There was school newspaper article written by a student at the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles earlier this year where the author called out wealthy families who exploit the extra time provisions granted to ACT and SAT takers, by enlisting high cost medical professionals to grant medical exemptions. It was an extremely well written article, and if the statistics quoted by the author are correct (5% of the population has learning disabilities, but up to 46% of private school students are granted the extra time accommodation), then this issue is far more pervasive than the 50 or so individuals who were indicted earlier today. Another example of the privileged exploiting the less fortunate for personal gain - shameful.
Blaming this on councellors is way off target. They (parents only sometimes) got likely letters through bribed coaches way before the application process itself was even started. After that the kids only needed to clear a few hurdles.
@twoinanddone What you said. The scholarships are split into small fractions for most of the “equivalency” sports which are going to include all of the Division 1 womens programs. I know the coach in question at USC and know women who were on his team and most got nothing more than enough to cover books.
My favorite part of the score scam indictment was when Gordon Caplan attempted to get accommodations for the kid and was denied.He appealed, and was denied again. He appealed again, and was granted the accommodations because the Feds told ETS to grant them.
I’m guessing that some of the students were actually qualified for the elite schools, If you had a kid who was a great student, great scores, but didn’t have a hook, they probably wouldn’t be admitted to an elite school. But if the coach said they wanted the kid, then they would be admitted.
@iaparent We knew this coach and my daughter played for his high school club team, got recruited by him and other schools and she opted to go elsewhere to play. She would have gotten a small amount of $ and we were dependent on financial aid to help fund her education. We were local, in SoCal and it is much easier being noticed. Water polo recruiting outside of CA - the vast majority of kids are coming from out of the country or inside of CA for a school like USC.
He is a tough coach but I never thought he would be implicated in something like this.
He is likely to be one of the parents that gets off, because whatever lawyers he hires will no doubt claim entrapment.
This might, ultimately, be from everyone getting a trophy.
Use of extra time is very prevalent in expensive, private schools. My D can reel off a dozen names of rich students who have been to examiners for diagnoses of ADD, ADHD and dyslexia for extra time in ACT/SAT tests but these same kids do just fine in classes with no extra time or help.
What’s the entrapment for Caplan? He paid the bribe to the phony charity (tax fraud) so he could get his daughter fake scores. I’m not seeing entrapment there.
D was recruited at Yale by Rudy a couple years ago (2017) and was on "very"short list at the end but was offered and took spot somewhere else as apposed to waiting it out. Doing well and very happy at school she picked. I guess somethings do work out.
https://www.justice.gov/file/1142886/download
- Still have to wonder if some other " recruit" got spot that caused waiting?
- Whew, It would be awful to be on that team now, with every student there wondering how much of your admission was legit.
There has to be some satisfaction at Northeastern: this school has officially arrived 
(And I say this as the mother of a Northeaster grad, so not poking fun. Well, just a little.)
When you have a recruiting coach controlling a few slots every year that is potentially worth over ten million dollars while his/her salary is only 1% of that amount, its a recipe for corruption; and add in factors that there is no 2nd check on the couch and the selection can be holistic, it is a small wonder we have not had more scandals like this much earlier.
I didn’t read all 25 pages here but after reading this I feel So Stupid.
I never thought of bribing the coaches!??? :-S. My kid just worked hard to get good grades and stats etc. How stupid are we?
I think that 800 families sounds like too many, considering that there was a single ringleader, and each family was paying a lot of money. This would come out to hundreds of millions of dollars moving through the ringleaders, which would have attracted the attention of the Feds earlier. With that many families involved, it also would have been very difficult to keep quiet, especially of even a small fraction of their kids knew. A perusal through Instagram is enough to tell you that kids of this age are very bad at keeping secrets. They’ve caught about 33 families, so my very rough guess would be that we’re talking about 100 or so families, with some having more than one kid.
About 69,000 students were accepted into the schools mentioned (about 35,000 if we ignore UCSD), so these kids are maybe 0.5% of the entire student body. This would, A, make it pretty easy to sneak these kids below the radar of many admissions officers, and B, is within the normal level of cheating in any given system.
Changing the admissions process would not preclude this type of cheating. After all, a very large number of the cheating was done by faking SAT/ACT scores, so getting rid of “holistic admissions” would not have solved this problem. Does this mean that “holistic admissions” is the best way to admit students? No, but it does mean that the “holistic admissions” is no easier to game than any system.
No matter what system is set up for admissions to universities, there will be a set of wealthy people who will find a way to game the system. In fact, one of the easiest system to game is Tracking. Wealthy people will always find a way to make sure that their kids will be on the track that leads to elite universities. In the USA, with its proliferation of private schools which have very little oversight, this is almost a certainty.
For once I’m glad that I am poor. I can’t be accused of buying my kid into her elite schools. =D>
USC just fired the AD, as well as the water polo coach
There are other factors involved in the admissions process that could not be corrupted: transcripts and teachers recs.
How a college admissions officer do not see that something is wrong and doesn’t match with the other pieces of the puzzle? I guess that corruption goes more deeply.
Well eventually you know that people are going to find this loophole of admissions through athletics too appealing not to take advantage of. The universities are also complicit in that if you can make the minimum academic score for admittance then your chance of admittance almost goes to 100% for a recruited athlete. Now add in a coach who is willing to give away a slot or two for a whole bunch of money…
I expect the vast majority of these kids knew. No one’s SAT magically jumps 400 points. If the parents care enough to bribe proctors, I’m sure these kids all took practice tests at some point.