international education
campusreview.com.au
Actress Felicity Huffman outside the LA
courthouse where she was charged.
Photo: David McNew, AFP
TV stars in college
bribery scheme
Celebrity parents charged after
forking out millions to guarantee
admission to elite US universities.
By AAP
A
ctresses Felicity Huffman and Lori
Loughlin, as well as various CEOs,
are among dozens of people
arrested over a US$25 million ($35 million)
scheme to help wealthy Americans cheat
their children’s way into elite universities,
such as Yale and Stanford.
The largest college admissions fraud
scam unearthed in US history was run out
of a small college preparation company
in Newport Beach, California, that relied
on bribes, phoney test-takers and even
doctored photos depicting non-athletic
applicants as elite competitors to land
college slots for the offspring of rich
parents, prosecutors said.
“These parents are a catalogue of wealth
and privilege,” Andrew Lelling, the US
attorney in Boston, said at a recent news
conference.
“For every student admitted through
fraud, an honest, genuinely talented
student was rejected.”
Federal prosecutors in Boston charged
William ‘Rick’ Singer, 58, with running the
scheme through his Edge College & Career
Network, which allegedly charged from
US$100,000 to US$2.5 million ($140,000
to $3.5 million) per child for the services,
masked as contributions to a scam charity
Singer ran.
About 300 law enforcement agents
swept across the country to make arrests
in what the FBI codenamed ‘Operation
Varsity Blues’.
Prosecutors have named 33 parents,
13 coaches and associates of Singer’s
business, but said the investigation
continues and more parents and coaches
could be charged.
Singer pleaded guilty in Boston federal
court to charges including racketeering,
money laundering and obstruction of
justice, according to court papers. He could
not be reached for immediate comment.
The alleged masterminds of the scam
and the parents who paid into it could all
face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Huffman, a former best actress Oscar
nominee who is married to fellow actor
William H Macy, starred in the ABC TV
series Desperate Housewives.
Loughlin, best known for her role in
the ABC sitcom Full House and the recent
Netflix sequel Fuller House, is married
to clothing company founder Mossimo
Giannulli, who was also charged in
the scheme.
Prosecutors said it was up to the
universities to decide what to do with
students admitted through cheating.
Yale University and the University of
Southern California said in separate
statements that they were co-operating
with investigators.
Prosecutors said the scheme began in
2011 and also helped children get into the
University of Texas, Georgetown University,
Wake Forest University and the University
of California, Los Angeles.
Part of the scheme involved advising
parents to lie to test administrators that their
child had learning disabilities that allowed
them extra exam time.
The parents were then advised to choose
one of two test centres that Singer’s
company said it had control over: one
For every student
admitted through fraud, an
honest, genuinely talented
student was rejected.
in Houston, Texas, and the other in West
Hollywood, California.
The test administrators in those centres
took bribes of tens of thousands of dollars
to allow Singer’s clients to cheat, often
by arranging to have wrong answers
corrected or having another person take
the exam. Singer would agree with parents
beforehand roughly what score they
wanted the child to get.
In many cases, the students were not
aware that their parents had arranged for
the cheating, prosecutors said, although in
other cases they knowingly took part. None
of the children were charged on Tuesday.
Singer also helped parents stage
photographs of their children playing
sports, and even Photoshopped children’s
faces onto images of athletes downloaded
from the internet to exaggerate their
athletic credentials. ■
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