April 27, 2007--Fanaticism LXXIX--Credenialitis

We should care that she lied about her academic credentials. We should care about anyone who lies. But do we need to care that she doesn’t have any degrees?

I am talking about Marilee Jones, who until this week was MIT’s dean of admissions. When she was hired by the admissions office 28 years ago, on her resume she indicated that she had three degrees. Ten days ago someone ratted on her and it turns out that she doesn’t even have a bachelors degree and she was fired.

Does this discovery also call into question that she has been an effective admissions dean? It would appear, in fact, that in all ways she has been very effective. When she arrived, MIT was an almost all-male preserve—just 17 percent of the students were female; under her leadership the undergraduate class is now nearly 50-50. And she has managed to preside over ever-higher admissions standards—every elite college’s dream.

Also along the way, Ms. Jones became a leader in the larger field of college admissions. She is best known as a proponent of reducing the incredible stress that high-aspiring high school students feel when seeking admission to the nation’s most competitive colleges. As one example, she limited the space on the MIT application where students are ask to list their extracurricular activities, in effect to say to them you don’t have to be perfect. (See NY Times story linked below.)

And she wrote a book on the subject, Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Getting Your Teen Tthrough College Admissions and Beyond. Ironically, in that book she forcefully calls for students to live with integrity: “Holding integrity is sometimes very hard to do because the temptation may be to cheat or cut corners.” I suppose these insights came a little too late to her.

But again, though her lies should not be overlooked, if she has been as effective as all have said, is not having these credentials a valid reason to let her go? Shouldn’t she be evaluated by now, after all these years, primarily by her performance?

This also raises questions about our raising the credentials bar in virtually all lines of work—from technicians to university professors. In the not-so-distant past, one could become a lawyer, physician, teacher, or architect through apprentice training—by learning by doing. Frank Lloyd Wright for example, just like Ms. Jones, never went to college. But through the years we have been obsessed by raising standards in all fields and in most this has meant requiring more formal education, more testing, more credentials, more certification. This, in spite of the considerable evidence that shows that these so-called higher standards do not produce more effective practitioners.

In fact, by allowing a university-industrial complex to emerge, an alliance that permits universities to become the advocates for more credentialing while at the same time having a monopoly on the supplying of these credentials, we may inadvertently be doing a poorer job of preparing people for success than we would like to admit while at the same time driving away from critical fields people who could otherwise be exemplary—people, for example, such as Marilee Jones.