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Leaving an M.A. off your CV due to potential bias against the institution?

In our newest “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

Suppose I’m someone who has an M.A. from an institution that, deservingly or not, may be perceived negatively by many hiring committees (as a “conservative” religious institution). Would it make sense, and would it be deceptive, to remove my M.A. from my CV once I’ve obtained my Ph.D from a different, “respectable” institution? Suppose further that I was young and naive back when I decided to attend the M.A. institution, and so still understandably under the sway of the beliefs and values of the religious culture in which I was brought up, but that (having grown up) I no longer endorse or identify with those values.

While I certainly understand and sympathize with the OP’s concerns, I worry that omitting a part of one’s educational history (including a degree earned) is deceptive. My sense is that CVs should be complete and accurate representations of one’s educational history and accomplishments. Although it is always possible that members of hiring committees might be biased against a given institution, I wonder whether they’re more likely to look at what the candidate has actually written/published, etc. I also wonder whether it might be good to address this in a cover letter, though there are probably risks with that.

What do readers think?

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17 responses to “Leaving an M.A. off your CV due to potential bias against the institution?”

  1. AnAnon

    It seems like there are two potential problems here. One is that hiring committees might take a dim view of the candidate’s academic preparation on account of their dim view of the academic quality of the MA institution. It seems to me that that should be cancelled out by the quality of the PhD. (It would be in my eyes, at least, which I guess is all I can speak to.)

    The second problem is that hiring committees may suspect that that the candidate has ideological commitments (largely about sex and gender) that they do not want a colleague of theirs to have. If the candidate does not in fact have those commitments, it seems like there are ways to clearly signal that in a cover letter without saying anything as ham-fisted as “I disavow my MA program.”

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  2. Michel

    You cannot leave off a degree earned. Not only is it deceptive, it could be grounds for dismissal from whatever job you get.

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  3. Anonymous

    I know the commenter wants to preserve anonymity, but I think it makes a difference *how* conservative/controversial we’re talking. My sense is that there is a big difference between, e.g., a Catholic institution (even a fairly conservative one) and a place like Baylor (etc.).

    I also worry that bringing it up in a cover letter would seem odd, particularly since they’d need to do it for every single one! I am also not convinced that it would be grounds for dismissal. For instance, a lot of people earn an MA while in the process of getting their PhD, since it usually requires just a bit of extra paperwork. I myself did this, but I don’t bother to mention that on my CV (since it was basically rolled into my PhD). I know others who have done this as well.

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    1. Sic ‘Em

      Startled to see Baylor named as an example of a red flag (?) school. I have a degree from Baylor. It’s an excellent school, with an excellent philosophy department. In grad school, I often regretted doing my BA there, thereby precluding the possibility of doing a PhD there. (Indeed, I often *still* feel that I learned more about philosophy doing a BA at Baylor than doing a PhD at [not going to specify].)

      If someone doesn’t want me as a colleague purely based on where I went (and very much enjoyed going) to college, the feeling is mutual. Moreover, I can’t imagine sentiments like that are good for the long-term health of the academy, and are probably contributing to current difficulties in cultivating/maintaining a positive public image thereof.

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  4. Anonymous

    At our university, that would be grounds for dismissal. And if the committee discovered it during the hiring process, it would guarantee your not getting the job.

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  5. Anonymous

    i don’t see a problem with this but am willing to be corrected. i conceive a CV as a list of accomplishments. totally up to you to leave something off (and to others to speculate why you left it off if they find out)

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  6. Trevor Hedberg

    Don’t omit a degree you have earned. As others have said, that’s deceptive and could have practical consequences in some cases.

    I’m not sure this is really something to worry about — most faculty know that many factors can impact where a person goes to graduate school and that graduate students are rarely at their first choice of institution — but if this is actually a serious enough issue to be worth mentioning in application material, I would think a sentence or two woven into the remarks about one’s educational background would be sufficient to address it. If committee members are really curious and want to know more, maybe they would ask about it during the interview process, and you could set the record straight at that time.

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  7. Anonymous

    I think there is genuine ambiguity about the norm here. Some institutions (like Brown) for example, have classes you fail drop off your transcript on the grounds that you “don’t list every job on your resume that you didn’t get.” (Or at least that is the logic I was told when I went there– I did not fail any classes!) So there is one reading on which listing things you didn’t accomplish is wrongful–but deciding not to list things you did accomplish is not. (When you list jobs on academic CVs, for example, most people don’t list every job they ever had—I certainly didn’t note that I was once a research assistant in college or that I worked at a caterer a few times.)

    What we should do depends on what we think the logic is of CVs and also of our norms. One view is close to thinking its about whether what you are doing is deception. Part of why I don’t list every job is because I feel confident there is a shared norm about what counts as information potential employers expect to have (nobody would be shocked to learn I hadn’t listed that one time I got paid to work as a bar tender at a public event). Thus I’m not lying even I am not providing all information.

    But another claim is a view about what information they SHOULD have and SHOULD make decisions on. (I have in mind something like Rae Langton’s work on truth telling in the context of non-ideal romantic norms.) You might think they shouldn’t make decisions on this information (in part because the inference will be wrong) and so you are protecting yourself rightly. But that isn’t the same as whether people will be angry

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  8. Anonymous

    OP here. Thanks everyone for your input. Can I just say, however, that the notion that omitting a degree earned could be “grounds for dismissal” (for *firing* someone!?) seems over the top. Maybe it is de facto the case at some institutions, but it certainly doesn’t seem like adequate grounds for terminating someone’s employment morally speaking! Especially when the conditions of the job market make it understandable why someone might not want to list a degree earned. Hiring committees take lots of shortcuts, of necessity; they only need to see one thing they don’t like in order to justify throwing your application in the trash!

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    1. Daniel

      I can’t speak for whoever wrote that comment, but I imagine what they meant was grounds for dismissal according to the institution’s hiring procedures. Many institutions have rules that say things like “misrepresentation of degrees is grounds for dismissal” and so on, where misrepresentation includes not just claiming to have a degree you don’t but also not claiming to have a degree you do.

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  9. Anonymous

    I think based on the feedback received here, it seems clear to me that the OP should not omit the degree on the CV. However, I think there are two easy ways to avoid the negative consequences:

    First, send clear signals in your cover letter and teaching statements that you care about equity and inclusion, and that you do not have the views people might think you have. Even a couple of sentences in the generic cover letter template can be very informative of how someone views things.

    Second, I would advise asking whoever writes your teaching letter (and perhaps also one of your other letters) to mention or emphasize your ability to teach diverse audiences and how collegial and accepting/inclusive you are. If you have a placement director, definitely talk with them about this, but I think a lot of letter writers might not think to emphasize something like this, and if I were to read a letter emphasizing how much you care about diversity in your syllabi and creating an inclusive teaching environment, I think any concerns I might have initially would be allayed.

    I also say this without endorsing, normatively, the fact that many committee members might raise an eyebrow at the CV line. It could both be true that, morally speaking, it is not fair that your chances are helped to explicitly signal certain political/moral views, and that, practically speaking, you should do whatever it takes to get the job (as long as you aren’t lying!!).

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  10. shrugger

    personally, i see nothing wrong at all with omitting something from a resume you think might yield unfair treatment. people do it all the time for juvenile papers, papers that might offend this or that institution, and your research says more about you than your institutional history anyway. the job market doesn’t allow for all that much sentimentality. of course i would worry about hr policies nevertheless, which may be indeed technically consider this grounds for dismissal. fairly unlikely to come to ahead but risky business nevertheless, i wish you good luck in either case

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    1. shrugger redux

      i just want to add that genuinely i think from a moral standpoint hiring people on the basis of which schools they went to just shouldn’t be done at all. whatever signal they pick up that goes uncaught by writing sample, publications, teaching evaluations and letters of recommendation is something like the pure residue of one’s class background—being from a good (read: affluent, likely secular, likely global north) family and thus going to a fancy school (and a grade inflated one!) and thus having a kind of royal road to the fanciest of programs in a bump-free way. if i were department czar i would require in my searches that CVs be blinded of educational background if i could. so for this reason it’s pretty hard for me to read the academic dishonesty critiques above with anything other than a snort

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  11. dazesensationallye39c0dc2cd

    I cannot register more strongly my disagreement with most of the comments here. In my view, you should absolutely omit the degree if it risks giving people the wrong idea about you, and if you don’t need it to qualify for jobs you’re seeking. No question. And I would be astounded if anyone considered it grounds for dismissal (really??!) or non-hiring; in fact, I’m comfortable with the advice of discounting that possibility altogether. You also don’t need to mention awards you got or honors you got or extra titles you were honorifically given. Degrees earned are not facts it is dishonest to exclude; sometimes they’re more misleading or deceptive to include. Or irrelevant: if you earned a CPA or DDS, too, no need to mention it on your CV, unless you’re applying for accounting or dental jobs. I’d bet the farm that nobody will discover the CPA and dismiss you. Same here.

    (For my part, I’m tenured at a well-ranked R-1 philosophy department, having earned an MA I almost never include or talk about, and that nobody knows about, although not for the reasons OP mentions; it just doesn’t come up and I like to save resume space. I don’t lose a moment’s sleep on it; neither should you.)

    It’s also worth noting that it’s hard to get a useful answer to a question like this, because folks around here have a bias in favor of the conventional and rule-following answer, and they tend to doubt people would do something they wouldn’t, or feel sure one’ shouldn’t, such as say, “Hey, this dude got an MA from Evangelical Church of Nationalism Divinity School, I don’t want that sort around here.” But they’re wrong; this really does happen and you’re right to ask. And omit.

    Reply
  12. Michel

    dazesensationallye39c0dc2cd,

    I can’t tell you how many times, when I was actively on the market, I had to fill out HR forms listing every degree I ever _sought_ or obtained, along with precise start and finish dates. Followed, of course, by certifying that the information I gave was complete and accurate. The fact that this is a common requirement should, I think, suffice to give people pause when it comes to omitting any degrees obtained. (Though in one instance, the system would not let me give non-US addresses or postal codes, nor would it let me leave those fields blank, so I had to give false information to even enter my educational info. YMMV.)

    I can tell you that when I got my job (and also my previous postdoc), HR required copies of transcripts and certificates for every degree I had obtained. I don’t know whether omitting a degree below the PhD would have seen me dismissed, but I’m quite sure it would have caused needless trouble, if discovered. Though I imagine it’s far more common for people to invent degrees than to leave off a degree below the required qualification. I can tell you that one of our VPs was just sacked for inventing a BA and an MBA, neither of which were required for the position, but that’s a different kind of case.

    I can also tell you that a close relative who was employed in a professional school had to provide academic information going back to high school, and HR actually hunted down the person who had custody of those records (the school no longer exists) and had them verify my relative’s claims.

    More generally, I will say this: I’m not worried about someone having a degree from what I consider to be a shady university, provided it’s not their highest degree. But I expect to see a record of all the degrees obtained (even better, everything sought, too), and if I discover that something was left off, well, that’s definitely going to raise a red flag for me. Similarly, I expect all professional publications to be listed (i.e. everything in a proper academic journal; grad journals I think can be omitted, as can magazine articles, etc.) unless it’s made clear that the list is curated (e.g. ‘selected publications’), and if I discover omissions, then I start to get suspicious. I think those are pretty standard expectations, though of course I may be wrong.

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  13. Anonymous

    I wanted to chime in because I’ve had the same concern as the OP about my undergraduate institution. Maybe the following thoughts are helpful. First, this institution has literally never come up in any of my professional or hiring interactions (I’m several years from my PhD and have gotten a series of postdocs). People only care where I did my PhD. Second, my sense is that maybe unless you work in philosophy of religion, philosophers tend to default to assuming that other philosophers are atheists, even knowing that you have a religious background. So I don’t think there is any common tendency to attribute socially conservative or anti-intellectual values to someone on the basis of knowing of a religious background. If you are in the US, any random selection of philosophers will have people who themselves grew up religious. Third, as someone who has made multiple large geographic moves, I think we tend to overestimate how familiar people are with universities outside of their immediate region. For example, a comment above mentioned Baylor and, while I’ve heard the name, I had to google to find out that this is a Baptist university. I didn’t know that although I grew up in the US (but have never lived near TX). So there is a chance that a lot of people who read your file won’t even know the institution is religious. If they do, they should hopefully understand (as another comment pointed out) that a variety of factors influence where you study, and that people who have completed a doctorate in philosophy are overwhelmingly not religiously conservative (though there are of course religious philosophers and conservative philosophers).

    I would not omit the degree from my CV on the grounds that doing so might draw more attention to the omission. In any case, lots of the jobs I apply for require me to list my whole education history on their HR forms, so taking it off my CV would do nothing aside from making my documentation look sloppy.

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  14. Anonymous

    I would think it is problematic not to list all your degrees on your CV. Your CV is a listing of your academic credentials and other things. You are being hired in part based on your academic credentials. To omit to mention one of your credentials is dishonest, since it does not present all of the information about your background that’s relevant. Whether you like your credentials or not, they are what they are, and since your credentials are relevant to assessing your background/academic experience/training/etc. they should be included. Note also that people google and they may find out you have a degree you didn’t list and that might raise questions, perhaps, about why it wasn’t listed. Also most people make judgments based on the PhD so I don’t think it’s that important in the end, but that’s a separate point.

    Reply

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