If the colleges in question have a common setup as to how to access student information, et. al.,
then they should be rethinking the way they set it up in the first place, instead of harping on about the 'attack".
Fixing the problem instead of whining about it should have been their priority. One of my bosses had the credo
"Cry Once", meaning take the time and energy to do it right the first time, and you probably won't have to do
it again, at greater expense.
Er0k has a point as well, it could be a publicity stunt.
"Ooh, that other school is bad, they hacked our computers, they're unethical, you should never go to that school!"
They are counting on future students looking at the situation to judge the other school not as people who
perpetrated a (mediocre) hack, but as morally corrupt. They may not have said it outright, but then, they didn't have to.
They are counting on the consumer (that's what it really comes down to) to be judge, jury and executioner
in this situation.
Funny thing is, is that if MIT had perpetrated this, the uproar might never happen. As far as I know, places like MIT,
Stanford and Berkeley have more of a "hacker type culture ( I can stand to be corrected on this) and that sort
of thing , while not entirely acceptable, would actually be expected.
Fix it, shut up, move on.
Maybe it's just me...lol

zaddikim