administration had stopped supplying that data.
Speaker 1: They decided they didn't believe in the rankings anymore. But
Speaker 1: still the magazine kept generating a ranking for Read anyway,
Speaker 1: and someone in the Read administration came to Kelly McConville
Speaker 1: and said, ever since we dropped out, our US News
Speaker 1: ranking has plummeted. We think they've been punishing us. Can
Speaker 1: you double check their math?
Speaker 5: That was our task. We were tasked with recreating the
Speaker 5: model and then seeing what our ranking would be if
Speaker 5: we did supplier data.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So tell me, the two of you walk me
Speaker 1: through how does one go about conceptually trying to answer
Speaker 1: this question.
Speaker 5: They use a model that's called a weight in some
Speaker 5: model that means they take about twenty or so different
Speaker 5: factors about a school, like class size and graduation rates.
Speaker 5: They wait each of those factors based on how important
Speaker 5: they think the factor is, and then they sum up
Speaker 5: all those pieces and then calibrate it so that the
Speaker 5: highest scores at one hundred, and then based on those scores,
Speaker 5: they rank as schools.
Speaker 1: The Red team had to build their own version of
Speaker 1: the US News algorithm from scratch, trying to get as
Speaker 1: close to it as possible.
Speaker 5: We grabbed all the variables we could from open government sources,
Speaker 5: and we built a model that isn't trying to recreate
Speaker 5: the US newswait in some model. Instead, it's just trying
Speaker 5: to predict the US New score of a school with
Speaker 5: a high degree of accuracy.
Speaker 1: Whying how close did you get?
Speaker 4: I'll say fairly close. The only school that's outside of
Speaker 4: like a reasonable range of predictive score in the test
Speaker 4: status read oh really, And all other schools are like
Speaker 4: within a reasonable prediction interval of their scores.
Speaker 1: Meaning the Reed students identical twin algorithm is so good
Speaker 1: that when they run their rankings of American colleges. Their
Speaker 1: list looks almost exactly like the US News list, with
Speaker 1: one exception Read College. Wait, so they were messing.
Speaker 4: With you based on our finding, it seems reasonable they
Speaker 4: this something.
Speaker 1: In twenty nineteen, US News put Read in ninetieth place.
Speaker 1: Where do you think you should be ranked?
Speaker 4: Thirty sixth Oh?
Speaker 1: Wait? What that much of a difference? Yeah, that's bananas.
Speaker 1: Oh my, oh, they really did a number on Reed.
Speaker 1: Now we don't need to go much further into the
Speaker 1: ensuing beef between Read and US News. The magazine calls
Speaker 1: the undergraduates analysis quote inaccurate. But just imagine my joy
Speaker 1: when I ran across Swaying's analysis. Here. I was searching
Speaker 1: for some way to understand the secret algorithm cooked up
Speaker 1: by Peter Bernstein and his pals back in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: and lo and behold, a bunch of undergraduates at Reed
Speaker 1: College had cracked the code. And were they motivated to
Speaker 1: help me? Absolutely? Because US News dissed their school. My
Speaker 1: first question to Kelly and her team was where should
Speaker 1: I start? And they said start with a little something
Speaker 1: called the peer Assessment score. Can you give me a
Speaker 1: more precise sort of statistic sense of just how important
Speaker 1: is it?
Speaker 4: Like, okay, So we find that the pure assessment score
Speaker 4: has the largest effects, So it has a coefficient of
Speaker 4: like six point five eight. In other words, like, if
Speaker 4: you hold everything else constant and you like increase the
Speaker 4: peer assessment scorer by one unit, your overall score will
Speaker 4: increase by six point five to eight.
Speaker 1: The peer 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.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had my marching orders, and I knew where
Speaker 1: I had to go. Next to the guardian of the
Speaker 1: US newsgates 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 that where's
Speaker 1: the crown? I called him up. I wanted to understand
Speaker 1: the mysterious variable that the read College hackers had told
Speaker 1: me was so important? Describe again, how is the reputation
Speaker 1: score generated?
Speaker 7: So we send out three surveys per school, and then
Speaker 7: they respond. They rate the schools on a scale of
Speaker 7: five to one or no response.
Speaker 1: So who are the three people at each school who
Speaker 1: are asked to fill out the survey.
Speaker 7: In the provos and the enrollment manager or the head
Speaker 7: of admissions.
Speaker 1: The surveys arrive via email once a year to everyone
Speaker 1: who matters in American Higher ed. If you're at a
Speaker 1: liberal arts college, you're given a list of all two
Speaker 1: hundred 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?
Speaker 7: Well, that's a good question. I mean, we ask them
Speaker 7: to base it on their view of the school's reputation
Speaker 7: for undergraduate academic quality.
Speaker 1: But I mean, how would you know.
Speaker 7: I mean, we believe that to aggregate sum of all
Speaker 7: the raiders who are a leader is in higher education.
Speaker 7: You know their presidents and provosts and mission deans. So
Speaker 7: they're not rookies. When you aggregate their views at any
Speaker 7: 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 feelings
Speaker 1: what other schools.
Speaker 7: Well, they're leaders in higher education, so it's based on
Speaker 7: their knowledge of the other schools that they've gathered or
Speaker 7: through meetings or for exposure. Do they necessarily know a
Speaker 7: lot about all the schools they're rating. I don't know.
Speaker 1: If I rate a restaurant on Yelp, it's because I've
Speaker 1: eaten there, right, yes, But here, when I rate a
Speaker 1: university on the US News ranking, it's not because I've
Speaker 1: attended that university or taught there.
Speaker 7: It's just, well, you may have. We shouldn't say that
Speaker 7: you didn't. But you're saying, have the people who rated
Speaker 7: the schools been on every campus or taught at that
Speaker 7: school or no? In depth their course catalog?
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 7: Do some of them have greater degrees of knowledge about
Speaker 7: the schools they're rating, yes? Do some of them have
Speaker 7: lesser degrees of knowledge? Yes? So I think it varies
Speaker 7: from having substantial knowledge to far less knowledge.
Speaker 1: In my naivete, I had imagined that there would be
Speaker 1: some level of rigor to this crucial variable in the
Speaker 1: US news wait, in some model a methodology that I
Speaker 1: could study, analyze, learn from. But Morse wasn't being very helpful,
Speaker 1: so I tried to draw him out. I mean, I
Speaker 1: was fascinated that there's a little clump where BYU Bring
Speaker 1: them Young, Yeshiva and Gonzaga are all ranked right in
Speaker 1: the same roughly equally in the National University's rank. So
Speaker 1: a Mormon school, Conservative Jewish school, and the Jesuit school.
Speaker 1: And I was trying to think, what is the rabbi
Speaker 1: who runs Yeshiva know about bring them Young? And what
Speaker 1: does the Jesuit priest who runs Gonzaga know about Yeshiva?
Speaker 1: And it's a good point, like is Gonzaga giving George
Speaker 1: ten of five and giving Boston College a five?
Speaker 7: And we're not looking at how people are rating other schools.
Speaker 7: We are doing a trim means, so we take off
Speaker 7: a few of the highest ratings and a few of
Speaker 7: the lowest ratings in an effort to eliminate some of
Speaker 7: the strategic voting that you're alluding to well, I.
Speaker 1: Don't know if that's strategic voting. I'm wondering if it's
Speaker 1: just that. If I'm president of Gonzaga, I'm powerfully motivated
Speaker 1: to believe that the Jesuit education is the best education
Speaker 1: out there. So when I look at Georgetown, I think
Speaker 1: they're doing the right thing. And when I look at Yeshiva,
Speaker 1: I say, where's the New Testament? Why are they not
Speaker 1: using the New Testament? I mean, this is just natural
Speaker 1: human biases. I just don't know what they have to
Speaker 1: do with the quality of the institution.
Speaker 7: Well, I don't have a different answer.
Speaker 1: Devoted listeners of revisionist history. Well, remember how years ago
Speaker 1: I fell for Rowan University in New Jersey. I love Rowin,
Speaker 1: But Rowan is ranked one hundred and eighty seventh in
Speaker 1: the National University's list dismal mediocre, and why because its
Speaker 1: peer assessment score is a forgettable two point four? How
Speaker 1: on earth have the University presidence of America come to
Speaker 1: the collective decision that they hate Rowan University way way
Speaker 1: down in South Jersey. I call up Ali hush Mind,
Speaker 1: the school's president. How many university presidents have visited Roan
Speaker 1: in the last five years from other colleges.
Speaker 8: Oh, two or three, one from Canada, one came who
Speaker 8: was part of an accreditation and I believe another one
Speaker 8: was a friend.
Speaker 1: That's it. Yes, So when they're giving you a score,
Speaker 1: on what basis are they using forgiving you? How do
Speaker 1: they know anything at all about Roan?
Speaker 7: Again, I don't know.
Speaker 8: I can only speak for myself. I can assure you
Speaker 8: that I really don't know much about the institutions that
Speaker 8: I'm asked to rank or score.
Speaker 3: I just don't have enough tools.
Speaker 1: Now. It's not like university presidents don't know anything about grading.
Speaker 1: They were all teachers themselves once. But when it comes
Speaker 1: to grading schools, it seems like they might just be
Speaker 1: mailing it in. Next, I called up the head of
Speaker 1: admissions at a major university. You've heard of it, trust me,
Speaker 1: but I can't tell you what it is. And we
Speaker 1: altered the voice to protect this person's identity. Of course
Speaker 1: we did. We had to look how US News treated
Speaker 1: read college. My source told me to address them only
Speaker 1: as dean.
Speaker 9: I am certain and I am far more qualified to
Speaker 9: be a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America
Speaker 9: and vote on the Hall of Fame than I am
Speaker 9: to assess other institutions for the US News and World Report.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: 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. I've not been there, I think three point two. Syracuse. Yes,
Speaker 1: I I stopped for coffee there once in a way
Speaker 1: driving back to my mom's house in Canada. I don't
Speaker 1: know if that counts. I don't think it does. I think
Speaker 1: I think it counts account experience. I got to say
Speaker 1: experience the weather, but there's no there were no students there.
Speaker 1: It was Christmas. But I will say this, my cousin
Speaker 1: went to Syracuse and had a good time.
Speaker 9: Oh h and so you would rate it based on that.
Speaker 1: Let's give Syracuse some love. Three point nine, No, four
Speaker 1: point zero. University of Washington in Seattle. Yes, you've been there,
Speaker 1: Yes I have. What'd you do when you were there?
Speaker 9: I walked around?
Speaker 1: I think that counts.
Speaker 7: It counts.
Speaker 1: I said to Dean, you can see the mountains from there,
Speaker 1: the space needle. Let's go big. University of Washington at
Speaker 1: Seattle four point two. Have you ever been to William Mary.
Speaker 7: I have yeah.
Speaker 9: I love history, I love colonial Williamsburg.
Speaker 1: Do you remember what score you gave William and Mary.
Speaker 9: I probably gave them a four or five.
Speaker 1: Really you went for five. It's the second oldest college
Speaker 1: in the US. Do you think that affected your judgment
Speaker 1: on that?
Speaker 9: 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, now that
Speaker 1: was my conversation with the Wizard of the Rankings, Robert Morse.
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 year's US News rankings.
Speaker 1: Is this circular?
Speaker 7: If they're telling you that, then that's not our expectation
Speaker 7: of how people are doing their ratings. Versus looking at
Speaker 7: the ranking table and looking at the score. We believe
Speaker 7: that there's more thought going into it than that, but
Speaker 7: we haven't done any kind of social science research to
Speaker 7: prove or disprove that point.
Speaker 1: You haven't done any right, Yeah, they haven't done any
Speaker 1: social science research. Only one person gave me much insight
Speaker 1: into the mechanics of the peer Assessment score, and that
Speaker 1: was Ali Huschmand, president of Rowan. His advice was, you
Speaker 1: have to take matters into your own hands. So what
Speaker 1: does he do? He makes his own hot sauce. And
Speaker 1: he told me that Rowan sends out free samples to
Speaker 1: every college president in the country. That's not too really
Speaker 1: he did, and he.
Speaker 8: Did no that I make hot sauce. Well, that would
Speaker 8: have been that's scoring.
Speaker 5: I hope.
Speaker 1: Yes. I want to know about your hot sauce. What
Speaker 1: kind of hot sauce do you have?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 8: I make serious, serious hot sauce. But I actually grow
Speaker 8: from seeds all the way to the packaging. And there
Speaker 8: are three levels of heat. The lowest one is called
Speaker 8: Ali's nasty, which is.
Speaker 4: Kind of mind.
Speaker 8: And then the one next to it, it happened, was
Speaker 8: as a heat it's called a nasty delicious, And then
Speaker 8: the one with Carona Reaper is called nasty vicious, and
Speaker 8: I will send you a package the nasty divisious can
Speaker 8: 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, it's like
Speaker 1: it happens to have a little bit of vicious. They're
Speaker 1: gonna they're gonna curse your name.
Speaker 8: Probably will, but I but I figured that no, no
Speaker 8: publicity is about bad publicity.
Speaker 1: Did I try the nasty vicious?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yes, I did, on a scale of one to five
Speaker 1: five point oh. In the middle of my investigation of
Speaker 1: the pure assessment score and its many implications, I had
Speaker 1: a conversation with a professor at Duke named Bill Mayu.
Speaker 1: Mayu is friendly with some bond traders, and he was
Speaker 1: talking with some of them one day when they mentioned
Speaker 1: that they were having difficulty with bonds issued by historically
Speaker 1: black colleges HBCUs as they're known.
Speaker 3: If you're a bond trader, you worry about moving the bonds,
Speaker 3: that you have an inventory, and they just mentioned, you know, hey,
Speaker 3: we're having a really hard time placing these HBCU schools
Speaker 3: because people don't want to hold them.
Speaker 1: The way the bond market works is that an institution
Speaker 1: needs money. Let's say a university wants to build a
Speaker 1: dormitory that costs fifty million dollars. The school can't raise
Speaker 1: all that money on its own, so it goes to
Speaker 1: a Wall Street bank, which purchases a bond a promise
Speaker 1: of repayment from the university. Then the bank breaks that
Speaker 1: bond into many hundreds and hundreds of pieces and sells
Speaker 1: those pieces to wealthy investors or insurance companies or hedge funds.
Speaker 1: So in May you hears that banks are struggling to
Speaker 1: sell bonds for historically black colleges, he wonders, is this
Speaker 1: just some apocryphal Wall Street story or is it true? Luckily,
Speaker 1: there's a simple way attests this. The price the bond
Speaker 1: trader charges is called the gross spread. If it's super
Speaker 1: easy to find buyers for the bonds, the gross spread
Speaker 1: is likely to be low. If the trader has difficulty
Speaker 1: finding buyers, the spread can get quite pricey. So if
Speaker 1: the bonds from black schools are harder to move than
Speaker 1: bonds from white schools, the spread should be higher. And
Speaker 1: are they Yes, they are May you and his colleagues
Speaker 1: compared black schools with non HBCUs that were otherwise identical.
Speaker 1: The spreads for the historically black schools were twenty percent
Speaker 1: higher in the bond market. A twenty percent difference in
Speaker 1: spreads is huge. Mayo and his co researchers then went
Speaker 1: one step further. They zeroed in on three states in
Speaker 1: the Deep South, and those three states were so.
Speaker 3: Those are Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Speaker 1: And what's the difference in spread in those states? Not
Speaker 1: twenty percent? Thirty seven percent. Mayo and his colleagues have
Speaker 1: given us a scientifically rigorous measurement of just how much
Speaker 1: of a burdened black institutions 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 3: That's one way to think about it. But I would
Speaker 3: say it's the racial component of reputation.
Speaker 1: A spread is a reputation in score, isn't it. Investors
Speaker 1: don't know the precise ins and outs of all the
Speaker 1: institutions they're asked to buy how could they. There are
Speaker 1: literally hundreds of thousands of bonds on a market at
Speaker 1: any given time, So the investors proceed on a feeling,
Speaker 1: a feeling about how worthy and how safe and how
Speaker 1: legitimate the institution getting the loan is. You see a
Speaker 1: black school and you say to yourself, I don't value
Speaker 1: that HBCU quite as highly as the white school across town.
Speaker 1: So you give the black school a discount, which is
Speaker 1: what prejudice is, by the way, a discount. The black
Speaker 1: life does not matter as much as the white life.
Speaker 1: And who are these people imposing a discount on black schools.
Speaker 1: They're wealthy, successful people who are simply checking a box.
Speaker 1: I like this bond, I like this one a lot,
Speaker 1: I don't like this one. They are, I suspect, not
Speaker 1: a whole lot different from the college administrators who assign
Speaker 1: a number to their peers for them. The US News
Speaker 1: rankings every year motivated by the same unconscious biases. I
Speaker 1: like the school four point two, I like this one
Speaker 1: a lot four point five. I don't like this one
Speaker 1: two point four, even though I don't really know anything
Speaker 1: about it. So if you were the president of a
Speaker 1: historically black college in one of those States with a
Speaker 1: reputational discount for being black is thirty seven percent. How
Speaker 1: do you think you'd feel about your peer assessment score?
Speaker 1: I thought I'd call Walter Kimbro, president of Dillard University,
Speaker 1: a historically black college in Louisiana, And.
Speaker 6: So when I start to look at the formulas and
Speaker 6: dig into it, I was like, this isn't a real
Speaker 6: good measurement of what we do. In fact, it's a
Speaker 6: measurement of privilege.
Speaker 1: Dillard's reputation score is two point six. That's not good.
Speaker 1: You can't ever get to the top of the US
Speaker 1: News rankings with a peer assessment score of two point six.
Speaker 6: Maybe that sounds defeatis, but I mean.
Speaker 1: It's it's not defeat its it's realistic, verble living it.
Speaker 6: Nobody's going to just go and say this school, with
Speaker 6: all these black people, is great.
Speaker 1: In their haste to compete with Time and Newsweek way
Speaker 1: back when, maybe all US News did was create a
Speaker 1: system that allowed the presidents and deans of every college
Speaker 1: in the country to assign a number to their prejudice
Speaker 1: to disguise mythology as methodology. Next week on Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: we take up the cause of Dillard University, and I
Speaker 1: enlist my old friends at Reed College to help me out.
Speaker 5: So that is how we can get Dillard into the
Speaker 5: tippy top tier of the liberal arts colleges.
Speaker 1: So it's Williams Amherst Dillard swarthwik Yes Division's history is
Speaker 1: produced by mel Belle, Leeman Gesteu and Jacob Smith, with
Speaker 1: Eloise Linton and on An eyem Our. Editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Original scoring by Luis Kira, mastering by Flonn Williams, and
Speaker 1: engineering by Martin Gonzalez. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Special
Speaker 1: thanks the Pushkin crew had a fine Carl MCGLIORI, Maya Knick,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicol Morano, Jason Gambrell, and of
Speaker 1: course Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Glaba. If you love this
Speaker 1: show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider becoming a Pushnik.
Speaker 1: Pushnick is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and
Speaker 1: uninterrupted listening for four dollars and ninety nine cents a month.
Speaker 1: Look for Pushnik exclusively on Apple Podcasts subscriptions with three
Speaker 1: flavors Ali's Nasty, Nasty, Delicious, and Nasty Vicious. Okay, guys,
Speaker 1: but you hold on the websites to do simultaneously. Ye okay, one, two, three,
Speaker 1: God oh, I like that it comes on, Oh, go Ali,
Speaker 1: go Ali, because it's really good. It's good.
Speaker 3: Hold on I okay, it's very spicy for a very long.
Speaker 1: Time, because am I, it's not eating me as hard
Speaker 1: as it did. I'm taking a second bite. Martine's struggling,
Speaker 1: By the way, where's my Harvard hot saice? I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't see any Harvard hot sauce. No one's sending
Speaker 1: me hot sauce from New even, are they.
Speaker 3: No