Where this was said
From Chicago to Barnard to Dartmouth: A Career in Administration
At 10:30 · chapter starts 8:40
Beilock recalls how she stumbled into administration by arguing with UChicago president Bob Zimmer on the Faculty Senate's Committee of the Council — and getting recruited to join his team as a result. After serving as executive vice provost, she was recruited to lead Barnard College in New York, where she encountered a cultural mismatch with the institutional neutrality framework she had internalized at Chicago. She then reveals a striking counterfactual: she had planned to wait and become a leading candidate for the Columbia presidency, but the Dartmouth offer arrived quickly and she took it — potentially sparing her from the upheaval that eventually cost Minouche Shafik her job. The segment concludes with Dubner and Beilock naming the three Ivy presidents who were ousted — Shafik, Penn's Liz McGill, and Harvard's Claudine Gay — as Beilock's 'class' of leaders.
Dartmouth was the first Ivy League school to reinstate SAT and ACT scores in admissions after the COVID-era test-optional wave, citing data showing it helps identify talented low-income students.
The test-optional era hurt the students it was supposed to help. Low-income students were less likely to submit strong scores, and Dartmouth's data showed the SAT is a better predictor of success than letters of recommendation or grades.
Research by Raj Chetty at Harvard shows that socioeconomic resources help students with non-quantitative admissions factors like summer activities and letters of recommendation.
