Marilee Jones was a leading critic of the rat race of college admissions in America. As admissions officer at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she complained publicly that prospective students were under too much pressure to pad their curriculum vitae to gain entry to elite universities.

Now the MIT dean of admissions has been forced to resign after a telephone tip-off that she lied about her qualifications to get her university job.

An inquiry found that Ms Jones never graduated from any of the three New York universities — Union College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Albany Medical College — from which she claimed to hold degrees.

“I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago, and did not have the courage to correct my resumé when I applied for my current job or at any time since,” Ms Jones, who was promoted to dean in 1997, said in a statement.

“I am deeply sorry for this and for disappointing so many in the MIT community and beyond who supported me, believed in me, and who have given me extraordinary opportunities.”

Phil Clay, the Chancellor, said that MIT, the seventh-best university in the world according to a recent survey, had no choice but to ask Ms Jones to step down. “We have to uphold the integrity of the institution, because that’s what we’ve been trying to sell and she’s our chief spokesperson on that,” he said. “It’s regrettable, ironic, sad, but that’s where we are.”

Ms Jones, 55, was first hired by MIT in 1979 for a secretarial job in the admissions office that did not require a degree. Nevertheless, she listed multiple degrees on her CV. Her credentials were not checked and she rose to become the dean of admissions in 1998.

She began to re-evaluate the hypercompetitive college admissions process when she started looking at universities with her daughter. Admissions officers, she observed, boasted constantly of the number of applicants with perfect exam results, piling on the pressure.

As the woman who picked the one in eight applicants who gets into MIT, Ms Jones was in a position to change the system. She completely rewrote the MIT application form when one high-school student asked her if he had to list ten activities to fill the ten empty lines under “Extracurriculars”.

She made speeches, kept a blog and co-wrote a book titled Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond. “Holding integrity is sometimes very hard to do because the temptation may be to cheat or cut corners,” the book observed. “But just remember that ‘what goes around comes around’.”

Lloyd Thacker, founder of the Education Conservancy, a group that is also trying to “turn down the flame” in university admissions, said that he was saddened by her departure.

“She’s had a positive impact in the lives of many students and families,” he said. “What’s happened in no way discredits the value of her work.”

Padded CVs

— Jeffrey Archer, the disgraced peer, cited on his CV Wellington, Sandhurst and Oxford. He never attended Sandhurst, and Wellington was not Wellington College in Berkshire but a school in Somerset. “Oxford” referred to a postgraduate diploma, for which he was unqualified, since he never earned his first degree

— Nick Leeson, the rogue trader who caused the collapse of Barings Bank in 1995, omitted county court judgments from his application to the company. He lost £827 million of the company’s funds

— Alison Ryan was sacked before taking up her job as PR chief for Manchester United in 2000 when discovered to have fibbed about a first-class degree from Cambridge University on her barristers’ chambers application forms

Sources: Times archives, agencies

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