It has been more than two weeks since the revelation that Wharton MBA admissions officer Judith Hodara also held jobs in the admissions consulting industry, but it remains unclear how her outside positions have impacted the University's conflict-of-interest policy.
Hodara served as a trustee to a Japanese MBA admissions consulting firm and ran IvyStone , an undergraduate admissions counseling company. She has since ended both affiliations.
But University officials deny that Penn has changed its guidelines for defining conflicts of interest or how it enforces those policies.
"There has been no change in the University's conflict-of-interest policy, which applies to all schools and all departments at Penn," University spokesman Roz Ozio wrote in an e-mail. He declined to comment further.
Hodara told the online publication Inside Higher Ed that she had vetted her relationship with AGOS, the Japanese firm, with her supervisors, but it is unknown whether Hodara disclosed her affiliation with IvyStone.
Hodara has taken down the IvyStone Web site, and the University released a statement saying, "Penn does not consider this type of relationship appropriate, which is why it has been ended."
Hodara referred all calls for comment to the University Communications office.
The University's Conflict of Interest Policy for Faculty Members - which appears to extend to other University employees - allows Penn employees to engage in "extramural" activities, as long as they do not significantly detract from their job duties and the activity is disclosed to their supervisors.
The policy also notes that relationships "are of concern if . the organization has a present or prospective relationship with the University."
The policy states that employees must report relevant information to superiors so that steps can be taken to avoid conflicts of interest, especially when faculty might "benefit from a knowledge of confidential information."
The last point raises troubling ethical questions, said David Hawkins, public-policy director for the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
"If you're counseling students for your own admissions office or even in general, you still have quite a bit of access that other [college] counselors wouldn't have," he said.
NACAC is discussing ways to advise its membership, which includes admissions officers from across the country, Hawkins added.
Recently, he noted, "the university community really [has] made an effort to understand what each other's policies [are] and try to articulate what their own policies" are.
To this end, the American Council on Education last month released a report entitled "Working Paper on Conflict of Interest" that discusses possible conflicts of interests within a university.
Some universities are already tackling specific conflicts of interests within their admissions offices.
At Stanford University, for instance, admissions officers and application readers must sign confidentiality agreements and conflict-of-interest documents "before they touch their first freshman application," said Shawn Abbott, the university's director of admissions.
Stanford relies on a self-disclosure policy, Abbott said, and applications are rerouted to another reader when personal relationships with a school official is discovered.
