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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.
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.
No, it is that they lie about it to attract students. The other famous MBA schools do not lie about it.
How do you know that other schools tell the truth about their policies?
From the article in the second link: :-)
But through the years, Stanford has insisted that it only awards scholarship money on the basis of financial need—not merit. Most of its peer schools, with the exception of Harvard Business School, make no such claim.
So the other schools don't really disclose their admissions policies
Telling people they are extra special snowflakes and lying about granting financial aid is unethical and may be illegal. A school that routinely lies to it's students might even risk loosing accreditation. A class action law suit is inevitable.
Overt discrimination by a educational institution is illegal under federal law. The MBA program faces fines, loss of federal funding and criminal charges for individuals and the program as a whole. It is possible that Stanford may have to end their MBA program. The academic reputation of the entire University is now at risk. There will be a mass exit of anyone in the chain of command above the business school. Even regents may be forced off the board.
You question is as stupid and vile as you are. I can only assume that you think it is acceptable to steal from old people and children. How many puppies did you stomp on this week?
Why is Snark Required?
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.
What world do you live in where wealthy white collar criminals are held accountable? That is not the US I know.
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.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Nope. They pay the most experienced students to come, and claim to pay based on need, not merit.
The starting pay more closely correlates with previous experience, so paying the most experienced to come distorts the starting pay used to advertise the school to other prospective students.
Learn to love Alaska
"So the "controversy" here is that Stanford is using financial aid to attract the most intelligent kids to the university?"
No, they're using financial intelligence to aid them attracting the most rich kids.
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.
But that is ridiculous. I highly doubt that anyone at any time thought that Stanford's Modus operandi was to find the 1000 poorest people in the world every year and give them scholarships. A big hint to all the students would of been a lack of malnourished Africans. Scholarships, by their very definition, go to otherwise overqualified individuals who cannot quite afford tuition.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
Scholarships, by their very definition, go to otherwise overqualified individuals who cannot quite afford tuition.
That was Stanford's claim. The reality is that it went to people that they felt would make them look good, with people in identical financial circumstances receiving very different awards.
What world do you live in where wealthy white collar criminals are held accountable? That is not the US I know.
Depends. Remember ENRON? They got busted, the case was also basically tossed because the prosecuting attorney turned it into a gigantic shitshow and lied. Those white collar criminals are held to account, occasionally but it has to have actual "human impact" in most cases i.e. someone has to directly die because of their action or in-action. There are rarer cases, like in Iceland where they threw bankers into prison over the mortgage crash, the same happened in Canada with realtors and bankers being tossed into prison last year for house price fixing.
In most western countries it's "direct crimes against a person" that lead to jail time. That's assault, battery, rape, murder, violent B&E/entry into a boarding house(home) w/people inside(Canada) and so on. This'll change as society moves more to more electronic means, digital currencies and so on. Title fraud is the new hot-shit right now, and governments are looking to move that to prison time from fines/forfeiture. If you don't know what title fraud is, it's where someone steals your property out from under you and borrows money against it and walks away with said money. Generally the amounts are over $250k which makes them a felony or indictable offence.
Om, nomnomnom...
So the school that teaches MBAs how to cheat everybody is a cheater. Big surprise there.
Humanity evolved. It was not created.
Deception is an artifact of evolution because it offers survival advantages. It can be useful to outsmart both predator and prey. But it is maximally useful when manipulating herd members for one's own gain.
Of course, a herd in which all members lie all the time won't survive. There is an optimal balance between deception and honesty within one's herd, and natural selection has been zooming on that balance for millions of years.
The game might have changed just a bit recently, with human herds being gargantuan compared to anything we have seen for most of our evolutionary history. But the principle is the same.
Every human evolved in this context. Every human has the ability to lie. The inclination to do so varies a bit due to genetic variation and environmental factors. But it's there in all of us.
No evolutionary process will ever rid us of it. But public accountability will keep it under control.
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.
In most western countries it's "direct crimes against a person" that lead to jail time.
Here in USA we have this thing called "the war on drugs."