Thanks to a report last week in the journal Inside Higher Ed, the business school admissions world has been buzzing about potential conflicts of interest in the MBA admissions process.
Here’s the story in brief: Three admissions officers from top U.S. universities (Columbia University, the University of North Carolina and the University of Pennsylvania) accept positions on the advisory board of a Japanese consulting company that focuses on helping prospective applicants gain admission to MBA programs. An official involved in business recruiting in Japan sends an email to officials at the universities involved, as well as some journalistic organizations (Inside Higher Ed among them), crying foul. Isn’t there a conflict of interest, this emailer wonders, given that the Japanese management consultancy firm advises students who are considering MBA programs at the very schools some of the admissions officers represent?
The answer, it seems, depends in part on who you ask. According to news stories on Friday in the Associated Press and the Philadelphia Inquirer, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business has decided that regardless of the answer, it wants to extricate itself from the controversy completely. Wharton has asked Judith Hodara, its associate director of MBA admissions, to end any outside consulting work.
“In order to avoid even an appearance of conflict of interest, Ms. Hodara has resigned from all outside consulting activities,” university spokesman Ron Ozio said in a statement Friday.
Here is the story in full: Hodara and two others – Sherry Wallace, MBA admissions dean at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Donald Martin, associate dean for enrollment and student services at Teachers College of Columbia University – recently joined the advisory committee of management admissions consultancy AGOS Japan. In exchange for adding their expertise – and their institutions’ clout – to the consultancy firm’s work, the admissions directors were offered trips to Japan.
Hodara and Martin both said their schools had vetted their participation on the advisory committee before they started, according to the AP. Hodara explained that she didn’t believe there was a conflict of interest because she would be advising AGOS, not its individual clients, and because she agreed to recuse herself from considering applications by any AGOS clients to Wharton. Wallace couldn’t be reached for comment about whether or not she had prior approval from UNC for her position on the AGOS board.
According to Ozio, Penn only became aware of Hodara’s involvement with AGOS in the past week, the Inquirer reported. Wharton has since not only required that Hodara end her relationship with AGOS, but also that she discontinue her own college admissions business, IvyStone Educational Consultants, which she founded in 2004 to guide high school students and their parents through the process of applying to colleges. In an email to the Inquirer, Hodara wrote that IvyStone “is wholly unrelated to my position with MBA admissions and is compliant with university policy.” Nonetheless, its website is now shut down.
The University of North Carolina, in contrast, doesn’t seem to see a conflict of interest. It deemed Wallace’s participation on the AGOS board appropriate after conducting an investigation following an email complaint. According to UNC spokesperson Susan Houston, Wallace was not paid for her role on the board but would be reimbursed for one trip per year to Japan, the Inquirer reported. Wallace intends to maintain her advisory position with AGOS because it will help UNC “reach out to outstanding Japanese applicants,” Houston told the Inquirer.
At Columbia’s Teachers College, the answer to the question of whether there’s a conflict of issue at hand is a strong maybe. This from Martin, the associate dean for enrollment and student services at Teachers College, who continues in his position on AGOS’s advisory board. Martin, who previously served as an admissions official at the business school of the University of Chicago, doesn’t feel that he did anything wrong because he doesn’t currently work with MBA applicants. But when asked if he would have served on the AGOS board while still working in MBA admissions, he replied “probably not.”
“In that case, if I was still working for a graduate school of business, I might have felt it would have appeared that it was tied in with one particular organization in Japan when there are several that do this kind of work,” Martin told Inside Higher Ed.
Meanwhile, the debate around the potential conflict of interest continues in larger admissions circles – especially in the wake of last year’s student loan scandal, which revealed questionable relationships between universities and lending institutions.
“We have discussed and continue to discuss with our board and membership the seriousness of conflict of interest situations that arose last year,” David Hawkins, director of policy and research for the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), told Inside Higher Ed. “Particularly in this environment of heightened awareness and concern, we need to remain on our guard and do our best to be fair and to avoid conflicts or perceived conflicts.”
Though NACAC’s ethics code does not include language directly addressing the AGOS relationships, “this certainly presents a potential conflict,” Hawkins told the Inquirer.
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