Leaked documents from a Bermuda-based law firm, Appleby, show that schools have increasingly turned to secretive offshore investments, which let them swell their endowments with blocker corporations, and avoid scrutiny. (Max Whittaker/The New York Times)
A student discovered in February that the files were accessible to all business school students and employees, and informed the school about the vulnerability. He also downloaded the information and spent months studying financial aid data from 2008 to 2015. The result was a 378-page statistical analysis that revealed the difference between the school’s claim of fairly awarded scholarships and what it had actually been doing.“All fellowships are need-based,” claims the school’s website, which was updated on Wednesday. Before then, the site included an assurance that the business school “does not offer merit-based scholarships.”
But it does discriminate — often favoring female applicants, international students, and those with backgrounds in finance, says the report by Adam Allcock, a Stanford business school student from the United Kingdom who found and analyzed the data. The school “represents its financial aid system to students as ‘non-merit-based,’ while operating it as ‘merit-based’ by secretly rating students and manually deciding how much (scholarship money) they should receive,” Allcock wrote in the analysis obtained by The Chronicle. He asked that the report not be shared publicly because he has returned the data to the school, which has not disputed its findings.