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."

Comments

Worth the sacrifice?

[Kaenneth]

Interesting, but good luck ever getting a job as a known leaker.

They might also have a more selfish reason.

[AtariDatacenter]

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.

Re: They might also have a more selfish reason.

[fubarrr]

And this is not much different from pretty much all other business schools with any much big name.

I'm Russian, from a top 1% family in Russia. I studied in an average college in Canada on my own volition, against wishes of my clueless parents who wanted to bang big money away on a business school. It took a lot of efforts for me to convince them that "big name business school" is a waste of money if you go there for actual skills and knowledge in the best case, and a disaster when you simply gave money away to small time fraudsters in the worst.

I know personally two other Russians few years older than me who went for Harvard MBA, and now spill bitter tears for spending a big portion of their family fortune for, at best, laughably mediocre education for such price.

And even in the mid-tier college I was going to, I saw that very few people who were getting not even a scholarship, but a "income supplement stipend," usually given to low income students, being given to another Russian guy who was always dressed expensively and casually wore $2000 watch and few other surprisingly well off people.

I instantly understood that they do it in anticipation that if this guy will work in his father's company and earn big buck, they can proudly put his testament and his salary on their graduate outcomes statistics.

Re: They might also have a more selfish reason.

[drinkypoo]

Middle class values education, ruling class values connections.

People keep making the mistake of believing that the world is a meritocracy, but it ain't. It's an insiders' club. If you're not good at schmoozing, though, you have no choice but to get by on competence, which is frankly a lot harder than doing it the other way. You know, with bullshit.

Re: Let Me Get This Straight

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is that they lie about it to attract students. The other famous MBA schools do not lie about it.

Re:Let Me Get This Straight

[PopeRatzo]

The academic reputation of the entire University is now at risk.

No, it's not. Business schools like Stanford's are run like little fiefdoms. Nobody's going to decide not to go to Stanford for Physics because the MBAs are crooked.

Here's a little secret: MBAs have always been crooked. They're basically certification for liars. They're institutions where the most corrupt groom potential future corrupt people the way pedophiles groom third-graders. People who believe that Humanities departments at universities are the most politicized places in higher education have never looked into what goes on at a top-tier business school.

1500 hours!

[CustomSolvers2]

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.

Re:1500 hours!

[DNS-and-BIND]

So instead of digesting this shocking information about a very prominent institution being caught red-handed in a gigantic lie, you attack the messenger. That's a pretty clever deflection, do you work as a journalist as your full-time job?

Re:1500 hours!

[DNS-and-BIND]

Well, you should consider journalism because you're very good at it. You totally changed the subject and in a very effective way. They can make good use of people like you.

Missing from the article: Rampant sexism

[Shadow of Eternity]

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.