Is Merit Real?

Harvard and I write a column for Bloomberg Opinion. I really wanted to do this show because I love going to the deepest part of any subject to try to figure out what's really happening underneath the news stories that we read about every day. It's not always easy, and it does take time, but it's also very satisfying. I hope the conversation we're going to have now and the ones that we'll have in the future will give you

the same sense of satisfaction. I want these to be useful to you to help you figure out something really new that gives you a different perspective on the issues and the debates that are out there, whether it's politics, criminal justice reform, or even some of the really sensational stories in the news, like our first topic, the college admissions scandal. After dozens of wealthy parents were indicted for bribing college admissions officials to get their kids into highly

competitive universities. I could not stop thinking about the story. First, as someone who lives and breathes academia myself, I was amazed that such an elaborate scheme could exist and be as successful as it was, given how heavily structured and bureaucratic college admissions usually is. Yet someone was able to

corrupt the system systematically. I also wondered about the officials who are responsible for sorting through the thousands of applications and making judgment calls about each candidate at elite schools. How do they make sense of the scandal and its fallout? More importantly, when you're dealing with that many people trying to get into your school, what is the best approach to make sure that those who deserve a spot actually get one. Today, we're extremely fortunate to have with us

Asha Rangapa. Asha has been the Dean of Admissions at the Yale Law School, not only one of the finest law schools in the country, maybe the finest law school, but maybe not by coincidence, the one that Asha happened to have gone to and that I happened to have gone to. She teaches at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale. She's been a lawyer, a Fulbright scholar,

and most unusually an FBI special agent. I'm pretty sure that makes Asha the only person in the world who's both been the dean of admissions at a major university and also simultaneously someone who investigates crimes. Asha, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me Asha.

I want to start with the background to this scandal that everyone's been talking about, run roughly by a ringleader called William Singer, who helped people both cheat on the SACT tests and also, at a more profound level of cheating, enabled students to appear to be varc athletes when they weren't, and did this in connection with various admissions officers. And I want to start by asking you about the testing side of this case. How did Singer pull off cheating

in this highly regulated area of testing. Well, it appeared that he had effectively bribed proctors who administer the SAT and then also arranged with parents to I think in some cases, if not all, be able to get certain accommodations to be able to take the test alone in a room, after which the proctor would then correct the exam and put in the right answer. I mean, it's

very astonishing. So as a result, today, when an admissions officer college or a law school is looking at an application, typically there won't be any notation of whether the person had extra time at all. And maybe that's good from the standpoint of fairness from the standpoint of people who are genuinely disabled, but it might not be good from the standpoint of people who are able to gain the

system and gain extra time. That's right, you know, And I think that this is just a side again that I know sort of secondhand because it's it's administered through these testing services. But you know, I think it's probably fairly rare to be able to gain the system, just because I think typically these testing services are reluctant we begin with, I mean, grants these accommodations. I would have thought exactly the same thing Asha until I read about

this scandal. I Mean, one of the fascinating things about the scandal is that the person who ran it seemed to think the easiest part he actually outsourced this part to the parents. You know, he held their hands, he held the kids hands, he wrote applications. But when he came to getting the accommodations, he just said, go to your doctor and get an accommodation. And it seems like all of these people whose kids then cheated on the SAT or the ACT did get accommodation. So it may

be the depending on the doctor. It's not that hard. And it sounds as though, I mean, I'm not an expert on this at all, but it sounds as though the testing services accepted a doctor's note, which why shouldn't they, right, Yeah, you know, you keep what's interesting here is that you know, each at each stage of evaluation, you're really defer. You're you're relying on the integrity of the process that is

providing you with the documentation. So the admissions dean is going to rely on the test and that the test was administered fairly and under you know, circumstances that are relatively equal to all the people taking them. The testing services are relying on the fact that when they get doctor's notes, that they are doing that objectively and under the you know, ethical obligations of their profession to only provide diagnoses for people who are actually who warrant them.

And so we just see this breakdown at every stage here in the scandal that really allows for a corruption of really kind of this entire framework that everything stands on, and it is I think, again, relatively few people. But it then, as you note, Noah, just really calls into question, like, how what can we trust here? You know, Asha, when you were describing that everyone trusts in everyone in the process, and then when people start systematically lying, the thing begins

to fall apart. I was immediately reminded of the mortgage backed securities crisis. Yeah, where everyone thought to themselves, well, the person who gathers the information on the mortgage application must be telling the truth, and then the person who then bought them mortgage backed security said well, we're collecting mortgages, they're all full of true information. And then when they

all were false, we were suddenly all underwater. Is this that kind of a crisis in your view for admissions generally? Is system that capable of being corrupted by the rich? I don't think so, Noah. Again. I mean, we'll see how many people come out of these indictments, but right now it's about fifty people relatively speaking. When we are looking at the number of college applicants, I think that this one entity which was you know, spread out among

many different schools. I don't think could corrupt the entire system. But as I learned in the FBI, and as we were told, often perception is reality. So it actually doesn't really matter if it is corrupted. In fact, it's whether people believe that the system is fair and that they can get a fair shake. You know this is true. You and I are both lawyers. This is true the justice system. It doesn't matter if you know it's only one judge that goes off the rails or does something

on ethical when that becomes publicized. That is how people view the administration of justice generally, and I think that that is as big of a problem perception in terms of legitimacy as as what is happening. In fact, I think what you just said, Ash is kind of profound, and it speaks to your genuinely unique perspective on this. You might be the only person in the world who's both been an FBI agent and also investigating crimes and also an admissions officer. So you know, had you been

that the FBI, this would have been your case. I suppose the question I want to ask you is when the FBI officers agents and the prosecutors who put this case together, federal prosecutors and the FBI put this case together, they must have known that by bringing Singer to justice and also indicting some celebrities, let's let's not pretend that's irrelevant, some celebrity parents here, that this would be a national story at page one story, and they must have known

that it would effectively cast some doubt on the legitimacy of the admissions process, even if it just involves, you know, fifty odd people to begin with. Should that or would that? I guess in the first question is would that have been a consideration for the FBI agents and the prosecutors working on this case, or would they have just said, who cares what the consequences are, We're going to go after a bad actor. Yeah, I don't think the perception

of the system would have been a consideration. I think because the counter veiling, you know, consideration is to also send a signal to the people who are engaging in this behavior that we will follow the money, and we will follow it to Beverly Hills, we will follow it to the hedge funds of New York, and we will find you. And what's really interesting here, Noah, is that in this indictment, you know, these prosecutors charge this as a rico conspiracy. This is a racketeering conspiracy, which is

harder to prove than a regular conspiracy. A statute designed to go against the mafia. It's it's a statute designed to go against the mafia, and interestingly, it's a statue that was designed to go after the top of the food chain, the godfather, the don And what's really interesting is that in this case they used the godfather, the guy at the top, to basically flip and catch the parents at the bottom. Well do you think he was the guy at the top, Singer? I mean, he's certainly

the person who put the plan together. He's the thread that holds the case together. But on the other hand, it wasn't his money at a fundamental level. I mean, was he out there seducing the parents or were they showing up and asking him to get their kids into school. I think it was a little of both. So you're right, it wasn't his money, and I think that that's why they inverted the pyramid here to go after the people who were really trying to abuse their wealth and privilege.

But what he was doing was running and we can talk about this because I did see legal versions of this that I had to address when I was at Yale Law School. He was essentially running and admissions consulting service. And this is you know these services out there. They say, look, I'm going to help your kid. I'll advise them on what to do, I'll look over their essays, i will give them all kinds of assistance to get into the

best schools possible. And so I think you had many people coming and paying lots of money for these services. And then along the way, kind of like a conman does, he starts testing the waters and says, you know, here's you know, if you really want a guaranteed option, there's this for this amount of money, the side door option, whether it was the athletes or the SAT scores, and would test the waters, and I think for people who

were intrigued by it, he would then follow through. So it does seem like some part of his business was doing kind of quote unquote legitimate and again I have issues with that admissions consulting, and then he would lead kind of the more unethical people down the path to outright bribery and front wow. So when you're sitting as an admissions director and you see an application, could you tell whether there was a consultant in the background coaching or were the good ones so good at their job

that they could hide their efforts to improve an application? No, you can't tell. I mean, listen, you're you're looking at these You're evaluating people on paper. And unless you are an admissions office that has the bandwidth to do things like individual interviews, and most admissions offices don't. For the volume of applications they receive, you are really, again, trusting that this person is providing you with an accurate reflection of their own work, just as you do as a professor.

You know, you want them to providing their own candidacy. And I have to tell you know, we don't have much in the way of testing either. You know, I occasionally get a student paper and think, huh, I'm suspicious. I think this might be a plagiarized paper. There's a there's a software package, believe it or not, that we can run the papers through to see if maybe they're plagiarized. And it's pretty good, but it's not perfect. And it's all we've got, you know, otherwise, unless I happen to

know a source that the person is quoting from. You know, I've got no way of knowing. So you're you're right, A lot of education does rest on trust. Go ahead, A sorry, yeah no. And so you know, for me, when I first started as the den of admissions at Yale Law School, that was in two thousand and five, two thousand and six, the admissions landscape had changed so much from when I applied. I mean, I had no clue what I was doing when I applied to college.

By the way, would you would you tell us that story? You talk about that in your I know you're CNN contributor and you wrote a terrific article for CNN about the scandal where you reflected on your own experiences. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, you know, I grew up in southern Virginia, and Virginia is a state that has fabulous schools, so most people, you know, go to school in state, and I went to a pretty average public school. You know, this was just not a place

where people went to Ivy League schools. And I got a brochure for Princeton from Princeton in the mail and was like, oh, this looks like a really pretty campus. I want to apply. And you know, my parents are immigrants from India. They had no idea how all of this works. I used to study book to study for the l set. I'd more or less walked in cold to take it. And I just mailed in my sorry the set. And you know, I mailed in my application into this black hole and just figured somebody was going

to look at it. And you know, I was pleasantly surprised to hear back maybe there were these services, consulting services and guide, you know, people who helped you back then.

But I definitely didn't have any access to those. And does that mean that an admissions officer looked at your application, looked at where you'd gone to school, looked at your parents, knew what their occupations were, and said, this is just a very smart candidate who didn't get all the prep and so we're gonna build that into our assessment of the application. In other words, isn't there some complicated process whereby admissions officers try to figure out they read between

the lines. This is separate from question of trust. They try to figure out whether a very well packaged candidate has self packaged or been packaged by a consultant. Isn't that part of the what a good admissions officer actually does. Yes, absolutely, there is some skepticism in the job, and I think this is where things like letters of recommendation really make a difference. You know, there was a local lawyer who ran our you know, mood court program at my high

school who wrote me a recommendation. He actually got a note back from the dean of admissions, who he's met, a great letter. Yeah, he said, this was really helpful. And so, I mean, they just took a chance on me.

And so when I became dean of admissions and suddenly saw, wow, you can pay five, ten, fifteen, forty thousand dollars to get people to help you not only apply to college, but to graduate school and law school in medical school, I was I was not pleased because for me, as a decision maker, I need to be able to do exactly what you just said, be able to assess each person on their own merits, taken to account all of the different factors that went into their application, including their background,

and you know, knowledge of the process. So I actually added two questions to the Yale Law School application as a result of learning about this, I first added a question asking the applicant to disclose whether or not they received any assistance in preparing their application. Terrific question, and they just you know, and it's open ended. It says, if yes, just please explain. And the other was whether they were able to take a test preparation course, which

I think is more common now. I don't know how you felt, you know, where you were in high school. I mean, they were super expensive at the time. I know, I didn't believe that they were that common back in then. No, I went to a private Jewish high school where, believe me, they were everyone was obsessed with college admissions. They started talking about it with us literally when we were twelve, and nobody took a a prep course for the SAT.

That would have been considered very, very strange and you would have had to have been very rich to do that, and that just wasn't in people's consciousness. But now I recognize that it's it's ubiquitous. Yeah, it's ubiquitous, and so on that side, it is almost the flip, like I kind of want to know if people didn't because sometimes it could be a result of, you know, lack of access so why don't. I mean, I think that's fascinating

what you did, and I think it's great. One question that I have is why don't colleges take it a step further? Why don't they say to students, listen, we need you to promise us as part of your application that you haven't been advised by a consultant, and then if you lie, we'll kick you out if we find

out about that. I mean, if it's really unfair, and it seems like it really is unfair that richer kids have the opportunity to be counseled on their production of their application, and you know, if we know that that breaks the basic idea of fairness. And if it's really hard for admissions officers to tell whether someone has been properly packaged in that way or not, why not just

why not just ban it? I mean, I understand that the test prep industry is harder to get around because you know, what if you sat at home and you know, did practice tests, and is that really so different? Or what if you did an online course that might be hard to test but to distinguish, but the actual consultancy, why not just ban it? I agree with you, Noah, I mean, but I have to tell you I got a lot of pushback when I included those questions on

the law schoo application. From whom who pushed back on you? Well, I think some of Frankly, some of my colleagues from other colleges were surprised. Um. I think because they thought that, you know, they were like, what if it dissuades people from applying us? What did you tell them when I asked you that you said, I don't care at Sale Law School. I am pretty much. I mean, look, I think that you know, I have deep affection for Yale School. I think it's a very special place, and I think

it's it's worth knowing who people are authentically. But what about what about all the other colleges and institutions, I mean who some of them are competing for applicants. So is it your sense that one reason more colleges don't do this is that they actually want the rich candidates whose parents buy them packaging, and so they wouldn't want to discourage those people from applying. I mean, if that's true,

it's important for us to understand that that's true. Yes, And I think it's because it's not just they want them because they are rich, but because you know these are Look, I think that these are coming from places, you know, the top private schools like they are. This is standard practice at the top, you know private schools and people where where they are literally being groomed from ninth grade. But can we be I mean, can we be a little more brutal on these institutions that we

both love and care a lot about. I mean, in fact, having some rich applicants is important for the colleges, not only because most colleges and universities can't afford to give financial aid to everybody, so they need some people who pay the full rack rate, but also because colleges and universities and you know they pay my salary to so I'm not I'm not claiming to be in any way example from this, they live on donations, and rich parents are more likely to be able to make meaningful donations.

So isn't there, in fact, just a systematic preference at a broad level, not for every individual applicant to be rich, but for some rich people to go to the colleges. I think that's possible. I would say, probably more for the former reason you mentioned than for the latter. The idea that they need some people to pay full freight.

So probably apart from the richest, richest universities that have tremendous endowments, with colleges and universities that might be running on a tuition driven model, do they do need people who can pay to come. They don't. They can't afford to give the kind of financial aid on the donor front. I honestly feel like, and again I mean, I'm looking at this from a graduate school, so you know, I don't know how it works at the college university level.

I think that there can be a trade off. Right in my experience having talked to people that I've admitted and who have graduated and gone on to do amazing things, it's the people who are more the most grateful for the opportunity to be at a place, and particularly when they go on to become incredibly successful and have that gratitude and affection for the school that become I think the biggest supporters and donors and patrons of those institutions.

So I think, as I mean, that's definitely true, there are we definitely know, incredibly generous alums who feel that, you know, the institution made them and are very loyal. But we also know people who make big donations to institutions because generation after generation of family members attended the school.

And that's surely part of it. I mean at my own university at Harvard, where as part of a lawsuit by Asian Americans alleging discrimination in the admissions process, a lot of deep tales at the admissions process we're disclosed in open court. We learned about a VIP list, which was a special list under the control of the deans

of admissions that was not for athletes. And we're going to come to athletes shortly, not for underprivileged kids, you know, but rather for the children of the very influential and in many cases very rich, and they were put on a special list and they had a huge advantage in admissions. I mean, that certainly exists at the university levels as we now we now know and presumably if that can be justified, and I don't think it can, but if it could be, it would be on the idea that

you know, you need you need people and make donations. Yeah, that if their institutional model is built on, you know, some degree of reliance and continuity with with those people, for sure. Um, so yeah, I mean so to Again, to go back to this whole idea, they don't want

to make those people. I think I don't think they want to alienate those people because they are probably the most likely to use the kind of services that are going to package you know, their children in the best way possible, and especially if they are people who are familiar with this world and know what you know, what what these colleges are sensibly looking for. Again, very different from the clueless applicant from you know, Arkansas, who doesn't know a single person who has ever gone to an

Ivy League school. You know, they're able to polish up their applications in a way. And to go back to why the colleges don't, I think that they're It would ruffle the feathers, or it would it would, you know, rattle the system as it exists. I think I don't think it would be fatal, but I think it would be a huge change. Speaking of rattling the system, to me, the sort of profound philosophical issue that underlies this whole debate is merit. You know, is merit a real thing?

Is it a thing that we can actually measure? Because we like to talk about it as though it were. You know, who are we admitting the students who are meritorious, who fit the criteria that we're looking for, and who produce diversity in a in a class taken as a whole. And if that's real, then we're talking about problems that the margin. You know, people who who cheated the system by pretending to have merit that they didn't have, And we could try to fix that by prosecuting those people.

Are doing a better job of sussing out who are the people who are overstating their their abilities and you know, maybe remembering that if you take a prep prep course, your test scores will be different. Those are all fixes assuming we believe in the underlying idea of merit. But the hard question is is merit real? Is it for real? And I guess I want to ask you, as someone who's been deep down inside the process, do you believe in it? Do you believe that there is a thing

called merit that you and other admissions officers can find? Wow? That is a really hard quest. Shit. Um, I think at its core, yes, but I think it really requires a few different things. Um. Number one, it really requires I think a human, thoughtful review of each person's application. I think it also means acknowledging that everyone has their

own subjective idea of what constitutes merit. So when you concentrate the decision making power into one person or three people, or whatever it is you are going to, I think get consciously or unconsciously just a particularly a certain kind of bias towards what is meritorious, but somewhat at odds should just to interrupt for a second with the with

the whole idea that, yeah, exactly. I mean if merritt, if you and I and another person you know, all sit at a desk and we're given us three files and we each reach a different conclusion on merit, then that doesn't feel like merit. That seems like getting struck by lightning, or you know, good good luck, or a value that is open for debate, Like if we were all asked who's attractive, we'd all have a different view of perhaps of who is attractive. But merit is supposed

to be something that can be measured. We have tests which are supposed to be the same test for everybody. Yeah, but I think that that I might disagree with that. You know, I think that you're right that we have come to understand merit as being numbers. And this is why people get obsessed with the essay to or else heat and GPAs and all of this stuff, because that

feels good to us, right, Like that's something measurable. And if the test is administered fairly, and you know, these people have taken classes like you have, you can be reduced to a number, which then tells everybody, compared to others, how meritorious you are. And I believe some of these reverse discrimination lawsuits are kind of based on this idea. They idea is that the numbers don't lie. That's the

numbers don't lie. Um, of course we know in real life isn't always true, but at least if they work right, they're not supposed to lie. But I think, you know, to go back to what we were saying earlier about the taking the chances and looking at the context. I mean, you know, do you look at someone who worked their

way through college? Um, do you do you evaluate that uh in in a different way, or you know, do you take that into account differently than from someone who really was able to take you know, is a very accomplished musician and was lived in New York City and was able to, you know, take classes at Juilliard UM and end up in you know, a symphony orchestra or something. UM. Those are the difficult questions that you come to UM because it's impossible to find a way to you know,

you you have to become. There is a subjectivity to evaluating those UM because they're just not as to apples.

So your example of the Juilliard trained musician raises the other grand issue that is in play in this college admission scandal, and that is athletics, elite athletics, which in its way is not unlike training at Juilliard, many long hours of intense training the best coaches or teachers and emerging as a as a leading competitive member of your of your chosen extracurricular activity at sometimes at the national level.

And as we know, one of the things that that singer did that's most scandalous is he recruited admissions officers or senior administrators at universities including USC including Stanford, including Whisper. Whisper because you work there and I went there Yale, and he corrupted them or they agreed to be corrupted, and they marked students as elite athletes deserving of recruiting even though the students in some cases had never even

played the board. So that raises right away the problem of whether sports should matter at all in college admissions. And I know that, at least based on my own experience, is a law student can't be that my basketball talents were any factor to my admission. And based on the other people players and I played with, some of them were very good, but that doesn't seem like why they

got in. So I understand this is not as much an issue in law school, but at the college level, should elite sports be treated as a separate category of admissions? You know, I have to be honest now, I just don't know enough about this. And again I think that this gets into things like the economic model on which

a lot of some institutions are based. College sports is I think, a moneymaker at many places, and you know it could it also fosters some of that alumni you know, connection and attachment to those institutions, which can then you know, funnel, which then bolsters their development base for donors and stuff. So I think it's really woven into, um, you know, the entire system that some of these universities are built

on and I should it be. I mean, I think certainly I have a great overview of it, and I think you're absolutely right. Yeah. I mean again, I think this comes to you know, these are the things that we believe our meritorious. I mean, our culture believes, like no one really has ever questioned that the way that they have questions, say affirmative action, um, you know, and I think there's been some questions on the other side

of say legacy status and stuff. But like you know, the idea that uh, you know, athletic recruitment is a part of college um and and can really give you um advantage has I think has always been linked to an idea that that developing that excellence in a sport is is actually noteworthy. And so I tend to agree with you that that it is noteworthy and that it

is worthy. Although it's worth noting that the Oxford and Cambridge model from the UK is that they give zero weight to athletics at all, and they actually still have some elite athletes who managed to get in, but that they don't wait at all. But admittedly that's a different country and in a different system. But what I was going to say, sorry, go ahead, Well, you are a road scholar, right, I was, And the roads also places,

or at least it used to. It absolutely does, and luckily for me, not everybody had to be had to be an athlete. There was, you know, there there was Corey Booker there to uh, you know, an actual an actual division one tight end, a legitimate, legitimate player to even out the people who who are more bookworms. But but you know, I think that it's reasonable to weigh

athletic prowess as one element in admission. But what the Singer scandal shows is that at a lot of colleges, including the best colleges in the country, you could get admitted on a totally different track. If you were an athlete, your application did not You didn't even get admitted at the same time, on the same day as everybody else.

There was an earlier admissions deadline, and there was a completely parallel process where coaches were given by admissions offices, which means by administrations a certain number of guaranteed slots. And that's what they managed to exploit. In fact, I think you know, one interesting question is why did people with a million bucks to get their kids into college not just make a million dollar donation to the college

or their choice. And I think the answer is no college would guarantee them admissions, even for a million dollars. But by going through this quote unt illegal side door, they were guaranteed admissions because the coaches had admission slots that they owned. Yeah, I mean, do you think we could agree that that is maybe a bad idea. I mean,

it's definitely raises the question of oversight. Like so, you know, presumably these coaches were given these slots because they alone have the expertise to assess whether someone is the best baseball player in the country, something that maybe the admissions team would not be able to assess. And so if that is the basis on which you're going to give like a significant advantage, then you have to have somebody

in that position who can evaluate that. Just like if if let's use music as an example, that were the other if that were instead of sport, what were you were doing, you would have to have somebody who understands, you know, musical proficiency and technical ability to evaluate that. No, I know, and you know, it's sort of interesting. We haven't really gotten a clear sense of this, but some of the coaches seem to have taken the money in exchange for giving away slots to use for their programs.

So in some cases they seem to have been given money themselves, the old fashioned form of corruption, I bribe you to give me one of your slots. But some of them seem to have taken a lot of the money in the form of donations to their program. So in a sense they were saying they probably were doing

just what you're saying. Oh, they were trying to particular their best team, but they thought to themselves, well, I also need equipment, right, and I also need support from my team, So I'm going to take half a million dollars as a donation to my program and use that this year in lieu of a particular slot. So the cash was also in that sense of benefit. Some of them may really have been doing exactly what you said, trying to put together the best team they could, but

they just weighed the cash more heavily than their particular candidate. Yeah, and I guess this gets too. I mean, why, maybe you know this better than me. I don't know that we've gone to institutions where sports are the moneymaker for the school, but I mean, you know this is again, this is kind of all the incentives that are built up. And I want to also just throw in here before we run out of time, that US News is another thing.

I mean, we can ignore how incentives play a role in how people value certain things, and then that kind of permeates the whole system. So with US News, for example, colleges, okay, hugely important to the life, which is most colleges and universities in the United States, and um, you know, most people don't realize that. I mean, the US News formula is fairly arbitrary. They can choose to wait things at certain things highly or not. And what they wait very

highly are l sets in GPA. Now, as we've just noted, maybe that makes sense. Maybe those are the only objective criteria of merit and they should be weighted. But what what then happens is that it becomes a frenzy to get the highest l SAT score to do, you know, to make sure that that it disincentivises students actually from taking harder classes because they don't want to get a lower grade UM. And it also drives great in it

drives great inflation, UM. And it also makes it so that many colleges and universities can take into account kind of the full picture and take the risks on people that are incredibly compelling, and maybe they don't feel like the test score is truly predictive of what this person is capable of, but it could impact their overall average, which would then drop them two points, you know, two slots and the rankings, and then that makes them lose money.

And I mean, all of these domino effects that happen, and I think that that also is sort of driving it in a way. We'd have to dissect it more on the athletic side. But when it becomes the moneymaker or the you know, reflection of that school's value, that's when you start having perverse incentives and people start being

able to exploit. I mean, you're really you're really uncovering here a whole cycle, Yeah, where the colleges and universities want to score high on the US News ranking so they can get the best students, so that they can score high on the US News ranking. The students want to do well so that they can go to the niest US News and ranked colleges so they can get jobs, so they can make money, so they can donate it back to the colleges so that they can whole start

the whole process all all over again. And I guess the question is, does this whole complicated process that is very characteristic of the United States is it working? Is it ultimately serving the interests of the society, which is what it's supposed to do? And you know, what is your what is your bottom line answer on that deep question. I think that you know this scandal, um, and I I can talk about law school for sure. I think that we have started to move into an area where

it is not serving the population. And you know, just tuition alone, the fact that you know, law school graduates are graduating with the debt that's equivalent of a mortgage where even the highest size, yes, and even the highest paying law firm jobs can't sustain necessarily these uh, these debts, um, you know. And I think that this has long term implications for for these schools. Uh. You know. They they make it so that students might be less likely to

give back. They might say, hey, I paid you know, two hundred thousand dollars to go there. I don't owe you any money anymore, um, or to to go into profess you know, go down paths that that aren't suited to them. I mean, you know you're there, Noah, you see how all? Yeah? Um, and so you know, the question is who needs to take the lead to sit down and say this is not working and here are the things that are really driving this off the rails, and we are going to change it. Um. I frankly

think that that belongs to the elite schools themselves. Um, it's the people. It's the ones at the top that I think can afford to, for example, drop out of the rankings and just say we're not doing we're not playing anymore. Out of the game. Yeah, we're out of the game. I mean, you know, if Harvard did that and they dropped, I don't think the students would stop. I don't think students would have stop applying to Harvard. I really don't. Um. You know, at some point somebody

has to call the bluff. And um. You know, same thing with with tuitions and uh, you know all of these other incentives that are you know, we have there are some schools that are now dropping um stardized tests. Yes, yeah, you know, so I think we're starting to see some movement in that direction. Um. And you know, anything like that I mean, think about it. If if if schools drop standardized tests there, the US news is going to have

to find another way that's true. And then the great challenge will be when the tests are dropped, have we made things fairer right? Or have we made it harder for for kids like you who had great scores and who use those scores as a signal to their colleges and say, hey, I'm really smart, you know, and admit me, yes, exactly, And I think that's the trade off. Trade Offs are the name of the game. And this very very, very complicated. I feel like we've no answers in this conversation except well,

I think you're I think you're right. But I think this is the stage of life where we should be asking the deep questions and we should be using a scandal like this as a way to say, does merit work? You know? Do these rankings help us? And asking those questions can be the first age to trying to solve the problem as you as you were just suggesting, and that was going to require some experimentation. Yeah, I'm incredibly grateful to you for your super honest and deep answers

and explanations. Josh, I thank you so so much, Matt. Thank you. This was a great conversation and I appreciate you having me on. I live my whole life surrounded by the idea of merit. I teach students. They seem great. I have colleagues, they seem great. So it's natural to assume that we're surrounded by the best people the heart is working the ones who deserve to be there the most. The thing about this college admission scandal is it makes

you stop and ask is merit for real? Just the fact that people seem good doesn't mean that there aren't other people out there who are as good, or maybe actually better, And the playing field that we imagine existing to choose the people who are most meritorious probably isn't fair in the first place. It's not just a question of how rich people cheated to get their kids into

fancy schools. It's the question, at the more basic level of why the system overall favors people who are well off over people who start with less means and might actually be more talented. Maybe the system just doesn't produce the merit that we imagine that it does. On top of that, I have the strong feeling that we have not heard the last of this case. Are these all the people that the FBI has on tape, cheating and lying and scheming to get their kids into Nancy schools?

I seriously doubt it. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Gane Coott, with engineering by Jason Gambrell and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R Feldman. This is Deep Background