News of the college admissions scandal in the US first broke in March, after federal prosecutors released details of a wide-spread investigation.
At least 50 people, including two high profile actresses, Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, face charges in the cheating scam, which involves parents accused of resorting to bribery to get their children coveted admission to elite universities.
Photo: AP
Joel Rubin from the LA Times has been delving into the story.
He says the scheme may not have even been discovered if it wasn’t for a man named Morrie Tobin, a finance guy who got into trouble with the feds for a stock scheme he was running.
Tobin tried to save his own hide by sharing information about a soccer coach at Yale University who solicited a bribe from him in order for his daughter to get into college.
“That certainly got the interest of federal investigators who approached the coach who then lead them to Rick Singer who by all accounts, and has admitted to being the mastermind to this scheme that involves coaches from many universities around the country and dozens of parents.”
Singer was a college admissions counsellor who targeted high profile wealthy clients, charging them thousands of dollars to get their children into colleges.
Singer agreed to cooperate and started to wear a wire and talk to parents on the phone, getting them to make incriminating statements. It unravelled a web of deception.
Caught up in that web is Felicity Huffman.
She has pleaded guilty to fraudulently conspiring to get her daughter into university by paying $15,000 to have exam answers secretly corrected and now could face a jail sentence of 4 to 10 months.
“It really will come down to whether the judge wants to take a hard stance and make an example of her and other parents involved in this case or whether he or she is going to show some mercy," says Rubin.
Confusingly, Huffman’s husband, William H. Macy, hasn’t been charged despite both of them being involved, she says.
“Somewhere along the way he strayed into illegal territory and started offering parents the opportunity to pay much more money in order to have an accomplice take college admissions tests for the kids.”
In the case of Huffman, the accomplice corrected the answers on her daughter's test after she had taken it.
If parents paid more money, they could gain a place that is reserved for athletes.
The University of Southern California is one of the main colleges caught up in the scandal.
“It’s a university that hasn’t always been thought of as one that’s in the upper echelons with the Ivy League schools like Yale and Harvard and Princeton, but has been making a strong push over the years to improve its reputation both as an academic centre and as a place where families want their kids to go.”
At least a dozen kids a year got into the university thanks to Singer and, federal prosecutors say, an administrator in the athletics department.
Other colleges embroiled in the scandal include Stanford University, University of Texas, Georgetown and several others around the country, Rubin says.
Photo: AFP
“One of the big issues that’s come to light in this is the recruiting process by which kids who have athletic talent and are in the sights of coaches at these universities, that process of how they get in through a special election process outside of the normal pool of applicants.”
Each year the coaches at these universities get a number of seats and while the big college sports include American football and basketball, sports like rowing and sailing have fewer eyes on them.
Singer has admitted to exploiting this process while not that many people were paying attention, says Rubin.
During the court case of Lori Loughlin, her daughter was put on a rowing machine to prove that she wasn’t a rower despite getting into college for rowing – and it wasn’t something she’d ever done in her life.
“Her and her husband, who is a well-known fashion designer, they have two kids, both of whom were admitted to the University of Southern California and both were admitted allegedly as rowers, members of the rowing team, to make the case that they should be admitted as rowers.”
The father allegedly took photos of his daughters on rowing machines and sent them to Singer so that he could add these to the portfolio that went through the admissions process.
All together 50 people have been charged in connection with the scandal and prosecutors are continuing to investigate other parents involved.
Rubin says Singer collected upwards of $25 million in bribes, some which was used to pay off the coaches and others.
