Yesterday I received the following email from Academia.edu, a social network for academics to share research papers.
Hi Ian,
We noticed that you are following the Computer Science research interest on Academia.edu. We wanted to mention that we are hiring software engineers at Academia.edu, and if you know any current or former students who might be interested, we offer a $5,000 referral reward. We’ll send you a $5,000 check for every person you refer to us, whom we end up hiring.
Academia.edu is an engineering-driven culture, and our mission is to accelerate the world’s research. More information on the kinds of software engineer we are looking to hire is here.
Please drop me a line if you have any questions about jobs at Academia.edu. Thanks in advance for referring any people you might know, and I hope your work is going very well,
Richard CEO, Academia.edu
My question: Is this ethical? The Georgia Tech Code of Ethics states that faculty ought to “Refuse to accept, for ourselves or our families, any favors, gifts, or privileges that might be construed by reasonable persons as influencing the performance of our assigned Institute duties.” These matters are always ambiguous, but $5k is a substantial finders fee, and it does seem reasonable to assume that its pursuit might unduly influence. And of course, my own institution’s code of ethics is just one way of analyzing the issue.
Perhaps this practice is far more prevalent than just Academia.edu, but I have never encountered it before in such a brazen fashion directed at university faculty specifically (certainly finders fees are a common practice in recruitment). In the tech and games industries, the competition is brutal enough that recruitment isn’t really an issue; my students compete on their merits. I’m particularly intrigued at this example because it’s directed from a research aggregation site (with a .edu address even) to university faculty specifically.
What do you think?
Comments
Adam Ruch
Seems pretty standard for any recruitment agent. If they were to use an agent, they’d probably pay something like that for hiring anyone that agency recommended.
Whether its ethical for someone in your position is a damn good question though.
Ian Bogost
Adam, you’re right that it’s common practice, and I’ve updated the post slightly to make that distinction clear.
Adrian Forest
Surely the question is whether making such a referral is considered part of your “assigned Institute duties”? Or have I misunderstood the dilemma?
Bienia
Yes, a good remark, as I have experienced such attempts too, even on a far lower level than a professor and have rejected. This hurts! 5000 even more, but in the end this leads to the insight that this was not worth to do if one has a clear conscience.
I like the fact, that to submit this post, I have to prove that I’m human by typing the words ‘c o m p a n y’ haha!
Frank Lantz
Presumably anyone you recommend is still “competing on their own merits”, your incentives as a teacher are still to augment those merits. I don’t really see the harm. Are you worried that this will influence you to teach your students to program websites instead of mastering VCS assembly?
Anthony Fiorito
I don’t really see anything wrong with it. In the twenty-plus years I’ve been in the industry, every company I’ve ever been associated with paid referral fees to employees and head hunters certainly get their fair share of recruiting dollars. An in the end, all you’re doing is making an introduction. The company still needs to like the candidate and the candidate the company before anything happens. You’re not forcing anyone to make or accept an offer. If it works out, awesome, everyone wins. If not, everyone walks away and no harm done.
Ian Bogost
@Frank, Anthony
The issue is one of influence, not of outcome. Taken to its logical extreme, why not just teach to the requirements of the companies that pay the best referral fees? Why not take on or mentor only the students who are the most potentially lucrative? Etc.
Rachel
Lots of businesses do this. Word of mouth recruitment probably costs them less than a recruitment consultancy would do in the long run, plus if you’re the kind of person they are looking for then even if you’re not interested in working for them, it’s reasonable to assume someone in your network of colleagues might be (both within and outside the university). Accenture recruited me in this way; my friend who introduced me to the firm got a referral fee.
Ted S
I agree with other comments that its A-ok for Academia.edu to use incentives for their recruiting. And for Prof. Bogost, if he works for an institution that has gone to the trouble or writing a code of ethics which says it’s unethical to accept money for referrals, then I guess that makes it unethical within the confines of that institution to do so.
Maybe the question should be ‘is it unethical for academics in general to accept money for referrals?’ I think it’s fine, as long as your not knowingly referring someone under-qualified, or referring someone to an employer who is lame.
my 2 cents
Ian Bogost
I think I was pretty clear in my post, so I’m a little surprised to see these responses. I’m not asking if companies can use incentives and finders fees for recruitment. Everyone knows that is common practice.
I’m asking if its ethically troublesome for companies to explicitly solicit (public) educators for their students in this fashion. Georgia Tech is hardly alone in having an ethics policy of this kind.
Mr_Yeh
I think the ethical problem for academics is that it biases your opinion from the students’ point of view. It may not be in the student’s best interest to be referred to this company (because you think they might be better suited for academia, or non-profit or a political career or simply a different disciplinary area) but you will recommend them (and potentially send them down the wrong career path) because you financially benefit from such advice. Sociologically speaking, you facilitate the creation of a new association between the student and the company, even if you’re not totally convinced about the merits of that association.
If educators were to routinely accept such payments, they would lose students’ confidence over time, to the detriment of the student-teacher relationship and possibly to the status of a university as such.
JR Mole
academia.edu is a for-profit corporation funded by a number of prominent venture capital firms to the tune of $6.7 million (see http://academia.edu/about ). It only has a .edu address because it was grandfathered in. I’ve always considered them to be extremely shady, banking on the assumption hat most people wouldn’t research the site and would therefore give it the credit that most give to a .edu site. Their terms reserve the right to charge fees for the site and while they prohibit commercial activity of their users, they exempt themselves. I’m therefore not surprised that they’re engaging in these practices. I try and stay far away from them.
Mark N.
I’m asking around a bit, but so far my impression is that it’s not common for referral fees to be paid to professors who refer students to an employer. I’d be interested if that’s incorrect. In fact a number of tech companies explicitly restrict referral bonuses to current employees to avoid some of that kind of problem. NVidia, for example, will pay a $2500 bonus to employees who refer a successful hire (who stays for at least 90 days), but will not pay that $2500 to non-employees, such as professors who refer their students to NVidia.
Beki
Its a great question Ian. Yes, companies can offer recruitment fees (and in competitive markets perhaps they should although I wonder what quality they get by doing it 😉 but it’s not at all clear to me that a taxpayer paid employee of the State of Georgia should take them. And that’s how I tend to answer these sorts of questions for myself. I always ask “what would the taxpayer think” (usually followed by “how bad would it look if I ended up on the local news”). Of course some people will point out that during the summer we are *not* paid by the State, but I tend to think that once you are paid by the State at any point that’s the standard you are held too…
And its not that I would mind 5K I have to admit, but as an educator I can’t help feeling that I am supposed to be in the business of recommending (or not) the students that I teach, work with etc… and that people read my recommendation as someone who is a teacher and a public servant and that comes with a set of commitments to telling the truth and not being influenced by large sacks of cash.
Ian Bogost
@Mr_Yeh, @Beki
Well-put, I think. Thanks for sharing your perspectives.
@JR Mole
You’re right to fill-in the blanks I didn’t in the post. I knew that Academia.edu was a for-profit company using a .edu name, but it’s very likely that others would, and they might take the organization to be something it is not.
@Mark
That was my assumption too. I appreciate your sleuthing on it.
Dr. Cat
If there’s anything inappropriate in such a relationship, I don’t think it’d be a case where it’s Academia.edu’s role to decide who it is or isn’t ethical to offer recruiting incentives to. It’s the role of the professors in question to decide whether this is appropriate or not. So to your question “is it ethically troublesome for them to solicit educators” I’d say no, not to Academia.edu. They solicit anyone and everyone, they’re just trying to spend money to grow their company and benefit their shareholders. The question “is it ethically troublesome to educators/universities to be solicited BY academia.edu” is more interesting here.
I would say generally giving former students any tips, advice, or contacts that improve their chances of getting a job tends to be a good thing you should do where possible, my mom certainly did that for her students. In specific, if you deliberately refer students only to companies that offer you cash and avoid mentioning other job opportunities you know of to maximize your chance of receiving cash, that’s bad. If you mention every opportunity you know of except for a few perfectly fine job openings that you would happen to benefit from, I think you’re narrowing what you offer your students in order to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, and doing them a disservice thereby. There might be cases where the best job for a certain student would be one that offered you a bonus, and you denied them the lead just so that you wouldn’t get the cash. Seems like a lose-lose-lose situation in that hypothetical case.
If you investigate a company offering you a bonus, and find that you feel it would be a very bad place for any of your students to seek employment, it would certainly be desirable to omit them from your list of leads you share with students. Same with anyplace shady or awful NOT offering you bonus money.
The one case where you should reject all such offers automatically would be if, through further investigation, you find that every potential employer that follows the practice of offering recruitment bonuses to professors is an awful place to work for. I suppose it’s possible that’s the case, but I wouldn’t assume it to be without looking into it and finding evidence that this is so. Lacking such evidence, I would find it ethically ok to offer students info on EVERY job offer you know of, bonusy and non-bonusy ones combined together. And I find it ethically dubious to omit any based on grounds that don’t clearly prove a particular company is against your student’s best interests in some way. Though if their behavior leads you to think MAYBE working there would be against their best interests, that increases the motivation to investigate that company further before including them on your opportunities list you share with students.
Whether to mention to students “by the way, this company will give me a recruiting bonus if you go there, just to alert you to the possibility of a bias on my part” is another question. I might have some small concern a student that really liked my class would bias towards getting me $5000, even though in some cases that might lead them AWAY from ending up with the job that fit them best. So that’s a little tricky.
Joshua Comer
The university code of ethics certainly isn’t innocent in this regard (though what you cite of course has broad applications). They want employers to have a relationship with the school, pay for booths at job fairs, sponsor department events, etc. And like an alumni newsletter or a university’s external grant administration office they want your success and influence to be mediated by the school’s letterhead. Managing your professional identity and money can be laborious, of course, as can headhunting, so these systems came about for good reasons. But having seen droves of students slouching across campus toward job fairs in ill-fitting suits soaked with flop sweat and professors write glowing letters of recommendation with the disinterest of a bureaucrat, it’s worth wondering if those institutions were ever in the best interest of students.
Gilbert Bernstein
In my time at Computer Science departments, I have gotten a number of forwarded e-mails from companies looking for employees. I have passed along one such e-mail to an appropriate list myself. I’ve never seen any of these e-mails mention anything about finders fees. So, that aspect certainly seems uncommon, although soliciting for students seems routine.
I have seen very small start ups pass out flyers and hang around to try to recruit students at the Stanford CS building. This is definitely skeezy and not-ok. They are usually asked to leave by staff as soon as it becomes aware that they’re there. However, another one inevitably pops up.
I believe most CS departments try to restrict companies’ access to students to job fairs. Companies are expected to pay the school for the opportunity to solicit students at the job fair, which helps explain why directly and anonymously soliciting students is frowned upon. I think the e-mails are tolerated because they are often based on personal relationships (e.g. a former student) or targeted interest. (e.g. a company looking for programmers familiar with computational geometry contacts a professor who is a geometer.)
Another interesting twist on this is professors who are on the advisory boards of or are founders of start-ups. This certainly gives them a strong incentive to recruit talented students to their startup. Is this substantively different than getting a referral fee? Is one of these ethical, whereas the other is not, and for what reason?
Frank Lantz
I think it’s important to distinguish the questions
– what is conventional?
– what is my intuitive reaction?
– what do the rules of my school prohibit?
from the question
– what is ethically right?
The fact that these things *don’t* line up neatly is what makes questions like this interesting.
“…why not just teach to the requirements of the companies that pay the best referral fees? Why not take on or mentor only the students who are the most potentially lucrative?”
Because you are juggling lots of different influences when you decide what, and who, to teach. You *already* get benefits from having your students go on to successful careers and you weigh these benefits against other things you value when you make pedagogical decisions.
Presumably your salary already partially comes from companies that give money to the university for research grants etc. There’s already a web of transactions that involve your interests, the students interests, companies’ interests, and the interests of society-at-large (of which the companies interests might possibly be the closest proxy). For better or worse, this is the web of modern life.
I think some of the discomfort you feel might come from the sense that the referral fee circumvents the institutional relationship you have with your university, cutting them out of the deal in a way that might break an implicit agreement between you.
I think there’s also just a moral “yuck factor” when markets intrude into places we don’t expect them. This is the kind of thing Michael Sandel talks about (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/15/what-money-can-t-buy-michael-sandel-on-market-moralism-run-amok.html)
I agree that we should be suspicious of monetary incentives and cultivate value systems that transcend material goods. But I also think it’s wrong to let our yuck factor responses completely govern our ethical decisions, especially if they drive us to claim that we occupy a position outside of the web of influences, incentives, benefits, and transactions, a claim that is dishonest and ultimately will lead to greater ethical confusion.
I would say this particular situation is novel, and it’s novelty makes us question it, which is good. But on closer examination I don’t see how it would necessarily lead to greater harm than the types of relationships that are less visible to us because they are embedded in familiar institutions. And I don’t see how either type of relationship, as difficult as it may be to balance material benefits against other values, is necessarily worse than a world where education takes place in a realm beyond any influence or transactions, where material benefits don’t intrude, even if such a world were possible.
Patrick Crogan
Mr yeh has nailed it. Plus this seems like an extra ploy in the strategy of reputation & attention capture for the commercial venture in knowledge monetization.
P.s. captcha said I had to prove I was human but I am not sure I have done so….
Frank Lantz
“It may not be in the student’s best interest to be referred to this company (because you think they might be better suited for academia, or non-profit or a political career or simply a different disciplinary area) but you will recommend them (and potentially send them down the wrong career path) because you financially benefit from such advice.”
So, is it likewise wrong to recommend a student to your friend’s company? To your wife’s company? To your own?
I imagine we all agree that in any case it is morally wrong to lie to the student, knowingly giving them bad advice for personal gain.
It isn’t obvious to me that financial incentives are inherently more likely to cause this behavior than all the other incentives we face. After all, we genuinely care about our students’ well being, and we fiercely guard our reputations, and these things will always influence our actions.
Personally, I think $5,000 is barely enough to be a fair price for just reading yet another stupid fucking e-mail, let alone forwarding it to what’s-her-name.
Ian Bogost
I imagine we all agree that in any case it is morally wrong to lie to the student, knowingly giving them bad advice for personal gain.
This might be as far as we can get on the matter in a universal sense. And even then, the question becomes one of what structures entail “lying.” To me, a professor encouraging a student to pursue a job at Academia.edu (or elsewhere) only because of the possibility of a $5k windfall seems different in kind, not just in degree or in beneficiary, to a school or department selling companies access to students for recruitment at job fairs or other meetings (a common activity that a number of commenters have mentioned).
But as Frank suggests, there are other kinds of personal gain. The gain associated with doing a friend a favor, or withholding the best candidates for a contact of greater influence. These are situations of personal gain too, it’s just that those sorts of gain can’t be (immediately) deposited into your bank account.