<p>great post collegebound</p>
<p>Actually, this may work out well for her. first,she probably qualifies for a pension.</p>
<p>Second, she will probably do consulting for kids that want to get into MIT and other top schools. If you have a kid interested and qualified for a school like MIT, wouldn't you pay her for consulting?</p>
<p>Well, this woman succeeded in making credentials less important and admissions more subjective as a means of increasing female enrollment. Great.</p>
<p>It might be a good time to remember what made M.I.T. great in the first place. When my father applied in 1930, M.I.T. didn't much care about extracurricular activities. For that matter, it wasn't interested in SATs or grades either. Instead, applicants presented themselves in Cambridge, where MIT administered its own admissions test, an eight hour no breaks equivilent of taking the AP Chemistry, Physics and Calculus exams back to back. If you passed (no easy task) then you were in. Once you were in, on the first day of school, the President addressed the Freshman and said "take a look at the guy on your right and now the guy on your left. One of them won't make it to be a sophmore."</p>
<p>Well, that was all far too stressful by Marilee Jones' standards, but it did, coincidently, foster the leading center of science in the world.</p>
<p>For many jobs at colleges, one has to supply official transcripts from all universities that one attended. It is hard for me to believe that none were required for the high level job that Jones eventually got at MIT. Even if such things weren't required for her initial low level job, I would bet money that they were required for a high level job.</p>
<p>Did she forge them? Did the committee drop the ball and overlook the fact that she didn't have those on file?</p>
<p>I too would like to know how that slipped by the MIT administration. I mean, she was a dean of admission. At least a background check was bound to be done.</p>
<p>"If you have a kid interested and qualified for a school like MIT, wouldn't you pay her for consulting?"</p>
<p>No, because I wouldn't trust her ethics. I also think that if anyone found out that my kid was associated with her, colleges would probably doubt my kid's integrity. I also bet that MIT's admission policies will be changing so MIT puts more obvious distance between their institution and Jones.</p>
<p>I feel very sorry for her child.
I imagine her husband also is being scrutiniized, and is likely not to be employed for long. I believe he directed a center associated with MIT. I think it will be hard for people to believe that he didn't know his wife was lying about her credentials. It's also unlikely that any institution would want to hire a scientist with questionable integrity.</p>
<p>Exactly, how does picking someone who has decent grades in math and science but is the president of the student government better suited for a spot at MIT than someone who has near perfect grades in math and science, does research papers but doesn't have stupid ecs</p>
<p>Aren't we living in a period where lying seems to be prevalent, blatant, ignored? After all, it got us into Iraq. Signs of the times.</p>
<p>
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Of course she shouts that; she was probably a slacker who didn't take the heaviest course loads or extracurriculars. That's why she had to falsify her credentials. Someone like her having a say on who is admitted to MIT or not contaminates the whole admissions process because she has no idea what a scholar is. Her flawed leadership probably influenced the rejection of many qualified applicants. I hope she gets sued for fraud and has to go to prison or is fined heavily.
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<p>Irrespective of Ms Jones' fraud, that is a problem affecting undergraduate admissions in the American universities in general. In other words, undergraduate admission offices are frequently run by non-academic staff who base their decisions on doubtful criteria that have little or no correlation with the applicant's probability of success as a scholar. That is in sharp contrast with graduate admission decisions, which tend to be ultimately made instead by the actual professors who teach classes and advise students, and focus mostly on the finding candidates with the greatest potential to excel in research and scholarship, as opposed to concentrating on vague and controversial qualities such as "well-roundness" and "diversity".</p>
<p>Background checks are generally not done for internal candidates, when they already have a file. You can bet that they will be done more widely after this incident, and we'll probably be hearing of a few more prominent people who have slipped by. If she had applied for a job at another institution in her entire career, she would have had to have degrees verified, etc., which has been standard procedure for some time.</p>
<p>People should know more about her personally, and the enormous impact she has had on the field before they judge. It was a gross error and she must be fired, but her contributions to the field are valuable and by all accounts she is well-loved as a leader at MIT. For a woman in particular, at that place, this is no small feat. Obviously she brought it upon herself, but you have to be saddened by it when you see the good that she's done for families going through this process. </p>
<p>I predict she will do very well as a private admissions consultant. It's clear you don't necessarily need an undergraduate degree to do a great job, and her behind-the-scenes experience will be invaluable.</p>
<p>^^^ Extending this logic further, it is also not necessary to go to MIT and spend a cartload of money to succeed in your job. State universities with their low tuition rates will do just as well!</p>
<p>The Times and WSJ say she was brought on to recruit women in 1979 and that the job probably didn't require a college degree at that time. That's perplexing. Even 28 years ago any job beyond file clerk in the admissions office of such a prestegious institution would have required a college degree. How could MIT not require a college background from someone who was to have contact with students and recruit them? Somethings not right here.</p>
<p>^ ^ Quite right, Willow. This is all highly perplexing. </p>
<p>And I agree with a previous poster that her husband will probably lose his job at MIT as well. I wonder—did she lie even to her daughter about her college degrees? How sad.</p>
<p>She presented herself as a scientist when we she first applied, so she would have appeared perfect for the position of attracting women to MIT. (And based on the results, it is now almost half female, she was at least somewhat successful.) Many entry level jobs, especially at that time, didn't have a hard and fast requirement of a college degree and still don't. Practically speaking, there are so many qualified applicants with degrees that it has become the standard. Keep in mind it was a different world in admissions in 1979, and almost the nadir of the baby bust (population decline.) Finding women with science backgrounds for that kind of position must have been difficult for the same reasons that attracting women to MIT was difficult.</p>
<p>The part I can't get my mind around is the fake PhD. So after working there a few years she decided a higher degree would be in order? And one day casually says, btw, I got my PhD this summer? And nobody at MIT says, great? From where? What did you study? Who did you study with? Do you know so-and-so in that department?</p>
<p>At the upper levels of academia it's a small world and you'd think <em>somebody</em> would have asked an inconvenient question. I also have trouble believing her husband didn't know something was amiss. Or did he think she got the degree online, no dissertation required? ;)</p>
<p>"The Times and WSJ say she was brought on to recruit women in 1979 and that the job probably didn't require a college degree at that time. That's perplexing."</p>
<p>Doesn't make any sense to me at all.
David Evans -- to my knowledge the only Harvard admissions officer who didn't go to Harvard -- is African American and was brought into Harvard in 1969 to expand their recruitment of black students. He certainly had a college degree - undegrad from Tennessee State, graduate degree from Princeton. He also had been an engineer with Boeing and IBM.</p>
<p>What I want to know is why when MIT wanted to expand the recruitment of women, they didn't bother to find a woman with established credentials to do that. It should have been an important enough position to check people's credentials and to find people with experience and highly respected credentials. I am wondering if MIT's failure to do this represented their low regard for women at the time.</p>
<p>I knew a man who had been at Union College heading a program to get disadvantaged kids into college, and after he got his doctorate, he went to MIT to help with their recruitment of disadvantaged students. This was in about 1974. Fascinating to me that when it came to a man, MIT selected someone with a doctorate, and credentials from heading a program at an established LAC, but MIT didn't do the same when it came to hiring a woman.</p>
<p>I don't buy it that Jones was so fantastic that MIT simply didn't bother to check her credentials. I think that what they did in their hiring process reflected a disrespect for women that MIT probably had at that time, which wasn't unusual in this country.</p>
<p>As a student that is admitted to MIT 2011 and is attending, I wish to make a few remarks about Meadle's point a few pages back:</p>
<p>What Marilee Jones did to the MIT community is regrettably dishonest and unexcusable in many regards, especially in an intellectual science powerhouse like MIT. What makes the situation utterly ironic, as duly noted by many people above, is that MIT represents one of the centers of science, an art that demands precision, accuracy, and most of all, honesty. I'm sure a lot of people still remember Dr. Hwang and his stem cell research from South Korea. What he did was equally unexcusable, but Marilee Jones setting herself up as the head of MIT while remaining silent about these affairs all these years is just a little...too much.</p>
<p>However, I do wish to affirm an idea that Meadle made a few pages back (and was quite unjustly attacked by several posters). I personally applied to fifteen colleges this year, and was accepted at 12, including many Ivies, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT. At the end, I turned down 11 and chose to attend MIT. What really drew me to MIT was the amount of contact that the admission staff had with its students, and its vibrancy in reaching out to potential students. As pointed out by Meadle, MIT does have the warmest admission staff that I had ever encountered. My emails were answered in a matter of few hours (I emailed them a couple of times), admission officers were available for any questions I should have, and even current students (I must admit that I believe they have been asked by the admission office to write to me) are warm and generous in their responses - they are eager to help, sometimes writing more than 3 replies to me in a single day. What really drew me to MIT is its atmosphere in forming a community, a place where warmth is shared between different individuals. In the remaining 11 schools, all I received was a few business emails, some colorful brochures, and hardly any contact at all with any of the admission staff. Even in the schools where the admission office emailed me, their emails sounded like mass-produced copies, distributed out to all prospective students.</p>
<p>In sum, I just want to say that from what I've seen of MIT so far (and from MIT students that I know), MIT is a community that readily supports and reaches out to many people. What Marilee Jones did is utterly regrettable, but we ought not to characterize the ENTIRE institution as such. Although Marilee Jones is the Dean of Admissions, she is not the dictator in the Admission Office and her words do not carry 100% weight in every case. Her team (like Ben, Matt...etc.) are also instrumental in making admission decisions, and frankly, it really irks me when I see posters here trying to "rationalize" their rejection by saying that the rejection was written by a lunatic and hypocrite anyway. </p>
<p>I may have not attended any classes nor gone to any dorms at MIT yet, but from what I've seen so far, MIT has been a, warm, welcoming community that had outshined the other 11 colleges on my college list - and trust me, I've communicated with a lot of them since my admission (so I'm not being one-sidedly biased towards MIT). I am still very disappointed in Marilee Jones but I do applaud her efforts in making college admissions more user-friendly (I love how MIT maintains a very active admissions blog...which college parallels that?). Her contributions at MIT over the past 28 years, although tainted (sometimes severely by her obviously hypocritical speech) is still laudable, and really, this is not a time to make personal attacks on her - other than the things that she personally did wrong (like fabricating her resume). Please keep your comments about the school in general or admission decision away from her error.</p>
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Her contributions at MIT over the past 28 years, although tainted (sometimes severely by her obviously hypocritical speech) is still laudable
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<p>In your opinion.</p>
<p>^ I believe anyone who had enjoyed the admission blogs at <a href="http://www.mitadmissions.org%5B/url%5D">www.mitadmissions.org</a> may attest as such. Do you think she wasn't a driving force in instigating those blogs?</p>
<p>Absolutely, oasis, Ms. Jones deserves credit for creating a welcoming and more transparent admissions environment. Her story, like those of many other well meaning people who have lived lies, is sad indeed. And as has been mentioned, there is a host of gender and class issues that feed into the frenzy over her case. I don't believe I've seen any speculation about who blew the whistle, but it's certainly interesting that the alarm went off at this particular time of year.
Having seen her speak in person, I believe she was a genuine advocate for young people, and must have known the bell would toll for her at some point. It has probably been hellish.</p>