Project Dillard

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Bushkin.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: 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 one hundred 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 nineteen thirties. And because this is New Orleans, the school choir is amazing. The president of Dillard is Walter kimbro Tall, mid fifties, close cropped hair, pencil thin mustache, Bachelor of Science from the University of Georgia, master's degree from Miami University, PhD from Georgia State. Your father is a very well known pastern Atlanta.

00:01:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right.

00:01:19
Speaker 2: He's Walter Senior. You're Walter Jr.

00:01:22
Speaker 4: Well, we have different middle 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 that's my dad.

00:01:32
Speaker 2: 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 Kimbro. Yeah, we're in this area of New Orleans is Gentili's Callegenttillity.

00:01:55
Speaker 4: The area is very residential. It was middle class African American community, So a lot of things. I want to sort of walk this way and make a loop.

00:02:07
Speaker 2: Then, when you finished your roller on campus, look up Dillard on the US News and World Report Best College's 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 Granted and Tweed, Pomona, Wellesley, Bowden, 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 US News dumps all the colleges that they considered too mediocre to marit 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 Kimbro. What does America's premier ranking system have against Dillard University. My name is Malcolm Glawe. You're listening to Revision's 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 US 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 US News algorithm. Let's call this investigation Project Dillard. About three quarters of the student body at Dillard are Pelgrant eligible, meaning they qualify for federal assistance. The average family income of the students is just over thirty thousand dollars a year. A third of them are the first in their families to go to college. Virtually all are black.

00:04:09
Speaker 4: Dylan is a part of a group of HBCUs they've called the Black Ivy League, so more House, Spelman, Howard Hampton, Dillar was in their group too, and so some people, you know, buy into that a lot and take pride in that, and when they're broke, you won't necessarily know that this is a student that comes from a family they're 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.

00:04:34
Speaker 2: US 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 US 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 it would be fun to make fun of US News. But the more I did it, the angrier I got. A not very sophisticated group of people in Washington, DC came up with a 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.

00:05:22
Speaker 4: Right, That's what it is, exactly, That's I mean, that's exactly what it is. I call, you know, the US News ranking is a perpetuation of privilege. That's what I've always called it is. That's all it is. It's a perpetuation of privilege.

00:05:38
Speaker 2: In last week's episode, I consulted with a group of statisticians at Reid College who had hacked their way into the secret US News algorithm. I decided to call on their services again, this time to help me with the puzzle of Dillard University's rank.

00:05:58
Speaker 5: My name is Lauren Reebe. I am an environmental studies economics major at Read College and I'm a senior.

00:06:06
Speaker 2: Tell me how how did Kelly recruit you for this project? Kelly Kelly McConville, a professor at Read who enjoys conjoling her students into various acts of statistical mischief.

00:06:20
Speaker 5: 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.

00:06:29
Speaker 6: And hold on, hold on. Your first question was can I make graphs?

00:06:35
Speaker 7: That's true.

00:06:37
Speaker 2: I think we need to go back to the mysterious variable that makes up such a large portion of the US News algorithm, the Peer Assessment Score. US 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 listen to the previous episode, you'll know that I couldn't figure out how all those college presidents came up up with their peer assessment grades.

00:07:11
Speaker 8: I tried.

00:07:12
Speaker 2: 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 graters in the end. Let's be honest, I got nowhere. But then I realized I could ask the read college hackers to do a statistical analysis what factors actually correlate with the peer assessment score. That was my assignment for Lauren Rabe.

00:07:45
Speaker 5: 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 PEL grants. And I found that endowment by itself, just the size of the endowment predicts half of the peersssessment score, So we can explain half of the assessments. The peer assessment scored just by how much money a school has in the bank, and then once we start adding the other the remaining school characteristics, we end up with over ninety percent.

00:08:24
Speaker 2: Ninety one point three percent 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 two point six 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 nineteen thousand dollars a year, and Dillard's endowment is a minuscule one hundred and five million dollars. A top rank school like Williams College has two billion more dollars in the bank than Dillard. The next thing US News really cares about is graduation rates. What percentage of a freshman class get their degree within six years. US 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 fifty percent. How can we call a school good if half its students don't graduate? But when I asked Walter Kimbro about this, here's what he said.

00:10:08
Speaker 4: I was doing one of my one meetings with a freshman student last week and the question I asked, what's the best part about being a college student?

00:10:15
Speaker 8: Was the worst part?

00:10:16
Speaker 4: And she said the worst part for her was Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's like why, she said, because I had to figure out what I was gonna do, where I could live. It was very powerful the way that she said. I was like, because I was like, what.

00:10:26
Speaker 1: Do you mean?

00:10:27
Speaker 4: Why is that the worst part of college? She said, I didn't know where I was gonna stay.

00:10:32
Speaker 2: 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 thirty thousand dollars a year, there's going to be a lot of that.

00:10:59
Speaker 4: For a school like us that you're seventy five percent pail grant eligible. If you have a six year graduation rate that's over fifty percent, 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 that.

00:11:17
Speaker 2: Just for contrast, the graduation rate at a school like Boden, currently number six on the Liberal Arts College Rankings, ninety five percent. Everyone graduates, maybe because one in every five students at Boden comes from a family with an income in the top one percent. The worst part of Christmas for a Boden student is deciding which of their houses to go to. No one's dropping out of Boden, 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 US News cares about have to do with money. That's how you raise your academic reputation score. Wealthy students are also way more likely to graduate from school. That boosts your school as well. But there are many other variables in the US 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 US News rankings, what is the basis for the assumption that the more money school has, the better quality of the education the school is providing.

00:13:14
Speaker 9: 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 saying that in this case, more is better than less.

00:13:58
Speaker 2: More is better than less. I mean, look, I mean, let's assume I'm getting paid two hundred thousand dollars a year. If you can say, Malcolm, if I gave you four hundred thousand, would you be a better writer? I would say absolutely, I would be better. But that would be false. There's no correlation. But how much you pay Malcolm, how good Malcolm's writing is?

00:14:25
Speaker 9: Right? But that's I'm not sure that analogy works in this particular case because you're dealing with, you know, a budget, and it's buying many different things than one human's human being skill. In your analogy, your article isn't going to be any better, even though maybe you'd get some incentive to work more.

00:14:51
Speaker 2: Oh right, all right, For the purposes of this thought experiment, let's stipulate, as the lawyer say that more money is better than less money and simply proceed with the question of what would happen if Walter kimbro were to wake up one morning and decide to do things the US 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 two billion, a nice round number. What happens in the real world If you gave Walter Kimbroke two 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 US 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.

00:15:55
Speaker 3: So I give you.

00:15:56
Speaker 2: Two billion, you would that would improve your scores on their ranking. But if your goal is to get bigger, then they would. They would ding you for that.

00:16:04
Speaker 7: They would hurt me, they would hurt you.

00:16:05
Speaker 2: They don't want you to get Bigger's right, But that's Walters nuts. Yep, 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 a product 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 US news boxes. And how do you attract that kind of student amenities? The big part 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 fanciers. I called up my old friend Vanessa, she's in the luxury real estate business.

00:17:16
Speaker 8: But why, I'm sorry, stupid question, but why does a rich white student raise a ranking?

00:17:24
Speaker 3: Oh my god, such a good question you have asked. You have asked the question 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.

00:17:45
Speaker 2: But I wanted to get rich kids. You have to 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 and incredibly fancy dorm the daughter of the hedge fun guy from New York. I wanted to walk in and say, Wow, how much is that gonna cost? What are we talking about here?

00:18:09
Speaker 8: 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? Okay, 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.

00:18:36
Speaker 2: Two million dollars per key. That's what the wealthiest are expecting in terms of high quality living these days.

00:18:45
Speaker 8: We have very fine materials that we have throughout the rooms. You will never see dry wall, for example, no.

00:18:53
Speaker 3: Drywall, so no dry wall.

00:18:55
Speaker 2: A two million per key.

00:18:57
Speaker 3: Dry wall is like the boat dirty word.

00:19:01
Speaker 8: 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.

00:19:14
Speaker 3: So wait, you could do this. You could totally do this in the ORMs. Of course, to go to our college.

00:19:20
Speaker 2: Example, the college came to you and said, I want a dorm for two I want a wow doorm for two hundred students. You think you could do that for four hundred million dollars.

00:19:32
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think we could.

00:19:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, you think you could. The kid, the eighteen year old's going to walk in with daddy, and Daddy's going to say, okay, you know, little what's her name? I don't know, Jenny, Jenny. Jenny. Jenny's going to be happy here.

00:19:49
Speaker 8: Jenny's going to be happy.

00:19:54
Speaker 2: We were laughing about this because it's absurd, right, But just imagine that Walter Kimbro actually built the dorm that Vanessa was imagining, and that little Jenny, the hedge funder's daughter and all the other little Jenny's out there, decided as a result to come to Dillard. Dillard would start to rise immediately in the rankings. Why because those Jennies are all going to graduate and the algorithm will love that. And after graduation, the Jennies will make generous gifts to Dillard's endowment because Walter will give them naming rights for the brand new Dillard University students BA. 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 Jennies 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 Red College, the leader of my consulting band of hackers, A call her back in to double check the math run the numbers on a Dillard full of Jennies through her simulated US News algorithm.

00:21:20
Speaker 10: So Williams is the top ranked liberal arts college with an endowment of over two point eight billion dollars. So if we take Williams financials and put them in for Dillard, Dillard goes from one sixty one to being tied for one oh three.

00:21:40
Speaker 2: So wait, this is positives is interesting. Yeah, So we haven't changed any of the fundamentals in the 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 pass to essentially the middle. Yep, Okay, okay, let's keep going.

00:22:13
Speaker 10: 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.

00:22:21
Speaker 2: Oh I nearly forgot test scores another key US news factor. In all likelihood, our Jennies 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 Kimbro told all of his lower achieving students to go home and rebuilt all of Dillard around only the highest test score Jennis? What would that do for the school's rank?

00:22:55
Speaker 10: Now, they went from one to oh three to forty three, So that went up sixty slabs just by adjusting those two variables.

00:23:07
Speaker 2: 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 forty three? She said, sure we can, and began going through the remaining items on the US News checklist, and lo and behold, this was a test our shiny New Dillard. Haste. I mean, teach your student ratios. They're tiny. Now we told half our students to go home. Faculty resources ginormous. We're loaded.

00:23:49
Speaker 6: I mean, I don't know what school we're looking at now, but this school, after we Jared cranked all of those things, turned all of those dials, means this New Dillard is ranked third.

00:24:02
Speaker 3: Wow.

00:24:03
Speaker 6: So that is how we can get Dillard into the tippy top tier of the liberal arts colleges.

00:24:11
Speaker 2: So it's williams Amherst Dillard swarthwarw Yes project. Dillard has given us a new school with a very different soundtrack. Can we convince Yale to lend them the Whiffin poofs.

00:24:30
Speaker 7: Are a latche who.

00:24:32
Speaker 2: Have a preacher's kid like Walter Kimbro, would know the Biblical lesson here Mark eight thirty six. For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? God have mercion.

00:24:51
Speaker 8: Such as sweet.

00:25:06
Speaker 2: When Walter Kimbro gave me his tour of the Dillard camp, he talked about the things that made Dillard special.

00:25:13
Speaker 4: We have certain things. When I got here, I realized that we have this physics program and people then 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.

00:25:31
Speaker 2: In twenty nineteen, Dillard produced thirteen African American physics grads, according to Department of Education numbers, Harvard produced one. In the past ten years, Dillard has graduated thirty five 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 three hundred black undergraduates this year, which is about the same as Dillard. Okay, is it because Dillard's 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 Kimbro brought up the other big HBCU in New Orleans just down the road from Dillard, Xavier University. Not terribly big or rich either.

00:26:42
Speaker 4: Xavier wasn't form until nineteen twenty five, I believe, but they've really gained a no variety because they really leaned in on sending the people to medical school, and so they send more people to medical school African America's any school in the country.

00:26:56
Speaker 2: The explanation seems to be that at most schools, there's a huge problem in STEM with what educators referred to as leakiness. Students start out majoring in science and math, but then they change may and the problem is most pronounced at selective schools.

00:27:14
Speaker 7: These institutions cream off the top, so to speak.

00:27:18
Speaker 2: That's Mitchell Chang, educational researcher at UCLA who has studied the problem.

00:27:23
Speaker 7: 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.

00:27:39
Speaker 2: But at the one 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.

00:27:59
Speaker 7: 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, you know, 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.

00:28:36
Speaker 2: 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 Kimber arranged for me to meet a group of students eight or syllabus around a conference table, and this is all the students ended up talking about what it felt like to be at Dillard.

00:29:06
Speaker 11: I could call it doctor Kimber 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 hug. My advisors are the best. They invested me. If I missed 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.

00:29:26
Speaker 12: 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, and I feel like as much as I pour in, they pour back.

00:29:41
Speaker 2: Another student talked about how if you'd gone to a big university, things happening back home might have gotten in a way.

00:29:48
Speaker 1: I probably wouldn't be in school anymore. Unfortunately, because my freshman year I experienced a loss in my family and he was very, very difficult, And had it not been for the faculty and the other 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.

00:30:15
Speaker 2: Do students at other small schools feel this way, of course they do. Students at Williams and Amherston's 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.

00:30:34
Speaker 7: 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.

00:30:55
Speaker 2: 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 have forward 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 Kimbro heard that an editor from US News was coming to speak at a nearby event.

00:31:29
Speaker 4: Well, I was like, cleit a schedule, I've got to go here the US 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 having a ranking system that basically measures privilege? And if I want to have a good ranking, I need to make sure I keep out poor students, black students, part time students, non traditional students. If I do those things, my ranking is high.

00:31:58
Speaker 3: And he couldn't.

00:31:58
Speaker 4: Answer the question. He said, well, you know, it's America and this is how we measure merrit and blah blah blah. 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.

00:32:13
Speaker 2: 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 US 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 US News thing right now?

00:33:03
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, I would love yeah.

00:33:04
Speaker 4: But they're gonna be folks who, like I said, they are, so this is this important.

00:33:09
Speaker 3: You're a persuasive guy. I feel like you could do that.

00:33:12
Speaker 4: You think I could do it.

00:33:13
Speaker 3: You have a little bit of your dad, and you just just stand up and preach.

00:33:17
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wouldn't need to have that.

00:33:19
Speaker 8: I need to have that.

00:33:21
Speaker 4: So from it from the mount to really try to make it happen.

00:33:47
Speaker 2: Revision's History is produced by Mio Nobel, Leeming, Gestu, and Jacob Smith, with Elowise Linton and On a Name. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Skara, mastering by Flaun Williams, engineering by Martin Gonzalez, fact checking by Amy Gaines Special thanks to the Pushkin Crew Had a Fame, Carly McLear, Maya Knigg, Danielle Lacon, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrel, and of course, Jacob Weisberg. Special thanks also to the Dillard University Choir and their director, Samuel Davenport. I'm Malcolm Bammoll. 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 by the audiobook at Bombermafia dot com and you'll get a bonus listener's guide, and you can listen in the podcast app you're using now