As has been noted repeatedly in this thread, there were two different methods involved in this scheme, though both boiled down to “parents paying bribes to get their kids into certain colleges”:
Paying college coaches to recruit their kids for their teams, despite the fact that the kids did not actually compete in those sports in high school
Paying to have your kid’s SAT or ACT scores manipulated (through someone else taking the test for your kid, a proctor helping your kid during the test, or results being doctored after the kid took the test)
My reading of the reports is that Loughlin and her husband are accused of participating in the first type of scheme; Huffman is accused of participating in the second.
I think it’'s unlikely that the coaches were listing “extra” people; read Manda JO’s excellent post #169 (and remember that she speaks from experience – her job involves helping high schoolers get into colleges). What’s more likely is that the coaches quietly “dropped” the kids who they were getting accepted into the schools via the bribes after they had enrolled, and replacing them on the teams with walk-ons.
If there’s no scholarship associated with being on the team, there is generally no penalty for not joining the team. I would guess that it’s not uncommon for prospective athletes to later decide to not play that sport once in college for a variety of legitimate reasons.
They aren’t mutually exclusive. The admissions committee won’t take just anyone the coaches recommend: they have to meet certain academic standards, as long as just generally seem like the sort of kids you want. If a coach says he wants you for his tennis team, and you write your essay on why Hitler was reacting to a reasonable threat from Zionists, you aren’t getting in. If you have an SAT of 950, you aren’t getting in. The process is basically:
Coaches scout and recommend
Admissions briefly reviews file and makes a decision. Absent red flags, they will accept.
Notice that this acceptance is not explicitly linked to the sport. The acceptance letter doesn’t say “You are accepted because we want you to play water polo for us”. It’s the exact same acceptance every other kid gets, and it’s not conditional.
At USC, the next stage would be offering financial aid (not a scholarship) if the kid was middle class or lower.
So first you find a coach you can bribe. The coach gives you an idea of the profile he needs the student to match (which he knows-- the admissions people let him know, so that he doesn’t spend a bunch of time recruiting kids they won’t take). Next, you have to get your kid to meet that minimum standard. So you arrange for cheating on the SAT. Then, you have to make the application look right for the admissions committee–that’s where the doctored photos and faked resumes and such come in. I’m also pretty positive that these people wrote the essays and supplements as well: I can’t imagine that was left to chance.
Then no one ever notices the kids aren’t actually on the team. There’s no sport-specific money at play, and the people in the admissions office don’t double-check the vollyball team to make sure everyone the coaches recommended actually ends up playing. And if for some reason an admissions officer did notice one or two didn’t play–that’s actually not utterly unheard of. Sometimes students have an injury, or there’s actual walk-ons that are stronger than them. And lots quit after the first year or two because they discover they don’t like college sports. They are totally allowed to do that.
The AD at a big sports school doesn’t know the minutae of every team. He relies on his staff. An assistant AD at USC was indicted. With USC the Athletic Director is Lynn Swann. He got the job in 2016 after a lot of this took place and the corruption was already well hidden.
It would never cross the ADs desk. These programs are HUGE, and we are talking about water polo and volleyball. How many hours a week does the AD put into overseeing the water polo team? The “recruit” list is made by the coach and sent to the admission’s people. It doesn’t go through the AD at all, and it’s not the list of whose on the team. The actual list of whose on the team isn’t put together until after school starts.
I tried to say the same thing earlier but you did it much better. Coaches recruit freshman that don’t make the team all the time. It’s expected so it’s easy to hide unqualified people that way. I remember when I was at Maryland there was a 7 foot tall guy who worked in the library. The story was he was recruited for the basketball team (obviously) and then they found out he had a health condition that kept him from ever playing. They didn’t kick him out of school even though he didn’t play a minute of basketball. There are many legitimate stories like that at every college.
Which is exactly why they won’t take kids that are just pathetically unqualified. Schools like this are so competitive that kids that are way below the “normal” standard can still do fine: they aren’t generally insisting on SATs of 1450 because that’s what it takes to do the work: they set the standard so high because they have so many applications that they can. They know damn well that a kid with a 1300 can do fine at the school–but a kid with an 1100 will not. So they will take that 1300 if the kid brings the potential of other skills–including filling a slot on a team. But if the kid doesn’t take that role, that’s fine. They aren’t unqualified to be there, by any means. They are just on the low end.
I wonder if this will cut way back on the ability of coaches to make admission recommendations. Although I strongly support most college sports, it does seem a little odd that “being good at sport” puts you at the head of the line to get into an educational institution. Maybe being good at a sport will become just something that makes you look well rounded rather than a highly desirable aspect to get into the school
If I were one of the implicated schools, I’d assign an independent employee to background check all coach’s picks going forward. The elite will find another way in though.
Frankly, athletic scholarships are an oxymoron, with the emphasis on the moron. But trying to get a room temperature intellect into college on an athletic scholarship and not even turning up for training is, well, beyond dumb.
In the last resort, what is a reasonable penalty for this sort of thing? People here have suggested punishments more on a level with someone who committed a violent crime.
As as been pointed out multiple times, there were no athletic scholarships involved with this.
The reasonable punishment is what others have gotten for fraud in this scale. No one has been punished yet but so far they have been treated the same as people in that past accused of similar levels of fraud. Your comparison to violent crime makes no sense to me. Can you cite some examples?
Wait, they actually got into Stanford and yet they’re suing University of San Diego, Yale and USC because they didn’t get in there? Are they crazy? Their school is better than two of those and probably all three. Plus the article says, “the lawsuit seeks $5,000,001 on behalf of what the lawyers estimate will be thousands of plaintiffs who fit the criteria to seek class status.” Do they know basic math?
Actually, I can see a potential complaint. USC has one of the largest and most generous merit scholarship programs out there, and it’s really specifically aimed at upper-middle class kids who could get into a top-10 school but would have to pay the full $70k/year. It’s a big deal: they send you a fancy invitation and fly you out for a two day sales pitch, I mean, campus tour. At the end of it, they offer 1/2 those kids full tuition. And there’s quite a few kids that opt for USC for the cost of room and board over Dartmouth or Cornell or even Standford at full price. There are not that many schools as prestigious as USC that have merit-based aid like that.
Thanks for that. I was not aware of that USC program. You’re right that it’s quite generous and I can well understand why someone would go to USC rather than one of the other schools.
BTW, perhaps you can answer a question for me. I graduated high school in 1984 and when I was contemplating college choices, the guidance counselor advised me which schools were “stretches”, which were safety schools and which were in the middle. Meanwhile, my brother’s kids graduated high school in 2012 and 2016 and didn’t get that kind of advice. So I was touring schools that my nephew had no chance of getting into (good grades but a terrible SAT score). (Although it’s a lot of fun to tour these schools. The really elite ones are amazing places. I wish I was 18 again and could go to school for the first time all over again.)
So do high school counselors still advise students which schools to consider?
I don’t know about the counselors, but that is the advice I give to both of my kids (one is currently in college). Above all, we encourage applying to schools “where you want to be”, with some of them stretch and some safe. It wont do anyone any favors going to any school where they don’t want to be, no matter how prestigious.