"Résumé lies and Signals":
Over at the Chicago Faculty Blog, Saul Levmore has an interesting post today on the recently-resigned MIT admissions director who lied about her educational credentials.
Features
Stuff from us
Academic Legal Writing: personalized bookplates
Sources on the Second Amendment
Clearly, she could no longer be dean after such a breach of integrity. But look at the huge cost here!
Folks would say that this cost was the rpice to pay for integrity, which I guess I might believe if I weren't so cynical.
The fact is, this is the price to pay for the illusion of the powerful degree. For many jobs, a college degree is a useless barrier to entry, with everyone involved working hard to maintain the sheepskin's illusion of prestige and competance.
MIT and academics have a LOT of money and prestige invested in the notion that higher education is mandatory for higher achievement. Yes, the woman lied, but perhaps it would be better for all of us if we just used this example to expose the lie of academic elitism.
That said, you can't lie repeatedly about your qualifications then write a book that includes a section on the importance of integrity.
If Ms. Smith had come clean years ago when she had demonstrated her abilities but was still at a relatively low level she might have been forgiven. But as she herself said, she did not do so at any point in her career even when the opportunity was there. That demonstrated a lack of integrity that could not be accepted by the administration.
For that matter, a similar logic could apply to students. If MIT discovered that a junior had submitted bogus information on his application, and actually didn't graduate high school, but he's gotten good grades at MIT, should they let him stay? If they did, how many other people would be tempted to try the same thing?
Lies. Lies. LIES. While you would not want someone designing a bridge without a lot of academic background, this sort of occupation is the vast exception.
"Productive member of today's society"?!? Imagine how much more production would be possible if people apprenticed for actual jobs rather than working part-time at MacDondald's while racking up huge school debt for four years.
Attending college is the epitome of non-productivity. I can think of very few fields, even technical fields, where four years of college would be better than even ONE year on the job.
The demise of trade schools and apprenticeships are the shame of our elitist society. Thinking of college as a 'basic requirement' is a real problem in today's economy.
Actually, until fairly recently people *did* design bridges without much academic background. The line between engineer (adademic) and mechanic (practical) is a thin one. If you look at most of the major boo boos in building history you find that they were caused by people with a lot of academic background, but a little less experience.
Whenever I hear someone talk like you, I know that they had a useless major in college. Probably economics. But I can tell you from experience, for software design and programming, having a degree is a major asset. That is, if you want to be more than a pathetic hack.
Can't agree with your entire premise, but there is no question that OJT can be as or more valuable than an academic degree. My grandfather was a civil engieer in Chicago, owned the largest surveying company in the city, was one of two creators/inventors of "sky rights" as used in the Chicago Merchandis Mart (the other was a person in NYC), and became the writer and administrator of the licensing exam for the State of Illinois. AND he only had an 8th grade education! To top it off, he was grandfathered into his license. They didn't have licenses when he started. All this was a while back. He died in 1963. But if you think people were simple and backwards in the first half of the last century and that explains why he could succeed your not understanding the accomplishments of those who lived then.
If you reject the value of degrees, you are rejecting the concept of free markets. Plus, many think there are nonmarketed externality benefits to college education as well.
I'm also not sure where the "pathetic hack" comes in. If it's an implicit attack on fellow commenters, it has no place here. If it's simply a factual claim that without a computer science degree one is likely to be a "pathetic hack" as a computer programmer (a term I'd rarely heard used applied to programmers, though I suppose it might be), then all I can say is that it doesn't fit my experience.
I too believe that there are many useless majors in college. And while I admit that the world needs english majors, for example, do we really need that many?
A Harvard English degree, for example, is a prestigious accomplishment... but it requires four years of hard work and deep debt to earn. Is it worth it? For the elementary school teacher, the businessman, or the wife-in-training, no. If you are rich enough to take a shot at great things, fine... but when society creates a four-year multi-thousand dollar requirement for even the simplest jobs, it actually hinders society's progress.
Some nutball congressman recently proposed a plan whose goal was for every American to earn a college degree. That would completely ruin the economy! This sort of thinking shows how this man bought in to the college degree hysteria.
This 'resume padding' article is just another in a line of examples. Lies aside, this situation is a perfect demonstration of the illusory value of a college degree. The 'culprit' put in twenty-eight years of distinguished work. She even won the school's biggest award. No one can say she was unqualified... it's just that she lied.
I'm not arguing that she shouldn't have been fired... it's just that this example exposes, once again, the inflated value of the college degree.
The requirements for graduation are now softer and fluffier than they once were with more section choices for less hardcore students.
Jones played to this by proclaiming that she was lowering the "pressure" to be perfect. In fact, all she did was make admission even more arbitrary. Now some of the very best were still admitted but a larger group of less academically qualified students were to be accepted over other more obviously deserving students in the name of diversity. Who needs another Math contest winner when you're short on cheerleaders? This Harvard-lite syndrome seems to have paid off in terms of more goodwill and higher donations. This has been labelled a success. But that success is a sheer race to the bottom.
Like grade inflation, which benefits weak individuals while harming the group as a whole, the attractions of diversity are hard to resist but show up in terms of fewer alums being competitive with the products of the most hardcore programs abroad and a slow devaluation of the MIT degree.
In my view, Jones bears some responsibility for encouraging this trend. Worse is that this is what some MIT leaders seem to have asked for. I can only say — as someone who was admitted to MIT — that I hope they suffer dearly from this scandal and that this leads to greater scrutiny of MIT's turn to "balance" even if there were no direct connection between her lies and her policies.
I think this is an excellent point. Citzenship status can be a politically-correct lie, and thus forgivable. But claiming fake degrees or attacking the fortress of academic prestige is unforgivable.
I will admit that in general, lying about your background might mean that you are is unqualified for the job. But this woman is a twenty-eight year, award-winining veteran! Competance is not an issue here.
She lied. And as Zarkov points out, an academic lie is particularly unforgivable. Perhaps if she only lied about a drug test, or a felony conviction...
If she was an INS agent with a bogus SSN, then I doubt anyone would object to her firing. An admissions director who lied about her credentials is the equivalent.
But this has nothing to do with having a college degree. It might help to LOOK LIKE you have a degree, but only the most clever colleges actually train you to play office politics. So from this angle, a college student would perform no better than a poser... and for reasons I mention below, perhaps they'd do even worse.
"This would apply even more so if the celebrity employee were pushing an agenda of "diversity," a very powerful modern shibboleth."
Unfortunately, this idea is more popular inside academia than outside. So we would actually expect her to push these policies MORE if she indeed had the degrees that she claimed.
It's time to bust the concept that college = "good and productive and smart." (And that no college = "would you like fries with that?")
“An admissions director who lied about her credentials is the equivalent.”
But she showed she was competent at her job, and thus the bogus college degrees are irrelevant. MIT fired her because she compromised her integrity by faking her resume. I ask why faking your social security number, your driver’s license, green card or citizenship should not count as an even greater compromise of integrity? After all faking your resume is not a crime, unlike faking those other documents. It seems to me that every argument I’ve heard for giving amnesty to long-term illegal aliens also applies to Jones.
All of the conclusions that people have drawn based on this false premise, e.g. that this shows how stupid credential requirements are, are therefore invalid.
The resume, the LSAT scores, the grades etc are all substitutes for the unknowable quantity of "will this person do the job well or will they be a liability for our organization?"
If you know that someone is qualified and/or doing an excellent job already, who cares what less reliable indicators say?
Having credential requirements is a perfectly legitimate thing, but using such things as a substitute for heaps of solid knowledge you already possess about the candidate is inexcusably stupid.
I don't see how MIT had any other option but to call for her resignation. To do otherwise would be to risk the Institution's credibility, and to invite further applicants to falsify their resumes.
It doesn't mean she did a bad job while she was dean.
Frankly, I am amazed that some people at MIT have been so supportive of her. This reflects badly on the school's protocols and judgment. And the continued tendency to downplay this as a minor indiscretion of youth suggests that this issue is NOT being blown out of proportion but deserves even more attention and condemnation.
Judging whether someone will make a good partner based on his LSAT scores is silly. But judging whether someone will make a good partner based on whether he lied about his LSAT scores is not so silly.
IOW, the question isn't merely, "Does one have the underlying skills to do the job?" It is also, "Can we trust this person?" If someone lies about something like this, what else might they have lied about? What else might they be lying about?
There is also the issue of deterrence -- we don't want other people doing this now based on the "Well, MIT doesn't think it's a big deal if one forges one's resume" argument.
I definitely was not intending to (and will not) wade into the immigration debate here. If she actually had a fake SSN I might support her firing. But when her job is about assessing credentials, you can't reasonably argue that lying about her own credentials is irrelevant.
Integrity doesn't mean anything.
Just read some of the posts above.