Massive Financial Aid Data Breach Proves Stanford Lied For Years To MBAs (poetsandquants.com) 116
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."
Worth the sacrifice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting, but good luck ever getting a job as a known leaker.
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He was never going to get a job in this day and age of sexual harassment with a last name like that anyway...
Re:Worth the sacrifice? (Score:5, Funny)
He doesn't have it as bad as his brother Isaac, though.
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He's a perfect worker for finance. He clearly has no loyalty. He goes straight for the payout without any consideration of the thought he's an asshole or it might look "bad". And he did it all in MBA style.
Re: Worth the sacrifice? (Score:1)
So what you're saying is that every company does unethical things they don't want leaked eh? If like to think that there's companies which would appreciate taking a stand against that kind of thing, but I know I'm hopelessly naive.
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before that, he can kiss goodbye to his MBA.
Worth the research? (Score:1)
I thought it was telling when he did research on the data, and released a paper. That's initiative right there.
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He didn't leak the data. He analyzed it, compiled a report, and presented the report TO THE UNIVERSITY, and even agreed not to release it. His actual report has not been made public to the press, and it was the university that acknowledged it.
The university's lax file management leaked the data which made his analysis possible.
In all, I thought this showed extreme professionalism on Allcock's part. Besides exposing the unethical practices of Stanford GSB, which were impairing himself and had impaired studen
They might also have a more selfish reason. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: They might also have a more selfish reason. (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is not much different from pretty much all other business schools with any much big name.
I'm Russian, from a top 1% family in Russia. I studied in an average college in Canada on my own volition, against wishes of my clueless parents who wanted to bang big money away on a business school. It took a lot of efforts for me to convince them that "big name business school" is a waste of money if you go there for actual skills and knowledge in the best case, and a disaster when you simply gave money away to small time fraudsters in the worst.
I know personally two other Russians few years older than me who went for Harvard MBA, and now spill bitter tears for spending a big portion of their family fortune for, at best, laughably mediocre education for such price.
And even in the mid-tier college I was going to, I saw that very few people who were getting not even a scholarship, but a "income supplement stipend," usually given to low income students, being given to another Russian guy who was always dressed expensively and casually wore $2000 watch and few other surprisingly well off people.
I instantly understood that they do it in anticipation that if this guy will work in his father's company and earn big buck, they can proudly put his testament and his salary on their graduate outcomes statistics.
Re: They might also have a more selfish reason. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: They might also have a more selfish reason. (Score:5, Insightful)
Middle class values education, ruling class values connections.
People keep making the mistake of believing that the world is a meritocracy, but it ain't. It's an insiders' club. If you're not good at schmoozing, though, you have no choice but to get by on competence, which is frankly a lot harder than doing it the other way. You know, with bullshit.
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The Harvard MBA opens doors that would be forever closed to you with a Master's degree from State U.
It is a big help to get that first job. From there on out it is up to the individual. I've worked with many shakers and movers that graduated from Obscure U.
Some times I think the Harvard or nothing meme is just something made up for failures to feel good about. They didn't succeed because they didn't go to X school.
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You haven't actually spent time in the Stanford MBA program. I have (not a full degree, but I was there).
The Stanford MBA program is basically a two-year vacation for high-achieving students. The Stanford campus is fucking gorgeous for people who take full advantage of it - and the undergrads are too dumb to realize what they have and the other grad students are too bsuy. Yes they spend some time studying but on the whole probably less than the undergrads. They are certainly the most relaxed students on cam
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Sign me up for a $200,000 degree in figuring out that you've just been ripped off.
Passing grades are awarded to any student that sports a purple, palm-shaped dent in their own forehead at some point during the program.
The school doesn't even bother to grade your assignments (except to assure that you never enjoyed a free moment). Everyone must be kept busy enough so as not to puncture the fourth wall for any student who has yet to achieve his or her own personal enlightenment.
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The summary says, "helps the school achieve the highest starting compensation packages of any MBA program," and I guess an uncritical reader might interpret that as being beneficial for the students, but those students are getting high compensation packages because of their previous experience. There are basically two reasons why schools want "the best students" - a famous student or alumni can increase the prestige of the sc
Let Me Get This Straight (Score:1)
So the "controversy" here is that Stanford is using financial aid to attract the most intelligent kids to the university?
Re: Let Me Get This Straight (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it is that they lie about it to attract students. The other famous MBA schools do not lie about it.
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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
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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
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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.
Re: Let Me Get This Straight (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Let Me Get This Straight (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re: Let Me Get This Straight (Score:3, Funny)
What world do you live in where wealthy white collar criminals are held accountable? That is not the US I know.
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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 toss
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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 [politifact.com]."
Re:Let Me Get This Straight (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re:Let Me Get This Straight (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Data compression? (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Data speed? (Score:2, Informative)
The other part people missed is he has a connection fast enough to deal with 14 terabytes.
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Well, he was probably on campus, so no surprises there.
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My guess is someone fucked up the units. You'd need a drive array just to store the damn thing. 14GB sounds more reasonable.
Re: Data compression? (Score:2)
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If you don't scan everything in color, you won't know if color information is lost.
A black and white picture of a Panda might be fine, but you might end up not seeing the red blood in it's fur.
Someone lying to MBAs? (Score:2)
Tough shit. Turnabout is fair play.
Really? (Score:1)
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 t
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IT wanted better security but the MBAs running the project fucked them
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Re:1500 hours! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I immediately came to the same conclusions as CustomSolvers2. It's called having an active bullshit detector.
Re: 1500 hours! (Score:1)
You clearly have not studied anything at any level of detail to make your knowledge worthwhile. I bet you think all knowledge can be fed to you in tweets.
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If it took 15 minutes to process each financial aid application and get the relevant data (age, race, sex, location of origin, economic background, acceptance status), that would be 1280 hours. (At 17.6 minutes, you reach 1500 hours). There were probably other data points on the applications that he initially had to take into considering and then ultimately rule out.
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To be fair, it was probably in some Microsoft Office format.
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Wrong headline (Score:5, Funny)
The much more spectacular one would have been "MBA student that can analyze data found".
Missing from the article: Rampant sexism (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Yeah, I think a Title IX lawsuit is appropriate here. Lets hope someone with standing decides to make life expensive for Stanford.
Selection bias: most powerful force in education (Score:2)
The post why selection bias is the most powerful force in education [fredrikdeboer.com] describes what's happening here, and it's not about educating students, sadly.
cheats (Score:3)
Reminds me of a story about a university (Score:2)
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 erro