posted on Monday, April 30, 2007 12:37 PM
by
Lou Michels
Damaging Admissions
After bad résumés from football coaches, corporate execs, politicians and just about anyone else you can think of, it still seems like some folks haven't gotten the word that they need to check the résumés of their employees on a routine basis. Latest case in point, one Marilee Jones, the Dean of Admissions at MIT. It seems Ms. Jones, who began working at MIT in 1979 as an entry level recruiter and moved up through the college ranks from there, had represented herself as having degrees from Albany Medical College, Union College, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in fact, had no undergraduate degree at all.
The irony doesn't stop there. Jones had become something of an admissions guru for highly competitive colleges by trying to work on relieving the stress of competitive college admissions. Most recently, she had been speaking around the country on her book Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond. So she was quite good at her job, but like so many others who start their careers with a falsehood, she apparently found it impossible to correct the error as she moved up the academic admissions food chain. Obviously, her working experience in the admissions process at MIT long ago trumped the value of any undergraduate degree. It just makes you wonder if she had volunteered at some earlier point the fact that there were misstatements in her credentials, whether the school could have kept her on and simply had her correct the problem.
As a final irony, her book contains a strong exhortation on living a life of integrity, "Holding integrity is sometimes very hard to do because the temptation may be to cheat or cut corners ... But just remember that 'what goes around comes around,' meaning that life has a funny way of getting back what you put out."
Exactly.