Slashdot Mirror
Massive Financial Aid Data Breach Proves Stanford Lied For Years To MBAs (poetsandquants.com)
14 terabytes of "highly confidential" data about 5,120 financial aid applications over seven years were exposed in a breach at Stanford's Graduate School of Business -- proving that the school "misled thousands of applicants and donors about the way it distributes fellowship aid and financial assistance to its MBA students," reports Poets&Quants.
The information was unearthed by a current MBA student, Adam Allcock, in February of this year from a shared network directory accessible to any student, faculty member or staffer of the business school. In the same month, on Feb. 23, the student reported the breach to Jack Edwards, director of financial aid, and the records were removed within an hour of his meeting with Edwards. Allcock, however, says he spent 1,500 hours analyzing the data and compiling an 88-page report on it...
Allcock's discovery that more money is being used by Stanford to entice the best students with financial backgrounds suggests an admissions strategy that helps the school achieve the highest starting compensation packages of any MBA program in the world. That is largely because prior work experience in finance is generally required to land jobs in the most lucrative finance fields in private equity, venture capital and hedge funds.
Half the school's students are awarded financial aid, and though Stanford always insisted it was awarded based only on need, the report concluded the school had been "lying to their faces" for more than a decade, also identifying evidece of "systemic biases against international students."
Besides the embarrassing exposure of their financial aid policies, there's another obvious lesson, writes Slashdot reader twentysixV. "It's actually way too easy for users to improperly secure their files in a shared file system, especially if the users aren't particularly familiar with security settings." Especially since Friday the university also reported another university-wide file-sharing platform had exposed "a variety of information from several campus offices, including Clery Act reports of sexual violence and some confidential student disciplinary information from six to 10 years ago."
Allcock's discovery that more money is being used by Stanford to entice the best students with financial backgrounds suggests an admissions strategy that helps the school achieve the highest starting compensation packages of any MBA program in the world. That is largely because prior work experience in finance is generally required to land jobs in the most lucrative finance fields in private equity, venture capital and hedge funds.
Half the school's students are awarded financial aid, and though Stanford always insisted it was awarded based only on need, the report concluded the school had been "lying to their faces" for more than a decade, also identifying evidece of "systemic biases against international students."
Besides the embarrassing exposure of their financial aid policies, there's another obvious lesson, writes Slashdot reader twentysixV. "It's actually way too easy for users to improperly secure their files in a shared file system, especially if the users aren't particularly familiar with security settings." Especially since Friday the university also reported another university-wide file-sharing platform had exposed "a variety of information from several campus offices, including Clery Act reports of sexual violence and some confidential student disciplinary information from six to 10 years ago."
Interesting, but good luck ever getting a job as a known leaker.
This is what happens when MBAs run the show. There's a reason the MBA is now widely viewed at the GED of grad school.
There might be a more selfish reason for this. If they're looking for rich alumni who can feed money back into the program some years down the road, they'll want to funnel as many of them as they can into private equity, venture capital and hedge funds after graduation.
So the "controversy" here is that Stanford is using financial aid to attract the most intelligent kids to the university?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
for the security breach. Some heads will probably roll in the IT department.
Oh, and about the mismatch between what they've been telling applicants (and the outside world) vs. what the data showed they did. They'll try to be a bit "more transparent" about that.
Stanford MBA students has the reputation for focusing on the next multi-million-dollar app to make them instant rich. Basket weaving is a more useful skill and cost significantly less. I've heard some tech companies will toss out any resume that list a Stanford MBA.
Where there is not proof, there is only deception. It is true absolutely everywhere, especially where there is money.
People say I am cynical. But Jesus Christ the evidence is everywhere! People lie through their teeth to anyone and everyone the moment there is profit in doing so.
There is exactly one way to prevent this: insist on public accountability. There is absolutely no other way to keep anyone at all honest, period.
I thought it was telling when he did research on the data, and released a paper. That's initiative right there.
14TB.
5120 applications.
So, 2700 megabytes per applicant.
Was this data stored as 5 minutes of uncompressed video of each page or something?
Wait, wait, I know, applications were stored as a scanned, multi-page TIFF, wasn't it?
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Tough shit. Turnabout is fair play.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
The other part people missed is he has a connection fast enough to deal with 14 terabytes.
It's actually way too easy for users to improperly secure their files in a shared file system, especially if the users aren't particularly familiar with security settings
Really? Sounds like IT incompetence to me. When I worked at $MEGACORP, every shared file system was assigned two groups by default - one with read access, one with read/write. The file system owner (just regular users) simply add/remove users from these groups. Not in the groups? No access. They even had a web interface to do this, so even the dumbest of secretaries easily knew how to maintain tight control of file system permissions. Filesystems were regularly scanned for Public/Everyone permissions and the server owner would get an auto-nastygram. This isn't really that complicated I mean it's fucking 2017, this is basic stuff people. So much for the "best and brightest" at Stanford.
Perfect material for their Master Bullshit Artist (MBA) program at Stanford.
Creimer, can I make a pull request to you from our github repository about you?
-the chief representative A.C.
***please pay attention to the Moon update***
C.D. Reimer is a renowned Slashdot collaborator, as he puts it himself; "Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."
But does anybody ever wondered what "C.D." stands for? Well, it stands for Creimy Dumpty of course!
Creimy Dumpty sat on the wall,
Creimy Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Creimy Dumpty
Together again.
Creimy's siblings video and theme song, very realistic, especially the pants, just like Creimy's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
With "Vice President Pence Vowing US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon", we are sure they will need miracle workers up there, here is what it would look like. Note that Creimy takes care of bringing a lot of food to the moon as depicted below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Creimy's real pictures:
Before the sex change:
https://ibb.co/cc7Ddw
After the sex change:
https://ibb.co/gVad65
Creimy's "enterprise-level" chair, he talks about it all the time on slashdot:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...
Creimy's head, while his supervisor was talking to him, not with him, since it is impossible to do with Creimy:
http://ibb.co/mRVSaG
Creimy acting in educational resource document, he actually confirmed himself on Slashdot that he was handled by Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education! He is really a king Dumpty!:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...
--
Balena!
Way to go boys!
--
John Edgar Hoover
He has spent on analysing this data 1500 hours?! Since February?! Working on the same data set over 5 hours per day during the last 10 months?! To write a 88 pages report?! While studying said MBA at said University?! I cannot think of many positive conclusions from any of that for either the person or the university/degree.
That statement seems to indicate that either that guy is lying and/or his proceeding/knowledge is highly inefficient (not knowing how to automate the analysis/to do what a MBA-holder usually do and pay someone with that knowledge? Writing a 88-page report to just come to the conclusion that people with certain background are more likely to be chosen?) and/or doing a MBA at Standford isn't precisely effort/time consuming (well...). I guess that it is quite evident that MBAs aren't exactly difficult/demanding and that aspects like getting contacts, opening doors are usually more relevant than the knowledge itself; but 1500 hours in 10 months seems a bit too much for what is being described under these conditions.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
The much more spectacular one would have been "MBA student that can analyze data found".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
School's or the student's?
The data also showed that female students were significantly more likely to have money thrown at them than men in identical financial circumstances. And men are already a disadvantaged minority in the entire education system, let alone by the time they get to university.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
The post why selection bias is the most powerful force in education describes what's happening here, and it's not about educating students, sadly.
> see subject.
Did you even read the same summary as the rest of us, never-mind the actual article.
He's going to be expelled, and he'll be lucky if he doesn't go to jail. Permissions being set wrong doesn't make it legal to go spelunking through files he has no business accessing.
So the school that teaches MBAs how to cheat everybody is a cheater. Big surprise there.
Reminds me of a story that I've read a few times in my life - I'm curious if anyone else here has heard about it. The story goes that a university was working out a list of which students would be granted scholarships. A senior official had a list of the top students that would then be further reduced to the top half who would then get the scholarships. The story goes that the list of the half of the students that failed the final selection was accidently used to grant the scholarships. By the time the error was discovered it was too late and the students were already studying. The story ends with the university later comparing the grades of the students who were mistakenly granted scholarships to those who should have received them and it was found that there was no significant difference.
Let me go find my surprised face.
Analysis of greedy sociopaths' activities finds that greedy sociopaths are greedy and sociopathic.
Also, water is wet.