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Lord of the Rankings · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Once upon a time in the middle of the
0:22
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, when the Cold War still raged and a
0:25
Speaker 1: man named Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, there were
0:28
Speaker 1: three major weekly news magazines in the United States. Time
0:33
Speaker 1: Magazine was number one, with millions upon millions of copies
0:36
Speaker 1: in circulation, Newsweek was number two, and What News Magazine
0:42
Speaker 1: came in third place, a sleepy little publication based in Washington,
0:46
Speaker 1: DC known as US News and World Report. One of
0:52
Speaker 1: the magazine's managing editors in those years, Peter Bernstein, remembers
0:56
Speaker 1: the day when everything changed.
0:58
Speaker 2: It was a very exciting time. I mean, because Moore
1:02
Speaker 2: had just taken over. There were a lot of people buzzing.
1:05
Speaker 1: Around mort being Mortimer B. Zuckerman, a Canadian billionaire who
1:11
Speaker 1: bought US News and Will Report with dreams of becoming
1:14
Speaker 1: a media baron.
1:15
Speaker 2: There are a ton of really good ideas sort of
1:19
Speaker 2: in the magazine, and I think it's fair to say
1:21
Speaker 2: our feeling was that the execution could have been a
1:25
Speaker 2: lot better. And one of the things we wanted to
1:27
Speaker 2: do was distinguish ourselves from Time and Newsweek, because we
1:30
Speaker 2: were the third.
1:33
Speaker 1: And how do you distinguish yourself if you're always coming
1:37
Speaker 1: in third. If a Canadian billionaire with visions of grandeur
1:41
Speaker 1: is breathing down your neck, you do something audacious. You
1:46
Speaker 1: create something that no educated parent could possibly ignore, a
1:50
Speaker 1: scheme to examine every American college and university and rank
1:55
Speaker 1: them from top to bottom.
1:59
Speaker 2: We were looking to reinvent the magazine, and the college
2:03
Speaker 2: rankings became part of that.
2:06
Speaker 1: So Bernstein and his colleagues began collecting a mountain of
2:09
Speaker 1: statistics on the universities and colleges of the United States.
2:13
Speaker 1: To make sense of those numbers, they came up with
2:15
Speaker 1: an algorithm, a secret algorithm that could assign every school
2:19
Speaker 1: a score of one through one hundred, regardless of its size,
2:23
Speaker 1: or mission or complexity, an algorithm to capture the elusive
2:28
Speaker 1: quality of academic excellence.
2:31
Speaker 2: Finding those points of data and putting them into a ranking,
2:35
Speaker 2: as you can appreciate, is a complicated task. Yes, full
2:42
Speaker 2: of value, judgments, full of problems, challenges, dangers, But we
2:50
Speaker 2: were undaunted and precede it.
2:55
Speaker 1: I love that you're laughing about this.
2:56
Speaker 2: It was a very heady time, and we thought, and
3:00
Speaker 2: we did a rarely challenge time in news. We get
3:03
Speaker 2: their game.
3:06
Speaker 1: The rankings became an institution. This news surged, careers were forged,
3:11
Speaker 1: fortunes made. I mean, what's fasci today is that time
3:15
Speaker 1: and newsic have basically disappeared. The rest of US News
3:19
Speaker 1: has basically disappeared. But the rankings are as strong as ever.
3:22
Speaker 2: Well, it's nice to know in this world of effemera
3:26
Speaker 2: that something can last. But and as a journalist, you
3:32
Speaker 2: know who you know when your work is used for
3:36
Speaker 2: for old fish after a day, it's nice to see
3:39
Speaker 2: that something hasn't impact for a while.
3:44
Speaker 1: Peter left US News long ago, but he and his
3:47
Speaker 1: colleagues had added something new to the American academic calendar
3:51
Speaker 1: beyond freshman week, finals commencement. There's now the day the
3:56
Speaker 1: new rankings come out.
3:57
Speaker 3: The new thirtieth edition of Best Colleges was just released
4:00
Speaker 3: this morning, and we've got it.
4:02
Speaker 4: You're seeing the two thousand.
4:03
Speaker 5: And the list for twenty nineteen was Princeton University, followed
4:07
Speaker 5: by Harvard Tied.
4:09
Speaker 6: Scholars of America's best colleges have been revealed. The US
4:12
Speaker 6: News and World Report is out with its angle list,
4:14
Speaker 6: and we've got the inside scoop on how.
4:17
Speaker 1: The algorithm that's developed is undergoing a constant state of
4:20
Speaker 1: evolution over the years. How often are you tweaking it?
4:24
Speaker 2: I thought you might ask about this. I mean I
4:27
Speaker 2: did go online and look at it, and I was
4:30
Speaker 2: glad to see they are tweaking it on a regular basis,
4:33
Speaker 2: at least it looking if you look at their methodology.
4:37
Speaker 2: And of course they've also been reacting to competition. I mean,
4:41
Speaker 2: you know a lot of people have been critical of
4:43
Speaker 2: the rankings and whether this mythology really this methodology?
4:48
Speaker 1: Excuse me, that's it, Peter. That is like the definition
4:51
Speaker 1: of a Freudian slip. You're talking about your you're talking
4:55
Speaker 1: about your brain child, and you refer to it as mythology.
5:01
Speaker 2: That's true. I couldn't have come up with that one consciously.
5:06
Speaker 1: At what point did the US news methodology become a mythology?
5:13
Speaker 1: Let's find out. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening
5:18
Speaker 1: to my podcast, Revisionist History about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood.
5:25
Speaker 1: In this episode, I ask, how is it that a
5:27
Speaker 1: promotional gimmick from the nineteen eighties turned into a fetish
5:30
Speaker 1: object for American higher education? How do these rankings work
5:39
Speaker 1: and why does everyone take them so seriously? We're going
5:42
Speaker 1: to launch a revisionist history investigation, one that will take
5:46
Speaker 1: us to all kinds of strange places, to the bond markets,
5:50
Speaker 1: to Portland, Oregon, to New Orleans. We'll meet a mysterious
5:54
Speaker 1: college administrator who asked to be identified only as Dean,
5:59
Speaker 1: as well as a band of hackers who agreed to
6:02
Speaker 1: join our cause. All right, all right, so we're ready
6:08
Speaker 1: to go this very now. Before we start, can both
6:11
Speaker 1: of you guys introduce yourselves.
6:15
Speaker 5: So I'm Kelly McConville, and I'm an assistant professor of
6:19
Speaker 5: statistics at Reed College.
6:21
Speaker 4: I'm playing too, and I'm an international student who is
6:25
Speaker 4: currently studying at UNC's High school.
6:29
Speaker 1: So these are some of my accomplices, and here's why
6:32
Speaker 1: I needed them. Us News will tell you what variables
6:35
Speaker 1: they use to determine whether a school is good or mediocre,
6:38
Speaker 1: but they won't disclose exactly how they combine those variables
6:42
Speaker 1: into a score. I mean, why would they. It's their
6:46
Speaker 1: secret Sauce they charged forty dollars a year for premium
6:50
Speaker 1: access to their findings. This is a big business. So
6:53
Speaker 1: I figured my only chance at really getting under the
6:56
Speaker 1: hood of the ranking algorithm was to find out if
6:58
Speaker 1: anyone had in effect hacked the algorithm, and it turns
7:03
Speaker 1: out someone had. It was a group of students at Reed,
7:07
Speaker 1: a small liberal arts college in Portland, under the leadership
7:10
Speaker 1: of their professor Kelly mcconvill. Tell me how on earth
7:16
Speaker 1: this whole project of looking at US News rankings? How
7:19
Speaker 1: did it begin?
7:21
Speaker 4: So?
7:21
Speaker 5: I teach a course called Statistics Practicum, and in that course,
7:26
Speaker 5: the students complete a semester long empirical research project, and
7:31
Speaker 5: I solicit those projects and the data from other READ
7:34
Speaker 5: faculty and staff.
7:36
Speaker 1: Every year, US News asks for a lot of data
7:39
Speaker 1: from schools, but the Read administration had stopped supplying that data.
7:44
Speaker 1: They decided they didn't believe in the rankings anymore. But
7:47
Speaker 1: still the magazine kept generating a ranking for Read anyway,
7:51
Speaker 1: and someone in the Read administration came to Kelly McConville
7:54
Speaker 1: and said, ever since we dropped out, our US News
7:57
Speaker 1: ranking has plummeted. We think they've been punishing us. Can
8:01
Speaker 1: you double check their math?
8:03
Speaker 5: That was our task. We were tasked with recreating the
8:06
Speaker 5: model and then seeing what our ranking would be if
8:10
Speaker 5: we did supplier data.
8:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, So tell me, the two of you walk me
8:13
Speaker 1: through how does one go about conceptually trying to answer
8:18
Speaker 1: this question.
8:19
Speaker 5: They use a model that's called a weight in some
8:22
Speaker 5: model that means they take about twenty or so different
8:27
Speaker 5: factors about a school, like class size and graduation rates.
8:31
Speaker 5: They wait each of those factors based on how important
8:35
Speaker 5: they think the factor is, and then they sum up
8:39
Speaker 5: all those pieces and then calibrate it so that the
8:41
Speaker 5: highest scores at one hundred, and then based on those scores,
8:44
Speaker 5: they rank as schools.
8:47
Speaker 1: The Red team had to build their own version of
8:48
Speaker 1: the US News algorithm from scratch, trying to get as
8:52
Speaker 1: close to it as possible.
8:54
Speaker 5: We grabbed all the variables we could from open government sources,
9:00
Speaker 5: and we built a model that isn't trying to recreate
9:03
Speaker 5: the US newswait in some model. Instead, it's just trying
9:07
Speaker 5: to predict the US New score of a school with
9:10
Speaker 5: a high degree of accuracy.
9:13
Speaker 1: Whying how close did you get?
9:15
Speaker 4: I'll say fairly close. The only school that's outside of
9:20
Speaker 4: like a reasonable range of predictive score in the test
9:23
Speaker 4: status read oh really, And all other schools are like
9:26
Speaker 4: within a reasonable prediction interval of their scores.
9:33
Speaker 1: Meaning the Reed students identical twin algorithm is so good
9:37
Speaker 1: that when they run their rankings of American colleges. Their
9:40
Speaker 1: list looks almost exactly like the US News list, with
9:45
Speaker 1: one exception Read College. Wait, so they were messing.
9:49
Speaker 4: With you based on our finding, it seems reasonable they
9:54
Speaker 4: this something.
9:56
Speaker 1: In twenty nineteen, US News put Read in ninetieth place.
10:02
Speaker 1: Where do you think you should be ranked?
10:06
Speaker 4: Thirty sixth Oh?
10:09
Speaker 1: Wait? What that much of a difference? Yeah, that's bananas.
10:14
Speaker 1: Oh my, oh, they really did a number on Reed.
10:21
Speaker 1: Now we don't need to go much further into the
10:24
Speaker 1: ensuing beef between Read and US News. The magazine calls
10:27
Speaker 1: the undergraduates analysis quote inaccurate. But just imagine my joy
10:33
Speaker 1: when I ran across Swaying's analysis. Here. I was searching
10:36
Speaker 1: for some way to understand the secret algorithm cooked up
10:40
Speaker 1: by Peter Bernstein and his pals back in the nineteen eighties,
10:43
Speaker 1: and lo and behold, a bunch of undergraduates at Reed
10:46
Speaker 1: College had cracked the code. And were they motivated to
10:50
Speaker 1: help me? Absolutely? Because US News dissed their school. My
10:56
Speaker 1: first question to Kelly and her team was where should
11:00
Speaker 1: I start? And they said start with a little something
11:04
Speaker 1: called the peer Assessment score. Can you give me a
11:07
Speaker 1: more precise sort of statistic sense of just how important
11:10
Speaker 1: is it?
11:12
Speaker 4: Like, okay, So we find that the pure assessment score
11:17
Speaker 4: has the largest effects, So it has a coefficient of
11:22
Speaker 4: like six point five eight. In other words, like, if
11:26
Speaker 4: you hold everything else constant and you like increase the
11:30
Speaker 4: peer assessment scorer by one unit, your overall score will
11:35
Speaker 4: increase by six point five to eight.
11:39
Speaker 1: The peer assessment score was at the heart of the
11:42
Speaker 1: US News secret sauce, a measure of reputation, one of
11:47
Speaker 1: the most powerful elements in the whole ranking system. So
11:51
Speaker 1: if I'm a school and I'm anxious to move up
11:55
Speaker 1: the US News rankings, the thing I should really be
11:57
Speaker 1: focused on is trying to boost my reputation score.
12:02
Speaker 4: Yeah.
12:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had my marching orders, and I knew where
12:06
Speaker 1: I had to go. Next to the guardian of the
12:09
Speaker 1: US newsgates that dragon at the mouth of the cave.
12:14
Speaker 1: Robert Morse. Robert Morse, the man who runs the US
12:28
Speaker 1: News rankings, is an older man, white hair, very preppy, nice,
12:33
Speaker 1: if a bit lugubrious, heavy hangs the head that where's
12:37
Speaker 1: the crown? I called him up. I wanted to understand
12:41
Speaker 1: the mysterious variable that the read College hackers had told
12:45
Speaker 1: me was so important? Describe again, how is the reputation
12:50
Speaker 1: score generated?
12:52
Speaker 7: So we send out three surveys per school, and then
12:57
Speaker 7: they respond. They rate the schools on a scale of
13:01
Speaker 7: five to one or no response.
13:04
Speaker 1: So who are the three people at each school who
13:06
Speaker 1: are asked to fill out the survey.
13:09
Speaker 7: In the provos and the enrollment manager or the head
13:13
Speaker 7: of admissions.
13:15
Speaker 1: The surveys arrive via email once a year to everyone
13:18
Speaker 1: who matters in American Higher ed. If you're at a
13:21
Speaker 1: liberal arts college, you're given a list of all two
13:24
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty two other liberal arts colleges in your category.
13:28
Speaker 1: If you're part of a big university, you get a
13:30
Speaker 1: list of the three hundred and eighty eight other big
13:33
Speaker 1: universities in the United States. Your job is to rank
13:37
Speaker 1: the schools on your list on a scale of one
13:39
Speaker 1: to five, five being amazing, one being there's a serious
13:45
Speaker 1: problem here. And on what basis are people making those judgments?
13:50
Speaker 7: Well, that's a good question. I mean, we ask them
13:53
Speaker 7: to base it on their view of the school's reputation
13:57
Speaker 7: for undergraduate academic quality.
14:00
Speaker 1: But I mean, how would you know.
14:03
Speaker 7: I mean, we believe that to aggregate sum of all
14:07
Speaker 7: the raiders who are a leader is in higher education.
14:11
Speaker 7: You know their presidents and provosts and mission deans. So
14:14
Speaker 7: they're not rookies. When you aggregate their views at any
14:18
Speaker 7: given time, they're representing where those schools stand in the marketplace.
14:25
Speaker 1: I mean, so it's it's an assessment of their feelings
14:30
Speaker 1: what other schools.
14:33
Speaker 7: Well, they're leaders in higher education, so it's based on
14:36
Speaker 7: their knowledge of the other schools that they've gathered or
14:42
Speaker 7: through meetings or for exposure. Do they necessarily know a
14:48
Speaker 7: lot about all the schools they're rating. I don't know.
14:52
Speaker 1: If I rate a restaurant on Yelp, it's because I've
14:55
Speaker 1: eaten there, right, yes, But here, when I rate a
15:03
Speaker 1: university on the US News ranking, it's not because I've
15:06
Speaker 1: attended that university or taught there.
15:09
Speaker 7: It's just, well, you may have. We shouldn't say that
15:12
Speaker 7: you didn't. But you're saying, have the people who rated
15:15
Speaker 7: the schools been on every campus or taught at that
15:19
Speaker 7: school or no? In depth their course catalog?
15:23
Speaker 4: No.
15:23
Speaker 7: Do some of them have greater degrees of knowledge about
15:26
Speaker 7: the schools they're rating, yes? Do some of them have
15:30
Speaker 7: lesser degrees of knowledge? Yes? So I think it varies
15:34
Speaker 7: from having substantial knowledge to far less knowledge.
15:39
Speaker 1: In my naivete, I had imagined that there would be
15:41
Speaker 1: some level of rigor to this crucial variable in the
15:44
Speaker 1: US news wait, in some model a methodology that I
15:47
Speaker 1: could study, analyze, learn from. But Morse wasn't being very helpful,
15:53
Speaker 1: so I tried to draw him out. I mean, I
15:56
Speaker 1: was fascinated that there's a little clump where BYU Bring
16:01
Speaker 1: them Young, Yeshiva and Gonzaga are all ranked right in
16:06
Speaker 1: the same roughly equally in the National University's rank. So
16:10
Speaker 1: a Mormon school, Conservative Jewish school, and the Jesuit school.
16:16
Speaker 1: And I was trying to think, what is the rabbi
16:20
Speaker 1: who runs Yeshiva know about bring them Young? And what
16:23
Speaker 1: does the Jesuit priest who runs Gonzaga know about Yeshiva?
16:28
Speaker 1: And it's a good point, like is Gonzaga giving George
16:33
Speaker 1: ten of five and giving Boston College a five?
16:36
Speaker 7: And we're not looking at how people are rating other schools.
16:40
Speaker 7: We are doing a trim means, so we take off
16:43
Speaker 7: a few of the highest ratings and a few of
16:46
Speaker 7: the lowest ratings in an effort to eliminate some of
16:51
Speaker 7: the strategic voting that you're alluding to well, I.
16:56
Speaker 1: Don't know if that's strategic voting. I'm wondering if it's
16:59
Speaker 1: just that. If I'm president of Gonzaga, I'm powerfully motivated
17:04
Speaker 1: to believe that the Jesuit education is the best education
17:08
Speaker 1: out there. So when I look at Georgetown, I think
17:11
Speaker 1: they're doing the right thing. And when I look at Yeshiva,
17:14
Speaker 1: I say, where's the New Testament? Why are they not
17:18
Speaker 1: using the New Testament? I mean, this is just natural
17:21
Speaker 1: human biases. I just don't know what they have to
17:24
Speaker 1: do with the quality of the institution.
17:29
Speaker 7: Well, I don't have a different answer.
17:35
Speaker 1: Devoted listeners of revisionist history. Well, remember how years ago
17:39
Speaker 1: I fell for Rowan University in New Jersey. I love Rowin,
17:44
Speaker 1: But Rowan is ranked one hundred and eighty seventh in
17:48
Speaker 1: the National University's list dismal mediocre, and why because its
17:53
Speaker 1: peer assessment score is a forgettable two point four? How
17:58
Speaker 1: on earth have the University presidence of America come to
18:01
Speaker 1: the collective decision that they hate Rowan University way way
18:05
Speaker 1: down in South Jersey. I call up Ali hush Mind,
18:09
Speaker 1: the school's president. How many university presidents have visited Roan
18:13
Speaker 1: in the last five years from other colleges.
18:16
Speaker 8: Oh, two or three, one from Canada, one came who
18:21
Speaker 8: was part of an accreditation and I believe another one
18:25
Speaker 8: was a friend.
18:26
Speaker 1: That's it. Yes, So when they're giving you a score,
18:31
Speaker 1: on what basis are they using forgiving you? How do
18:34
Speaker 1: they know anything at all about Roan?
18:35
Speaker 7: Again, I don't know.
18:36
Speaker 8: I can only speak for myself. I can assure you
18:39
Speaker 8: that I really don't know much about the institutions that
18:43
Speaker 8: I'm asked to rank or score.
18:45
Speaker 3: I just don't have enough tools.
18:48
Speaker 1: Now. It's not like university presidents don't know anything about grading.
18:53
Speaker 1: They were all teachers themselves once. But when it comes
18:55
Speaker 1: to grading schools, it seems like they might just be
18:59
Speaker 1: mailing it in. Next, I called up the head of
19:02
Speaker 1: admissions at a major university. You've heard of it, trust me,
19:06
Speaker 1: but I can't tell you what it is. And we
19:08
Speaker 1: altered the voice to protect this person's identity. Of course
19:11
Speaker 1: we did. We had to look how US News treated
19:15
Speaker 1: read college. My source told me to address them only
19:19
Speaker 1: as dean.
19:20
Speaker 9: I am certain and I am far more qualified to
19:25
Speaker 9: be a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America
19:28
Speaker 9: and vote on the Hall of Fame than I am
19:31
Speaker 9: to assess other institutions for the US News and World Report.
19:35
Speaker 4: Yeah.
19:35
Speaker 9: Yeah.
19:36
Speaker 1: I proposed a Dean that we do an exercise. I'd
19:39
Speaker 1: name a school at random, and then the two of
19:42
Speaker 1: us would try to peer assess it. Florida State. Never
19:48
Speaker 1: been there. I've not been there, I think three point two. Syracuse. Yes,
19:57
Speaker 1: I I stopped for coffee there once in a way
20:00
Speaker 1: driving back to my mom's house in Canada. I don't
20:02
Speaker 1: know if that counts. I don't think it does. I think
20:05
Speaker 1: I think it counts account experience. I got to say
20:07
Speaker 1: experience the weather, but there's no there were no students there.
20:11
Speaker 1: It was Christmas. But I will say this, my cousin
20:15
Speaker 1: went to Syracuse and had a good time.
20:19
Speaker 9: Oh h and so you would rate it based on that.
20:23
Speaker 1: Let's give Syracuse some love. Three point nine, No, four
20:26
Speaker 1: point zero. University of Washington in Seattle. Yes, you've been there,
20:33
Speaker 1: Yes I have. What'd you do when you were there?
20:38
Speaker 9: I walked around?
20:39
Speaker 1: I think that counts.
20:41
Speaker 7: It counts.
20:42
Speaker 1: I said to Dean, you can see the mountains from there,
20:45
Speaker 1: the space needle. Let's go big. University of Washington at
20:50
Speaker 1: Seattle four point two. Have you ever been to William Mary.
20:56
Speaker 7: I have yeah.
20:58
Speaker 9: I love history, I love colonial Williamsburg.
21:02
Speaker 1: Do you remember what score you gave William and Mary.
21:06
Speaker 9: I probably gave them a four or five.
21:09
Speaker 1: Really you went for five. It's the second oldest college
21:13
Speaker 1: in the US. Do you think that affected your judgment
21:15
Speaker 1: on that?
21:17
Speaker 9: I'm sure it did.
21:19
Speaker 1: Dean and I went on for quite some time. We
21:21
Speaker 1: had a long chat about Southern Methodist University in Dallas
21:24
Speaker 1: and whether or not the great football team the school
21:26
Speaker 1: had in the nineteen eighties should count in their favor.
21:29
Speaker 1: Dean said no. I said yes. Now was all this
21:36
Speaker 1: a helpful exercise? Not really? But then again, now that
21:40
Speaker 1: was my conversation with the Wizard of the Rankings, Robert Morse.
21:44
Speaker 1: One suggestion that has been made to me by people
21:46
Speaker 1: who do the rankings is that the thing they rely
21:50
Speaker 1: on to make their reputation scores for other universities is
21:55
Speaker 1: the only source they have of reputation scores for the
21:58
Speaker 1: other universities, which is the previous year's US News rankings.
22:03
Speaker 1: Is this circular?
22:05
Speaker 7: If they're telling you that, then that's not our expectation
22:09
Speaker 7: of how people are doing their ratings. Versus looking at
22:12
Speaker 7: the ranking table and looking at the score. We believe
22:17
Speaker 7: that there's more thought going into it than that, but
22:22
Speaker 7: we haven't done any kind of social science research to
22:26
Speaker 7: prove or disprove that point.
22:28
Speaker 1: You haven't done any right, Yeah, they haven't done any
22:32
Speaker 1: social science research. Only one person gave me much insight
22:38
Speaker 1: into the mechanics of the peer Assessment score, and that
22:42
Speaker 1: was Ali Huschmand, president of Rowan. His advice was, you
22:46
Speaker 1: have to take matters into your own hands. So what
22:49
Speaker 1: does he do? He makes his own hot sauce. And
22:52
Speaker 1: he told me that Rowan sends out free samples to
22:55
Speaker 1: every college president in the country. That's not too really
23:00
Speaker 1: he did, and he.
23:01
Speaker 8: Did no that I make hot sauce. Well, that would
23:07
Speaker 8: have been that's scoring.
23:08
Speaker 5: I hope.
23:09
Speaker 1: Yes. I want to know about your hot sauce. What
23:11
Speaker 1: kind of hot sauce do you have?
23:13
Speaker 4: Oh?
23:13
Speaker 8: I make serious, serious hot sauce. But I actually grow
23:16
Speaker 8: from seeds all the way to the packaging. And there
23:19
Speaker 8: are three levels of heat. The lowest one is called
23:22
Speaker 8: Ali's nasty, which is.
23:24
Speaker 4: Kind of mind.
23:26
Speaker 8: And then the one next to it, it happened, was
23:28
Speaker 8: as a heat it's called a nasty delicious, And then
23:32
Speaker 8: the one with Carona Reaper is called nasty vicious, and
23:37
Speaker 8: I will send you a package the nasty divisious can
23:40
Speaker 8: get you.
23:41
Speaker 1: But this isn't gonna help your cause. This is gonna
23:43
Speaker 1: hurt your cause. If you're if you're giving some some
23:47
Speaker 1: university president in the middle of the Midwest, it's like
23:49
Speaker 1: it happens to have a little bit of vicious. They're
23:52
Speaker 1: gonna they're gonna curse your name.
23:54
Speaker 8: Probably will, but I but I figured that no, no
23:57
Speaker 8: publicity is about bad publicity.
24:01
Speaker 1: Did I try the nasty vicious?
24:02
Speaker 2: Oh?
24:03
Speaker 1: Yes, I did, on a scale of one to five
24:06
Speaker 1: five point oh. In the middle of my investigation of
24:18
Speaker 1: the pure assessment score and its many implications, I had
24:22
Speaker 1: a conversation with a professor at Duke named Bill Mayu.
24:26
Speaker 1: Mayu is friendly with some bond traders, and he was
24:29
Speaker 1: talking with some of them one day when they mentioned
24:31
Speaker 1: that they were having difficulty with bonds issued by historically
24:34
Speaker 1: black colleges HBCUs as they're known.
24:38
Speaker 3: If you're a bond trader, you worry about moving the bonds,
24:41
Speaker 3: that you have an inventory, and they just mentioned, you know, hey,
24:44
Speaker 3: we're having a really hard time placing these HBCU schools
24:47
Speaker 3: because people don't want to hold them.
24:50
Speaker 1: The way the bond market works is that an institution
24:53
Speaker 1: needs money. Let's say a university wants to build a
24:56
Speaker 1: dormitory that costs fifty million dollars. The school can't raise
25:00
Speaker 1: all that money on its own, so it goes to
25:03
Speaker 1: a Wall Street bank, which purchases a bond a promise
25:06
Speaker 1: of repayment from the university. Then the bank breaks that
25:11
Speaker 1: bond into many hundreds and hundreds of pieces and sells
25:14
Speaker 1: those pieces to wealthy investors or insurance companies or hedge funds.
25:20
Speaker 1: So in May you hears that banks are struggling to
25:22
Speaker 1: sell bonds for historically black colleges, he wonders, is this
25:26
Speaker 1: just some apocryphal Wall Street story or is it true? Luckily,
25:31
Speaker 1: there's a simple way attests this. The price the bond
25:34
Speaker 1: trader charges is called the gross spread. If it's super
25:38
Speaker 1: easy to find buyers for the bonds, the gross spread
25:41
Speaker 1: is likely to be low. If the trader has difficulty
25:44
Speaker 1: finding buyers, the spread can get quite pricey. So if
25:48
Speaker 1: the bonds from black schools are harder to move than
25:51
Speaker 1: bonds from white schools, the spread should be higher. And
25:54
Speaker 1: are they Yes, they are May you and his colleagues
25:58
Speaker 1: compared black schools with non HBCUs that were otherwise identical.
26:04
Speaker 1: The spreads for the historically black schools were twenty percent
26:08
Speaker 1: higher in the bond market. A twenty percent difference in
26:12
Speaker 1: spreads is huge. Mayo and his co researchers then went
26:17
Speaker 1: one step further. They zeroed in on three states in
26:21
Speaker 1: the Deep South, and those three states were so.
26:26
Speaker 3: Those are Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
26:31
Speaker 1: And what's the difference in spread in those states? Not
26:34
Speaker 1: twenty percent? Thirty seven percent. Mayo and his colleagues have
26:39
Speaker 1: given us a scientifically rigorous measurement of just how much
26:43
Speaker 1: of a burdened black institutions face in the real world.
26:47
Speaker 1: You've put a number on reputation. What is the reputational
26:50
Speaker 1: cost of being a school that overwhelmingly accepts and educates
26:56
Speaker 1: black kids in Louisiana. The reputation cost is thirty percent.
27:01
Speaker 3: That's one way to think about it. But I would
27:03
Speaker 3: say it's the racial component of reputation.
27:07
Speaker 1: A spread is a reputation in score, isn't it. Investors
27:11
Speaker 1: don't know the precise ins and outs of all the
27:13
Speaker 1: institutions they're asked to buy how could they. There are
27:16
Speaker 1: literally hundreds of thousands of bonds on a market at
27:19
Speaker 1: any given time, So the investors proceed on a feeling,
27:24
Speaker 1: a feeling about how worthy and how safe and how
27:27
Speaker 1: legitimate the institution getting the loan is. You see a
27:30
Speaker 1: black school and you say to yourself, I don't value
27:33
Speaker 1: that HBCU quite as highly as the white school across town.
27:38
Speaker 1: So you give the black school a discount, which is
27:41
Speaker 1: what prejudice is, by the way, a discount. The black
27:45
Speaker 1: life does not matter as much as the white life.
27:50
Speaker 1: And who are these people imposing a discount on black schools.
27:54
Speaker 1: They're wealthy, successful people who are simply checking a box.
27:58
Speaker 1: I like this bond, I like this one a lot,
28:01
Speaker 1: I don't like this one. They are, I suspect, not
28:04
Speaker 1: a whole lot different from the college administrators who assign
28:07
Speaker 1: a number to their peers for them. The US News
28:09
Speaker 1: rankings every year motivated by the same unconscious biases. I
28:14
Speaker 1: like the school four point two, I like this one
28:17
Speaker 1: a lot four point five. I don't like this one
28:21
Speaker 1: two point four, even though I don't really know anything
28:23
Speaker 1: about it. So if you were the president of a
28:27
Speaker 1: historically black college in one of those States with a
28:30
Speaker 1: reputational discount for being black is thirty seven percent. How
28:34
Speaker 1: do you think you'd feel about your peer assessment score?
28:40
Speaker 1: I thought I'd call Walter Kimbro, president of Dillard University,
28:44
Speaker 1: a historically black college in Louisiana, And.
28:47
Speaker 6: So when I start to look at the formulas and
28:48
Speaker 6: dig into it, I was like, this isn't a real
28:50
Speaker 6: good measurement of what we do. In fact, it's a
28:54
Speaker 6: measurement of privilege.
28:56
Speaker 1: Dillard's reputation score is two point six. That's not good.
29:01
Speaker 1: You can't ever get to the top of the US
29:03
Speaker 1: News rankings with a peer assessment score of two point six.
29:06
Speaker 6: Maybe that sounds defeatis, but I mean.
29:09
Speaker 1: It's it's not defeat its it's realistic, verble living it.
29:14
Speaker 6: Nobody's going to just go and say this school, with
29:16
Speaker 6: all these black people, is great.
29:19
Speaker 1: In their haste to compete with Time and Newsweek way
29:22
Speaker 1: back when, maybe all US News did was create a
29:25
Speaker 1: system that allowed the presidents and deans of every college
29:28
Speaker 1: in the country to assign a number to their prejudice
29:31
Speaker 1: to disguise mythology as methodology. Next week on Revisionist History,
29:42
Speaker 1: we take up the cause of Dillard University, and I
29:45
Speaker 1: enlist my old friends at Reed College to help me out.
29:49
Speaker 5: So that is how we can get Dillard into the
29:52
Speaker 5: tippy top tier of the liberal arts colleges.
29:56
Speaker 1: So it's Williams Amherst Dillard swarthwik Yes Division's history is
30:08
Speaker 1: produced by mel Belle, Leeman Gesteu and Jacob Smith, with
30:11
Speaker 1: Eloise Linton and on An eyem Our. Editor is Julia Barton.
30:16
Speaker 1: Original scoring by Luis Kira, mastering by Flonn Williams, and
30:20
Speaker 1: engineering by Martin Gonzalez. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Special
30:25
Speaker 1: thanks the Pushkin crew had a fine Carl MCGLIORI, Maya Knick,
30:30
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicol Morano, Jason Gambrell, and of
30:35
Speaker 1: course Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Glaba. If you love this
30:49
Speaker 1: show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider becoming a Pushnik.
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Speaker 1: Pushnick is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and
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Speaker 1: uninterrupted listening for four dollars and ninety nine cents a month.
31:03
Speaker 1: Look for Pushnik exclusively on Apple Podcasts subscriptions with three
31:11
Speaker 1: flavors Ali's Nasty, Nasty, Delicious, and Nasty Vicious. Okay, guys,
31:17
Speaker 1: but you hold on the websites to do simultaneously. Ye okay, one, two, three,
31:23
Speaker 1: God oh, I like that it comes on, Oh, go Ali,
31:40
Speaker 1: go Ali, because it's really good. It's good.
31:43
Speaker 3: Hold on I okay, it's very spicy for a very long.
31:49
Speaker 1: Time, because am I, it's not eating me as hard
31:52
Speaker 1: as it did. I'm taking a second bite. Martine's struggling,
32:02
Speaker 1: By the way, where's my Harvard hot saice? I don't.
32:04
Speaker 1: I don't see any Harvard hot sauce. No one's sending
32:07
Speaker 1: me hot sauce from New even, are they.
32:10
Speaker 3: No