Perils Of Credentialism - MIT Example | Hacker News Reader

Perils Of Credentialism - MIT Example

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25 pointshelwr34 comments

From the end of TFA: Bill Gates could never have been the Dean of Admissions at Stanford, but the Computer Science building at Stanford carries his name.

sigh, i wish people would stop using Gates, Zuckerberg, and other drop-outs from elite colleges to rally up salt-of-the-earth populist propaganda like "oh you can come from humble down-to-earth roots and be a college drop-out and still be a billionaire!" many of these guys came from highly-educated, upper-middle-class families and went to elite private high schools and colleges. the true populist heroes are lurking here amongst the HN readership ... people who have successful autonomous small businesses that are making a good living.

I think that's a really good point.

- Gates, Allen: Harvard

- Bezos: Princeton

- Page, Brin, Yang, Filo: Stanford

- Zuckerberg: Harvard

All these had the brains, drive and position to at least get accepted by a top-notch school. But that got me thinking, what exceptions are there? I thought of Jobs/Wozniack, but what other big hitters out there went somewhere besides and A-list school? I know they are out there, especially the multi-million dollar hits, but naturally, the press doesn't mention someone's school, unless it's a big name.

Paul Allen went to Washington State University. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen

Perhaps not so well known (which is to say, I didn't know this): Woz was a UC Berkeley dropout, but after Apple went public he went back and got a B.S. in EECS.

Not sure if this is what you are thinking exactly but:

Sam Walton - University of Missouri

Mike Duke - Georgia Tech

Rex Tillerson - UTx - Austin

Alan Mulally - U Kansas

Warren Buffet - UPenn, U Nebraska-Lincoln, Columbia

James Sinegal - AA from San Diego City College

Bernard Marcus - Rutgers

Arthur Blank - Babson

Ron Brill - Fairleigh Dickinson

George Dayton - nothing after HS

Charles Rudolph Walgreen - nothing after HS

Michael Dell - U Tx Austin

Marcus Goldman - Nothing after HS

Richard M. Schulze - Nothing after HS

I think I'll stop. I'm just going down the Fortune 500 list, and if the company has an identifiable founder that didn't go to an A-list school for their education I'm listing them (I tossed in a couple CEOs as well). Schulze (Best Buy) is at #45 so I think that paints the picture.

Maybe a better question is, if the A-list schools are supposed to be so much better than other schools, why aren't the better represented in this list. Hell U Texas-Austin has about as many as Harvard and it's a state school.

Jobs dropped out of Reed.

The only one that comes to mind is Michael Dell (UT Austin)

And then there's Edward Fredkin, who dropped out of Caltech after a year, and later (without a degree) became a full professor at MIT, as well as founding a number of companies.

"To maintain intellectual honesty and consistency, MIT should announce that it would henceforth stop requiring formal credentials in evaluating candidates for this and other similar jobs. In other words, future candidates like her, who feel confident in their ability to perform the job, shouldn’t feel the need to invent degrees on their resumes. Come on, you may say, how are they supposed to find out who is a good candidate and who is bad. Well, they hired her based on an invented degree, didn’t they? Didn’t she work out OK for 28 years?"

I'm not following the line of thinking here. A single instance of a high performer with fake credentials does not negate the fact that credentials tend to be a rough indicator of performance in many jobs.

The same point that jumped out at me from the article. Which one of the documented logical fallacies is this?

I entirely disagree with this article.

[First a factual correction: the original job she applied for (some administrative job) did not require the high-level credentials she faked.] Now my opinion: Whether or not somebody is fit for the job is not for the applicant to judge but for the employer. You cannot fake something in order to seem well-fit. For the same reason that a student, who feels she is capable of doing PhD level work, can't inflate her GPA. For the same reason that a student who feels she can make it through MIT can't add additional honors and awards to her MIT application. It is not about who can make it and do an OK job. For many positions, there are many more qualified applicants than slots. The faking of the credentials is extremely immoral and pretty much nullifies her worth to me. Human frailty, you say? More like human greed? It's not like she got caught faking credentials during her first year of employment. She was at MIT for 20 years. At some point she must have realized what she did was immoral. 20 years is more than enough time to quit the job, without a public spectacle, just giving a personal reason, and going into some other business without faked credentials (maybe her own business, like she does now). Money must have been too good to take the right path. PS: I am not bitter against MIT or MJ in particular; I actually was an MIT student admitted under MJ's leadership.

First of all, this article is three years old. Second of all, Marilee Jones blatantly lied about her credentials for 28 years. Yes, she did a fantastic job while she was at MIT, but that doesn't change the fact that she lied. This is not an issue of credentialism, it's an issue of trust and integrity. As far as I'm concerned, what she did is on par with the kid from Harvard who was recently charged with fabricating his life story...

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/05/by_gl...

It is an issue of trust...trust in college credentials. If you ask me, overpriced colleges and forcing degrees on the art, history, etc. majors of the world is a far greater swindle and far more damaging on the economy.

Colleges have conditioned the public to think if there are two similar people, the one with the degree is much better than the one without. Degree requirements on many jobs have increased from bachelors, to masters and even PhDs over the years.

People like Marilee put these claims in doubt and show that degrees are a poor predictor of capability; something that employers over-rely on these days.

Everyone makes mistakes - this was certainly worse than some but really, I don't see how she would ever have had an opportunity to honestly correct the mistake after getting hired without this happening, so she had little choice but to live with it. It does raise the issue of why she had to fake her credentials - or even feel pressured to - to be considered for the job if she was a good candidate without them.

She could have honestly corrected her "mistake" by saying "I don't have a degree; I lied on my resume."

Many organizations have a policy that you can and will be terminated at any time for lying on your application. If she admitted it, bam.

Which has precisely Zip to do with being honest. Honesty isn't a sliding scale, where you say one thing if its good for you, and another if it harms you.

How did she perform at her job for 28 years? If OK, that performance is a far better guide to her quality than any bits of paper she may or may not have. If not OK, they should have sacked her.

Once an employee has been working at an employer for a reasonable length of time (certainly a lot less than 28 years), the employer has adequate knowledge of how that employee performs at their job; and if the employee isn't up to it, they have the opportunity to end the employment. Therefore I think that after a certain interval (say a year or 2), an employer should not be able to use the accuracy or otherwise of an employee's CV to sack them.

How did she perform at her job for 28 years?

Her actual performance was at times quite controversial. I will defer to the MIT students and alumni here (remember, some of those will have been admitted when she was in charge of admission at MIT) to comment on what they think the pros and cons of her legacy are.

I was at MIT during her reign as dean of admissions (I dropped out about a year or so into it). She was actually rather offensive, claiming that the generation after me cared more about fitting in than academics, and she did a pretty good job of skewering the extracurricular activities which were one of the major defining parts of MIT (at least for undergraduates).

Actually, I have nothing good to say about MIT's administration above the individual professors and departments -- they spent huge amounts of money on pointless things, and mainly consisted of professional administrators (educated at e.g. BU) vs. alumni. During my time at MIT they destroyed the FSILG system (student-managed small housing groups) due to one fucknozzle drinking himself to death next door to my residence.

I haven't kept up with MIT since around 2000, but it was definitely on a downward trend from 1996-1999, surviving mainly on past reputation.

Yeah, I chose MIT because I wanted to get my ass kicked, which didn't happen so much. It's still possible, but it seems that they've been watering down everything. They banned triple majoring, and I think they've even stopped granting dual degrees now.

The administration has always seemed pathologically risk-averse, and mostly come from the wrong sort of background to run the type of school MIT should be.

It's still not a bad place, but I think I could put together a far superior program, attached to another research university (to have access to grad students), to educate undergrads for $15-20k/yr (vs. the $60k/yr MIT claims to be spending). Take risks!

I think something like KAUST (in Saudi) could end up being what MIT should be -- or Olin (the free school which has lots of MIT SM/PhD instructors).

If I had kids, I'd probably push toward an undergrad-focused school like Reed for pure science education, or Stanford or UC Berkeley for someone who wanted to be an engineer, just to have access to the silicon valley ecosystem. I think there is a strong case for "take 1-2 years between HS and college to work", too.

Yeah, I agree, I still enjoyed it, met a lot of great people, and (I think) got a good education. Just meant to agree that the administration seems to be almost more of a hinderance than a help to those things.

Olin isn't free anymore.

http://olin.edu/admission/costs.asp

I think she did an OK job, except for her recent campaign to admit more of the "well-rounded" type that most Ivies also go for. I think that somewhat diminished what makes MIT special.

I think it may be part of the reason that so many of my classmates went into finance and consulting after graduating. Many seemed to be more in love with the name than with tech itself.

This isn't universally true, of course, and much of it is based on hearsay, since I wasn't there to observe other time periods.

Having such a 'statute of limitations' on resume-lies would encourage a lot more lying, by everyone who thinks they can do a good job for the 'grace period' without their deception being discovered.

This woman was the Dean of Admissions. To forgive her deception would have made it hard to object in principle to anyone lying on their MIT college application.

Yeah, universities certainly never overstate the value of a degree.

"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

MIT is a beacon of intellectual integrity. As such, it is the duty of the institute to let her go. Condoning her actions would be condoning fabricated information, and thereby undermining the entire scientific research community. They punish students with the same sort of rigor, why not the faculty?

This comment has said more than all others so far in this thread, and I agree with it. While I'm of the camp of individuals that think the job market, and society as a whole should be more performance and output oriented versus what a degree says (because for what it's worth, I should never have so much as graduated high school yet here I am working for Samsung USA), allowing her to stay would have compromised the ethos of what MIT represents. Well stated gjcourt.

The point of firing her isn't to get rid of a bad worker; it is based on game theory. The firing hurts both MIT and the dean, but it should dissuade people from lying in these kinds of situations.

Dunno if they sent the right message. "You will be able to get away with it for half a lifetime but will have to pretend to be sorry when we find out."

>but will have to pretend to be sorry when we find out."

Uh, they fired her. So the message is "you'll get fired when we find out". Which seems like exactly the right message, given their goals.

Too often, I see bloggers willing to give executives and public officials a pass when they are caught in a lie. The rationale is that the people are otherwise doing a good job, but the bloggers ignore the irony that part of the job was enforcing the rules and imposing judgments on others.

If you're a Dean who has ever kicked a student out of school for an honor violation, I have no sympathy when you get called-out for lying. Too many students get kicked out of school and have permanent black mark on their record for similar offenses; why should the Dean get a pass.

If you're a former President whose job as chief executive is enforce the laws of the country, then I have a hard time having sympathy when people find-out you've lied under oath. Too many people go to jail for perjury; why should the President get a pass.

If you're a former New York prosecutor famous for corruption cases, then I have little sympathy when you've been caught hiding funds to pay a prostitute. Too many people are vilified for this; why should an Attorney General get a pass.

All that being said, I don't judge this Dean, the former President, or the NY Attorney General. Instead, I judge the bloggers who have a double standard for people they like.

The reason she was let go had nothing to do with her lying, it had to do with her doing a good job for so many years.

Some first-year employee with little visibility might be forgiven for lying about academic credentials on her resume. Sweep it all under the rug. No harm, no foul. The Dean of Admissions with a wonderfully effective career and lots of praise could not.

(Actually, after I wrote that I had second thoughts. The fact is that any challenge to the idea that college credentials are critical to job performance in an academic setting must receive the most severe punishment.)

I think there is a bit of populist rabble-rousing going on, but that doesn't detract from the fact that there is a serious point here as well. In my opinion, after that much service to the university, somebody should have cut her some slack. Surely MIT is big enough to let in the occasional person of competence sans degree.

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