MIT Dean of Admissions Resigns in Lying Scandal

Billosaur writes "CNN has a report that the Dean of Admissions at MIT has resigned her post after admitting to lying about her academic record. 'Marilee Jones, who joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1979 to lead the recruitment of women at the university, stepped down from her post after admitting that she had misrepresented her academic degrees to the institute, according to a statement posted on MIT's Web site.' The school had recently received information about her credentials and the subsequent investigation uncovered the misrepresentations. Question is, why did it take 28 years?"

Comments

Hypocrisy

[dshaw858]

The thing that really annoys me about this whole ordeal is the nearly unfathomable amounts of hypocrisy which envelop the entire scenario. First of all, she was the dean of admissions--it was her job to admit and deny people, to make or break what I'm sure were many of the applicants' dreams. I'm a high school senior (trying to decide between UCSB and the University of Washington for next year), and this makes my blood simply boil. I didn't apply to MIT, but I know a lot of people who did. Think about how horrible and betrayed they must feel that the dean of admissions didn't even go to college herself! And all that talking and prodding about academic honesty...

I think the worst part, though, is that she wasn't just the dean of admissions--she was capitalizing on her position of power as well, giving speeches to high schools (such as my own) to promote herself and the book that she wrote. That's what really irks me.

In some situations, I would have said that after 28 years doing a good job in her position, she should be reprimanded but not asked to resign. However, her blatant abuse of the system and extensive lying and hypocrisy simply drive me crazy.

- dshaw

Re:Hypocrisy

[Aqua OS X]

Eh, she had a senior administrative job. It's not like she could've majored in Bureaucracy Studies in order to prep for that position. What really mattered was experience, her ability to network, her ability to raise money, etc. Moreover, admission standards are typically set by department chairs who understand their department's student body and curriculum. In the end, those are usually the people who set the important benchmarks.

Quite frankly, there are a LOT of desk jobs in the world that don't require a college degree as long as you're a reasonably competent and experienced individual. Thousands of college students graduate every year and enter a professional career that has nothing to do with their former major. I imagine the only college skills they reference are the the basic reading / writing / critical thought skills acquired from 1st and 2nd year General Ed. For many, a BA or BS is little more then a piece of paper that allows you to apply to new stratum of employment.

That's not to say you don't specialized degrees for specialized fields, and that's not to day she shouldn't step down. However, those potentially "crushed dreams" probably have little do with her ability to do that job.

Or...

[b1ad3runn3r]

While she was good at her job, everyone must be subjected to the same standards of honesty and culpability. She made a mistake, and has benefited from it for a while. However, the truth came out and she must now, like she preaches to high-schoolers, accept responsibility for her actions.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[tomhudson]

"Question is, why did it take 28 years?"

Answer: because the person who hired her lied about THEIR qualifications - they can't read. There are more than a few university graduates who can't write a 2-page letter, summarize an editorial, make a decent presentation or speech, formulate logical arguments, ...oh .... BRIGHT ... SHINY ... THING ...

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[jesboat]

You're wrong. It's because she was damn good at her job, and, frankly, it'll be a loss to MIT that she resigned.

Re:This means one of two things...

[Anonymous Coward]

But many top jobs rely much more on the people skills than on technical knowledge, and this is one of them. So yeah, it is interesting that a dropout from a no-name college could become so successful in this role, in the estimation of her peers

Due to the extreme self-selection of MIT's applicants the job of picking out a class of ~ 1050 students each year is pretty easy.

MIT knows what are the metrics that signal likely success (e.g. class ranking is one of them, strangely enough, at least as of the late '80s). For admissions, MIT (again, as of the late '80s) just has two people read each folder (one of the readers is generally a volunteer outside of the admissions unit), ranks them on two axes and into nine boxes, admits pretty much everyone who scores #1 in both, doesn't admit anyone who scores #3 in both, and the people spend a lot of time agonizing over the middle cases, as is inevitable.

As I remember, managing yield (guessing how many will accept) is also fairly easy compared to other highly selective schools; in the last three decades or so they only screwed up once, and had to house a group of freshman in makeshift quarters in the basement of the graduate dorm (which for most of them actually turned out to be a very positive thing, a little adversity and bonding and all that).

Before this woman, and a real pro in the field, MIT had for the longest time a non-professional who probably also rose through the ranks; by and large admissions were on auto-pilot for something more than a decade, and the Institute survived quite well.

MIT also accepts essentially no transfer students, and of course the various departments handle graduate admissions.

This wouldn't work at, say, most of the selective schools other than Harvard; managing yield must be a nightmare, with large wait lists for insurance against too many students accepting.

Re:This means one of two things...

[slashdotmsiriv]

"Either: She is obviously good at her job and should keep it.
Or: University degrees aren't worth very much."

Or her job is so easy that even a retarded liar can do it.
Seriously, how difficult can it be for a bureaucrat to
pretend that it manages a bunch of other stupid bureaucrats and to go through resumes
and select those with 100% test scores and GPAs?

This case goes to show how overestimated bureaucratic positions are, and how
people in prestigious scientific centers should wake up and put those bureaucrats
in the place they deserve. That is:
a) at most 20-30% of faculty stuff salaries. Hell those stupid idiots should get
even less than graduate students.
b) absolutely no respect. I am seek of watching students and professors begging every
retarded secretary to do the minimum of his/her job.

Re:This means one of two things...

[bmeiers]

If she had her degree, she would still have her job.

University degrees are worth plenty.

No statute of limitations?

[rs79]

It's interesting that if this were a court case, unless it was murder or a war crime it wouild have been moot because of the statute of limitations. While it varies in the US on a state by state basis it runs from 1 to 15 years. In Japan even murder has a 25 year statute of limitations. I think it's six years for breach of contract in Mass.

People exagerate. That's a bad thing. MIT didn't do it's job either. An dher track record was steller. Seems like no harm no foul to me.

It would surprise me if some good attorney could't play the statute of limitations angle and get her her job back.

I'd wager to say though thst she was probably good at crossing t's and dotting i's in the same way you hire a hacker to do your security. They know what to look for being experts in the field of what you don't want.

I'd take performance over paper any day.

And a possible reason why it happened

[pikine]

I don't endorse the view of this guy, but the summary is asking the question "why did it take 28 years?" and this short blog entry attempts to offer an explanation.

http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/04/27/the-real-reaso n-why-mit-dean-marilee-jones-was-fired/

The fact MIT was tipped off by an anonymous person (why wouldn't MIT simply say it was an internal audit, even simply refuse to comment?) makes the story ripe for conspiracy theory.

She was known as a lightweight

[deanc]

Many people on campus at MIT viewed her as a lightweight. She kept trying to portray herself as a "Den Mother."

The odd thing is that, unlike most other Deans of Admission, at MIT and elsewhere, she had a compulsion to turn herself into a public figure. First she became a public figure on campus, when the previous Dean of Admissions wasn't really known. Then she started becoming a presence among the community of Admissions officials and guidance conselors and universities at high schools. Finally she went on a very public book tour and would have frequent media appearances, making her one of the highest profile Admissions Deans in the country. It's almost as though she had a compulsion to publicly misrepresent herself to larger and larger audiences, as her fake academic would be repeated at all of these venues. She probably saw that she "got away with it" in 1978 and had a need to keep pushing the issue.

Glad she's gone

[Somnus]

As an MIT alum admitted prior to her regime, I'm pleased that she will be replaced. While her lies are a black eye for the institute, her admissions policies and personal philosophy had done more damage. In an attempt to admit "well-rounded" students and compete with the Harvards of the world, she chipped away at the identity that makes MIT unique: academic excellence, creativity and fun. If that makes MIT too "geeky," so be it.

Moreover, her outspokenness reduced the dignity of her position and the process. Admissions should serve the principles of the school -- period.

Re:Glad she's gone

[JelloJoe]

As an MIT alum myself recruite during her regime, I am sad she is leaving. Well-rounded people are necessary to keep the place sane! You know how tough it is, and without some amount of normality, the suicide rate would have kept increasing and increasing. Well-rounded is fine at MIT as long as they are mentally tough. Without that toughness you are bound to fail out. This whole thing smells like an inside job, as if someone was holding this information not only over marilee's head, but also over the Institue's head. She did quite a fine job in the admissions dept and I hope her strategy at recruiting lives on. Your comments sounds as if the students admitted during her regime weren't "qualified" enough to be at MIT. I'll tell you though, the quality of MIT student has been increasing every year. The talent pool just gets better and better. You being admitted pre-1997 doesn't show that you are any better than any mit student admitted post-1997. With her resignation, it also does not discredit the plethora of students who graduated during this period.

Re:Glad she's gone

[Anonymous Coward]

You know how tough it is, and without some amount of normality, the suicide rate would have kept increasing and increasing. Well-rounded is fine at MIT as long as they are mentally tough. Without that toughness you are bound to fail out.

I'm also an MIT alum. I was pretty well acquainted with two students who committed suicide at MIT during the last ten years. And I really don't think you know what you're saying here.

Re:Glad she's gone

[HPNpilot]

I agree. I, also, am an alum from before her reign. Her desire to set the male-female ratio at 1:1 was a de-facto quota system which resulted in 1 out of 4 females being admitted compared to 1 out of 12 males. This, plain and simple, reduced the academic quality of the student body. I saw this when I was there and professors I have kept in contact mention it all the time. Some have had to lighten up on the course material while others have been able to make do with adjusting the grading curve a bit.

This year's application looked more like a liberal arts college application than an engineering school's. I just hope MIT gets a hold of themselves and moves more in the direction of academic excellence over artificial quota systems. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against women going to top engineering schools, but the reality is that right now if you want the best students in that field it will be less then 50% female.

My donations ceased a while ago and will not resume until this situation is corrected.

A PhD doesn't make you an expert

[DaFork]

You could hold a Ph.D in computer sciences while liberally abusing Goto statements.

Especially since you don't have to know anything about computers to get a PhD in Computer Science. I one worked with a person who had a PhD in CS from a Big 10 school and was absolutely clueless. After a while I got tired of him using his advanced degree as a club and decided to do a little investigation. I discovered that their undergrad and graduate degrees was in Mathematics and their PhD specialized in a very mathematical area of AI.

In other words, this Computer Scientist had never taken a CS class! He was just good at algorithms.

Re:Let me get this straight

[shark swooner]

and perhaps a little telling about how much weight we give to pieces of paper

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_(economics)

Spence began his 1973 model with a hypothetical. Suppose that there are two types of employees -- good and bad -- and that employers are willing to pay a higher wage to the good type than the bad type. Spence assumes that for employers, there's no real way to tell in advance which employees will be of the good or bad type. Bad employees aren't really upset about this, because they get a free ride off of the hard work of the good employees. But good employees know that they deserve to be paid more for their effort, so they invest in the signal -- in this case, some amount of education. Spence assumes that education doesn't enhance the employee's productivity at all. But he does make one key assumption: good-type employees pay less for one unit of education than bad-type employees. This is not indicative of the cost of tuition and living expenses, as one would expect better employees to get educated at better and more expensive institutions. Rather, it is indicative of the opportunity cost that is paid by the time and effort invested into obtaining the education, which for a more efficient "good" employee, would be less than for a less efficient "bad" employee getting the same degree with the same grades from the same institution.

Spence discovered that even if education didn't contribute anything to an employee's productivity, good employees would still buy more education in order to signal their higher productivity to employers. (Economists sometimes call this the signalling hypothesis in education, often cited as a reason why government should not subsidize higher education for workers: more education allows workers to be paid a higher wage but doesn't make society more productive.) Bad workers, for their part, would accept a lower wage rather than pay the higher price (for them) of getting more education. And employers, seeing that the education signal really is correlated to employee productivity, would condition their wages on the signal, offering better wages to those who had invested more in the signal. This is called a signalling equilibrium.

She will be missed

[Piedramente]

As a current MIT student, I am one among many who are sad to see her go. She did a great job, and has received numerous administrator awards. College admissions officers across the country appreciate all she has done to champion a more balanced admissions process. I for one am very glad we have a more balanced male/female ratio.

Those that she changed MIT admissions policy by herself are completely mistake. She was asked by the institute specifically before she became dean to find a way to increase female attendance at MIT. She acted in accordance with and with full backing by the MIT administration's wishes. She was very good at her job, which is why nobody even thought to question her credentials.

A loss to the community

[Zatchmort]

As someone who was just rejected from MIT, I think it's a shame she has to resign. I heard her speak, and her ideas and influence on the college admissions community have been amazing and wonderful. I think she's made some very good changes, and I can only hope that whoever they get next will continue in that direction. It's also obvious, as some others have said, that her job didn't really require a degree, only experience. That said, I think it's clear that, now that her lying has been exposed, she couldn't be allowed to keep her position.

fovnder

[Anonymous Coward]

"William Barton Rogers, 1804-1882, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was educated at the College of William and Mary but apparently did not receive a degree."

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[mangastudent]

Accreditation organizations and MIT are known to play something like the game of "chicken" with each other. Basically, if one of them, especially in the field of engineering, were to pull MIT's accreditation, it would reflect a lot more on the org than on MIT, and so they tend to work out accommodations when e.g. their educational philosophy/pedagogy significantly differs with MIT's.

One frequent example is whomever accredits the EECS department. At least in times past, they had an obsession with "teaching design". EECS does not believe you can teach design per se, there is no specific design only course, although many that include teaching design in the context of what else the course is teaching. So they run around looking at the required courses and assign design credits to each one, totalling enough to satisfy the org.

I can just imagine MIT's reaction if such an org said of a professor who'd been vetted by his department, school (engineering, science, etc.) and the visiting committee for the department, "I'm sorry, you're just going to have to fire him because he doesn't have sufficient credentials...." ^_^

I wonder how many of the professional SF authors who have taught at the Institute had PhDs in English? Few, if any, I'd suspect. As noted, MIT cares a lot more about what you can do that credentials. MIT for the most part is a place about actually doing things, not piling up credentials, useless papers and books, etc.

Bigger question

[ThoreauHD]

If she did a good job for 30 years, then are College degrees not worth the paper they're printed on? The irony is thick at ole MIT. Maybe Hawking can deconstruct that chicken and egg scenario while still maintaining MIT's credibility.

Oh, and let's not forget really successful people. The richest man in existence, perhaps? Yea, let's not go there. The jist is, from what I've seen is this. People who don't get to sit on their sheepskin, work harder because of it. Quite the conundrum.

Maybe they can make a degree for people who don't have degrees and yet are more successful because of it. Or maybe we should judge people by what they do, rather than what their parents could afford when they're college age. Just a thought. But cattle branding is so much easier when you hire someone- isn't it.

And just a look back a few year, it's a good thing Abe Lincoln formed his own opinions in a log cabin, and that Edgar Allen Poe was kicked out of the University of Virginia for crappy grades. What unconsumer-like idiots these legends are. They would have gotten their work done properly if they had a degree from a certified/set curriculum.

Re:It took 28 years because she is a woman.

[WEFUNK]

"Fact 1: MIT has granted Full Professorships to people without degrees."

Can you cite an example, please?

I don't believe that Ed Fredkin has any degrees (except probably honorary ones, I've seen him titled as "Dr." and he is certainly deserving), but he was appointed a full professor at MIT in electrical engineering in the sixties, while on his way to becoming a pioneer in artificial intelligence (reversible computing, the Fredkin Gate, etc.) and establishing his concept ("digital physics/philosophy") that the universe can be represented as a discrete/finite cellular automata, or essentially as a computer program. He dropped out of Caltech at 19 to become a fighter pilot and built his experience at MIT Lincoln Labs and through a career as an early computer entrepreneur, working with the PDP-1. He has held other positions as a professor in physics and is currently a "Distinguished Career Professor" at Carnegie Mellon.

I'm certain there are other examples where MIT professors lacked advanced degrees particularly in the early computing days and where successful entrepreneurs have returned for appointments. Certainly this is common at Ivy league schools such as Harvard where former politicians and other notable figures frequently hold appointments. To someone's point about accreditation, certainly the qualifications of the faculty are an important component but this does not generally require that 100% of teaching or research staff hold advanced degrees, particularly if they have practical experience and/or published research.

Re:I know what CS

[IamTheRealMike]

For what it's worth, I agree with you 100%. The problem is that "computer science" is so vaguely defined it's not even a useful term. There are only a few jobs for computer scientists, and even then, those jobs usually require you to be both a talented software engineer AND a computer scientist. We have a few of those types at Google and I have mad respect for their skillz, but they would never have been hired if they didn't know C++ or Java - it's that simple.

Unfortunately, there is a small but not insignificant part of the software development population who always had a greater love for the mathematical side of computing - in which there aren't many jobs - and were never that keen on the gritty details of how computers actually work. So they end up bitter and take every opportunity to "remind" people that computer science isn't about programming or systems architecture, it's just maths (ie, the part they like). They conveniently ignore that the popular definition of computer science is what's taught on computer science courses, which should be a whole mix of things.

Re:Your're right on both counts

[Moe1975]

You Jack, are not only an ASSHOLE, you are an ignorant SOB - and it shows.
Out of the total number of PC's that come in for repair to most PC repair shops, just how many of them have "a reversed floppy cable, incorrect jumpers on the hard drives, nonsense BIOS settings and a disconnected 4-pin ATX plug" - just how many? MOST Windows boxes have Windows problems (I will assume you do know what those are) and/or power supply problems. This is from experience, and I lasted more than a day, more than months, solved every problem brought before me - but this is back when I had to fix boxes for a living, not anymore.
I know your kind. You have no degree - and you will never have one. If you did, you would not be fixing boxes for a living. Having no degree, you automatically assume that folks who do are "cocky" about it - way you would be if you had one - and now you must "knock them off their high horse" . . . which is why you have gone to such great lengths to both set up your little "degrade others to boost my own failing self esteem" system, and post all about it - nauseatingly pathetic.
I would bet you have not given any of the victims more than a few minutes to work on your little bullshit test rig, standing there the whole time, glaring at them, running your mouth to where they can't hear themselves think - as if paying clients would be doing the exact same thing . . . boy, just where and how do they breed "people" like you?