The FBI affidavit says that the crimes are “conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud.”
It looks like there were two separate sorts of bribery going on:
I wonder if the kids were listed on the rosters of the teams. It sounds like they did not do that. Also I wonder how this was uncovered .
For trivia, there are 2 famous actresses who have sons that played college hoops. Julia Louis -Drefyuss son played at Northwestern and Julianne Moore’s son was at Davidson. Those are 2 schools that are not known for cutting athletes a break on grades.
They received a tip during an unrelated investigation.
They went as far as staging photos of participation in athletics, sometimes just photo-shopping faces onto stock photos.
Take a look at this article on5 status symbols the rich are investing in. Number one on the list is education.
I should mention the kids of Moore and Louis-Dreyfus were not star players on their teams. I believe both were reserves. A couple years ago when Northwestern was on TV for a game they spent a ton of time showing his mother Julia in the stands.
Moore’s son:
A lot of coaches have resigned or are suspended. I can’t wait to see how this continues to unfold. I am more interested in the CEOs than the actors. I wonder if any of them will have to step down or if they will claim ignorance and blame the spouses.
My schadenfreude is off the charts.
WAKE FOREST?!?!?
Oh, man, that does my Furman-educated heart good.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote about being a visiting professor at places where the rich sent their scions to get edumacated. He was not pleased with what he found. Classes full of lazy, stupid, uncaring kids.
This was a key part of what turned him against the plutocracy in the US.
It’s hardly surprising to anyone familiar with colleges that there’s an entirely different set of rules for the kids of wealthy people. And it is so easy to pay legally to get a college degree at certain small private colleges it is amazing that people go thru such great lengths (including breaking the law) to buy a degree for a kid that just doesn’t care.
Oldie but goodie: One of the Walton (Walmart) family got caught cheating to get a degree. Hmm, USC again.
This article has more details on the indicted participants
Except for the actresses there’s not a lot of name recognition there, although some of the companies may be recognized.
So, I’ll wager, is the FBI. The celebrities who participated in this are unlikely to see jail time, but they may be willing to turn on coaches and university officials who facilitated these schemes. Going after smaller fish in a very public way to build a case against major participants is an well honored tactic by federal prosecutors.
When Jared Kushner’s father goes to prison (again) then I’ll celebrate a victory for Western civilization. Until then I’m not going to hold my breath that much will really come out of this other than wealthy “donors” will find more inventive ways of ensuring that their children enjoy the unearned privileges of familial wealth.
Stranger
I think that the people who have flipped have done so already.
None of them will see jail time. They will pay big fines that they can easily afford and probably start scholarship funds for underprivileged youth. The CEOs may lose their jobs and the actors will continue on having lost a bit of pride. They will make public statements about how they lost sight of things out of love for their children.
Half a million isn’t NEAR enough to get you into USC directly. I mean, Jesus Christ, normal tuition/fees is going to be $250,000 over 4 years for a full-pay kid: half a million isn’t even all that much more.
The old fashioned was to do this was to donate lots of money directly to the University a few years before your kid applies. These are known as “Development cases”. However, and this is important, “development cases” cannot generally be trainwrecks: they have to meet the standards of the university–students that might well have gotten in, so it’s just a matter of accepting THIS qualified kid over THAT qualified kid. Half a million MIGHT be enough to get into USC that way, though even then, it’s a little low.
But that’s not what this was. These kids were starkly unqualified. You have to pay a lot more–like tens of millions–to get a dramatically unqualified kid accepted into a wealthy university. It may not be possible at any price.
So that’s why these parents were looking for a cheaper option. I mean, examples vary, but the heart of the scheme seemed to be lying/cheating/whatever to get the kids to look at least as good as recruited athletes, the group with the lowest stats at most schools. Then you pay the coach, not the school, to put the kid down on the “recruited athlete” list, which the admissions committee more or less rubber-stamps.
Like others I was surprised at how unelite most of the schools named are. Before anyone gets defensive its all about perception. Beyond the Ivy League there are at most a handful of other schools that are perceived as elite enough to impress someone just by having the diploma. Texas is not one of them. Even if you are rich just save your money and have your kid go to a community college for a few years first.
Even a certain president who had a millionaire father went to Fordam for a few years first.
If nothing else, I’d love to see the degrees revoked for those students that made it all the way through. But the privileged class rarely suffers much real harm when scandals like this erupt, so I would be surprised if any of the repercussions are very serious. A few firings, a few fines, and that’s about it. 
Moderator Note
Since this is kind of a current events story, I’m going to shift this over to MPSIMS from IMHO.
This is pretty much a text book example of a federal investigation. You don’t hear shit until the cage door is shut and locked. The announcement comes at the same time that the main conspirator is pleading guilty to all charges in court.
If it costs 6 million to get your kid into a good school so that kid can become rich and successful, wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier to just give the kid 4 million and call it a day?
Also, I love that we live in a country where we can buy a building for a university to get our kid in and that somehow is acceptable, but whatever happened here is somehow not.
And in case anyone is wondering, yes, William Macy was up to his neck in this.
Well for one “whatever happened here” has been very clearly laid out in all the stories. As for the stereotypical buying a building, if it is a direct quid pro quo it may be illegal depending on the circumstances. One big difference is in one case the school and a large number of its students benefit from the donation. In the other one dude pockets $25 million dollars.