A company used “side doors” to gain admission for its clients’ children to elite colleges, according to prosecutors at the U.S. Department of Justice.Jon Elswick, AP Images
The U.S. Department of Justice has charged dozens of people with illegally clearing their children’s way to admission at elite universities through bribery, according to documents unsealed on Tuesday.
News of the indictments has sent a shock wave through higher ed. Here’s how the bribery scheme is alleged to have worked, based solely on a supporting affidavit filed in the case.
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A company used “side doors” to gain admission for its clients’ children to elite colleges, according to prosecutors at the U.S. Department of Justice.Jon Elswick, AP Images
The U.S. Department of Justice has charged dozens of people with illegally clearing their children’s way to admission at elite universities through bribery, according to documents unsealed on Tuesday.
News of the indictments has sent a shock wave through higher ed. Here’s how the bribery scheme is alleged to have worked, based solely on a supporting affidavit filed in the case.
There’s one main entity you need to know about: The Edge College & Career Network, LLC, known informally as “The Key.” Clients of the Key included parents who wanted to ensure that their children were admitted to elite colleges. A cooperating witness, identified in the affidavit as Rick Singer, the Key’s founder, described the scheme, broadly, like this:
What we do is we help the wealthiest families in the U.S. get their kids into school … They want guarantees, they want this thing done. They don’t want to be messing around with this thing. And so they want in at certain schools. So I did what I would call, “side doors.” There is a front door which means you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement, which is 10 times as much money. And I’ve created this side door in. Because the back door, when you go through institutional advancement, as you know, everybody’s got a friend of a friend, who knows somebody who knows somebody, but there’s no guarantee, they’re just gonna give you a second look. My families want a guarantee.
Dozens of people, including famous actors, college coaches, and a university administrator, have been charged by federal prosecutors for their alleged roles in an admissions-bribery scheme involving Yale, Stanford, and other elite institutions.
The Key used several “side doors.” One was through college-entrance examinations like the SAT and the ACT. Clients were told to have their children ask to extend the time in which they took the tests, sometimes by claiming to have learning disabilities. That tended to give the students an “individualized setting” in which to take the tests. The Key would then bribe officials overseeing those settings to let someone else take an exam in a student’s place. Clients would pay $15,000 to $75,000 per test for that service. The resulting fraudulent scores were submitted to colleges.
Another “side door” was through athletic designation. From 2011 to 2018, parents paid the Key about $25 million to bribe coaches and administrators to identify the parents’ children as recruited athletes, thereby giving them a leg up in the admissions process. Coaches are typically granted a certain number of “admissions slots” in which they alert the admissions office to their teams’ needs; coaches who accepted the Key’s bribes agreed to designate one “slot” to an applicant even though he or she was not a recruited athlete. (The Key created fake athletic “profiles” for those students, even going so far as to Photoshop their faces onto the bodies of real athletes.)
According to the Justice Department, coaches at Georgetown, Stanford, Wake Forest, and Yale Universities and the University of Southern California, among others, have been implicated in the scheme.
The Key concealed all of the payments by funneling them through a nonprofit organization, the Key Worldwide Foundation, whose executive director is Singer.
The foundation was open about how it conducted business, though it cast its efforts as on behalf of underrepresented students.
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“The Key Worldwide Foundation endeavors to provide education that would normally be unattainable to underprivileged students, not only attainable but realistic,” its mission statement reads. “Our contributions to major athletic university programs may help to provide placement to students that may not have access under normal channels.”
Universities named in the affidavit are also listed among the foundation’s grantees in its Form 990, the disclosure it is required to file with the Internal Revenue Service. Southern California and the University of Texas at Austin, for example, are each listed as having received a total of more than a half-million dollars between 2014 and 2016.
