KnowledgeKick

I don't feel that I'm losing the argument because no one has managed to explain how getting even 1 interview based on misleading information is worse than getting 0 interviews based on an online degree from Flint.

wayneandgarth

"With that said, does everyone really believe that if your MBA isn't from a top 25 program then it isn't worth getting whatsoever?!

What is helpful is an MBA from a university respected in the locale you expect to work. It certainly doesn't need to be a top 25. Now the more highly respected the better, but for some positions, an MBA from a respected university will separate you from other applicants or least won't put you at a disadvantage from the legions that do have an MBA.

That said, the way to go is to work FT and find an employer that will help fund your MBA through a PT MBA program over like a three year period.

BTW - absolutely do not think of doing this U of Michigan, leaving off the Flint thing. It likely will come out and if it does, the employer likely will view it as misleading. You don't know you'll get 0 interviews with the Flint designation but you'll likely get 0 positions without it.

ECAdmStudent

Aside from the many potential penalties (word getting around that you're misrepresenting yourself on your resume, getting accepted and then fired, missing out on interviews that the -Flint designation may not have disqualified you for), it's unethical. Game, Set, Match. Why are we even discussing this?

Unethical Synonyms, Unethical Antonyms | Thesaurus.com

ucbalumnus

A hiring manager who is less school-prestige-obsessed (and may not even care if you have an MBA) may call you in for an interview regardless of UM-AA, UM-F, or no MBA, but may decide not to hire you after seeing what s/he considers deception ("UM" trying to imply UM-AA when it was really UM-F). Or HR may mark you as ineligible to hire after the check of UM-AA (based on "UM") reveals that you never attended there.

The other possibility is that if you do get hired, but found out later, if the manager or HR considers this cause for firing, then you may have to explain being fired in subsequent job interviews. Or even if you do not get fired, you may be seen by your manager as untrustworthy and given less desirable work assignments, limiting your career growth.

Yes, plenty of people do "get away" with stretching the ethical envelope. But many others do "get caught" and penalized.

lookingforward

We're repeating ourselves. OP and a certain other poster need to meet for coffee.

An MBA alone isn't indicative of a person's ability. True. Nor is a college degree or, for that matter, a hs diploma. Or, speaking well or paying bills on time. Or whether you come to work reasonably dressed or in your pj's.

If you were my relative, what would conern me is that, with a "toehold" in a great, competitive, well-paying industry-- you choose to focus on how to shortchange the next level of professional education in that field. You want to (hypothetically) discuss if one can get around the low quality of an online program by pretending "one" went to a more rigorous program, Scary.

You can go to Harvard Extension, take a few classes and, I suppose, convince a few people (usally grandmas and great aunts,) you studied business at Harvard.


But, really, OP, if don't you have the hunger to do this right, you're missing a key skill. Hypothetical is a waste of time when it's this low level.


Something is very off here. Maybe this discussion is for a summer school paper in ethics-- common reactions to awareness of a possible scam.

LasMa

This is a false choice. There are mechanics who are both qualified AND honest.

Bottom line, you intend to deceive. You can call it advantageous or expedient. But don't try to call it moral.

ETA -- It seems to be important to you to frame this as a moral decision, so look at it this way: Anyone can do the right thing when it's easy. Integrity is doing the right thing when it might cost you something. And BTW, there's no sliding scale; you are either a person of integrity or you're not. Are you?

3togo

OP, so if you don't like the advise you're receiving go for it. My guess, you are found out within 2 hours of starting your job and you're going to have either blatantly lie or come clean. In my experience, after going through the HR paperwork the first thing the hiring manager does is s/he walks the new employee around the department ... and the odds someone says something referencing your being a Wolverine or something about Ann Arbor are very-very high. So your next ethical situation will be waiting for you some time very soon after you start.

PS - as a subordinate one of the best ways to get a head is to make your boss look good ... and the way to your boss' s**t list is to make them look bad. I'm sure s/he will be pleased when they have to explain to their boss that they did not hire someone with the credentials they told their boss you had ... how they messed up and how it was their fault. Frankly, of all the ways to lie about one's background this is probably one of the worst ways as it is so likely to come up in normal day-to-day conversation.

sakky

But again, why exactly would you be fired which implies losing your job for cause? After all, what's the cause? You never provided any cause for firing because you never actually lied. If the company continues to assert that you were indeed fired for cause, they will have to demonstrate cause. Merely feeling 'deceived' is insufficient.

Now, granted, I agree that any firm can lay you off (without cause) at any time. But that happens all the time. More importantly, that's easy to explain particularly in this economy, as millions of people have been laid off for entirely benign reasons. You can simply say that you employer decided to downsize staff, and you unfortunately happened to be one of them.

Besides, again, one has to compare having to explain why you lost your previous job vs. why you don't even have a job at all. Seems to me that the latter is a far more difficult story to sell. At least with a job, you are able to develop valuable experience and networking contacts with which you can leverage to find another job. Sitting around unemployed provides you with none of that.

And I must continue to ask - why must we continue to invoke concepts such as integrity or morals? This is business, this ain't beanball, and whether we like it or not, success in business is largely based on the strategic disclosure of information. When a movie studio deliberately omits the worst scenes of a movie to construct a trailer, is that "scary"? (If so, then I suppose all of Hollywood marketing is scary). When Apple, prior to the launch of the Ipad, secretly signed long-term supplier contracts for key manufacturing facilities to ensure that nobody else could quickly launch a strong tablet competitor, was that 'immoral'? When a hedge fund refuses to disclose its trading strategy - and indeed, leverages dark pool trades and other obfuscatory schemes to disguise its trades - does that demonstrate a 'lack of integrity'? I suspect that most of us would concede that, like it or not, that's just the way that business is conducted.

Given that, I continue to ask: what exactly is so wrong for a potential employee to also strategically choose to withhold certain information about themselves? The act of hiring is a business transaction, no different from any other business transaction. Business ain't beanball.

I might be convinced if I see Paramount Pictures + Dreamworks refund all of the ticket money they made for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen that they drew for an epic series of trailers for a movie that has been widely derided as one of the worst movies ever made, having won the Razzie for Worst Picture and such that even director Michael Bay himself later openly admitting that the movie was "crap". But hey, that movie turned out to be one of the highest grossing films of all time, and the studios are clearly not giving any of that money back. They're laughing all the way to the bank. Nobody seems to be accusing them of "dishonesty".

I find that one of the great ironies in the business world that when somebody strategically leverages information to market himself to obtain a job, he's immediately castigated as behaving immorally or deceptively, when the money at stake is at most a few hundred thousand dollars a year. But when companies strategically leverage information through savvy marketing campaigns to influence hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen generated over $800million in revenue), the companies never suffer the slings and arrows of moral indignation.

sakky

What's uncomfortable about it? You never once claimed that you attended UM-AA. If the company was deceived, well, frankly, that's their own fault. They should have been better prepared.

And of course all of that presumes that the HR department even performs any routine background check at all. Plenty of companies do not. Like I said, everybody here seems to persist in the belief that the hiring process is a soberly conducted state of affairs where applicants are rigorously cross-checked and cross-validated and anomalies are inevitably ferreted out. That's a far cry from the way that hiring is actually done at even well-established firms. Like I said, Yahoo's internal validation system couldn't even figure out that their own CEO didn't even have the computer science degree that he claimed. It took an outside hedge fund with an activist agenda - their goal was to muscle Yahoo into replacing certain Board members with the hedge fund's preferred candidates - to show Yahoo that the CEO's biography was false. What do you think that says about the scrutiny that Yahoo paid to the rest of its employees?

And, again, let's keep in mind that the CEO of Yahoo actually outright lied about having a computer science degree. The OP, on the other hand, isn't lying for he does indeed have an MBA from UM.

barrk123

It doesn't matter if you don't think it was deceitful

He still won't get the job because of it either way

ucbalumnus

It does not matter whether the claim is technically truthful or not. Nor does it matter whether you personally think it is deceitful or consistent with how business is otherwise conducted.

With something as subjective and holistic as hiring and continued interaction on the job, perception of those hiring is effectively reality, for better or worse, and whether or not it is consistent with any other attitudes about how they do business. Given that the proposed claim is considered deceptive by many, it does carry risk if you "get caught".

Yes, Yahoo may not do enough verification checks of resume claims. But that does not mean that all companies are like that. And the Yahoo CEO did eventually "get caught", if belatedly.

sakky

Uh, no there is no such consensus at all, because I certainly don't agree, and neither do other posters such as KnowledgeKick. So it seems to me that there is quite a bit that could be added to this thread.

And as far as my parents are concerned, my parents didn't raise me to be naive: you don't owe altruism to anybody who isn't going to reciprocate. Sure, you should be altruistic with your family and friends. But business is different. I think we all know that businesses will screw you over, whether as a customer or an employee, without even thinking twice. Nor is this mere speculation on my part, but rather ample evidence of that can be found every day in the business news.

[quote]Sakky, are you seriously arguing that because employers may have questionable ethics, prospective employees should try to get away with whatever they can? Where do you learn your business ethics? Are you an adult functioning in the business world or just a student? In either case, how do you have time to write such lengthy (and repetitious) posts?[ /quote]

I type fast. More importantly, since you raised the issue, I'm quite confident in my knowledge and experience about practical business affairs, if I don't say so myself. Indeed, it is precisely that experience that leads me to take my current stance towards business.

Let's keep in mind that ethics is largely a community-generated cultural concept. For example, it is obviously deeply unethical for me to walk up to somebody on the street, strike them in the face and try to choke them to unconsciousness. But that is entirely ethical - indeed, expected - if we're competing in a mixed martial arts match. Similarly, I'm sure we wouldn't want a bunch of Indians expounding upon the immorality of killing cows while we're trying to barbeque a July 4th hamburger here, but I will refrain from eating burgers whenever I travel to India. Celebrating a successful business relationship via copious public consumption of alcohol is widely accepted in the West and East Asia (especially Japan), but would be considered to be deeply immoral in the Muslim world or even certain subcultures in the US (e.g. the Mormons).

The exact same philosophy holds when it comes to the business ethics of information disclosure. Perhaps there are certain regions of the world where the business culture is such that every participant truly does feel morally obligated to provide complete information disclosure for every business transaction. {I would actually be surprised that such a culture would have been able to survive competition from Western businesses.} But even if such regions do exist, we surely don't reside in one of them. We live within a culture where business success is indeed largely (probably mostly) based upon the leveraging of information as a strategic asset.

Microsoft's ingenious business transaction that transformed it into a behemoth was its bluff to convince IBM that Microsoft could sell an operating system for IBM's new PC, when in reality Microsoft had no such product and had to scramble to buy one from SCP. If Microsoft had provided full disclosure as the moral guardians here might have dictated, then IBM would have simply purchased directly from SCP and Bill Gates would likely not be a billionaire.

Why is it morally wrong for employees to be able to get away with whatever they can, when it seems as if Bill Gates got away with whatever he could with regards to IBM and is laughing all the way to the bank?

sakky

Again, why? You seem to be presuming that companies actually hire people carefully. Anybody who has been in business will surely attest that companies make plenty of careless hires all the time.

Um, sure it matters, because it determines if you can be fired (for cause). You can't (legally) be fired for lying if you never actually lied. Companies who want to fire you for lying have to actually be prepared to actually point to the actual lie that they claimed that you made.

Now, again, I have always agreed that companies can always lay you off - which is different from being fired - at any time. But that happens all the time. More importantly, it's elementary to explain to a future employer. {Heck, I've known people who were laid off during the very first few days of the job through no fault of their own as the company decided to downsize or shut down a division.} But at least you had the job, if only for awhile. That's surely better than never having a job at all, which is precisely the problem faced by millions of people right now. At least now you have something you can put on your resume.

I've never disputed that being laid off from a job might elicit uncomfortable questions from future employers. But what will really elicit uncomfortable questions from future employers are large gaps on your resume with no employment at all.

sakky

Sure, and only, again, because of the intervention of an activist hedge fund. How many other companies are the target of hedge funds? Heck, how many companies are even publicly traded, such that such disclosure of the CEO's discrepancies would prove to be publicly embarrassing?

Besides, former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson's troubles stem from the fact that he outright claimed to have a degree in computer science. If he had merely claimed to have "studied" computer science, none of this would be an issue because that wouldn't have been a lie (for it does seem that he did indeed "study" some computer science while in college). Similarly, if the OP states that he an MBA from UM, again, that's not a lie.

ucbalumnus

Being dismissed from your job is not the only risk.

You might not be hired at all for a job which otherwise does not care whether you went to UM-F versus UM-AA (or have an MBA at all), but where the manager or HR refuses to hire you because of the perceived attempted deception that was discovered in the hiring process.

And if you do get hired, a manager who sees that as a reason to trust you less may give you less desirable job assignments etc..