In Bribery Scheme, Coaches Sold Their ‘Admissions Slots’ to Nonathletes. Wait, Coaches Influence Admissions?

One day in August 2015, Gordon Ernst got an email. “I have been really successful this summer playing tennis around the country,” wrote a prospective applicant to Georgetown University. “I am looking forward to having a chance to be part of the Georgetown tennis team and make a positive contribution to your team’s success.”

Ernst, then the university’s women’s tennis coach, forwarded the email to an admissions officer with the comment: “Potential spot.”

The applicant played tennis, but not well enough to make Georgetown’s team. And Ernst had no intention of putting her on it. Instead, they and the student’s parents were part of an elaborate bribery scheme, described on Tuesday by federal prosecutors, whose sordid details and scope have brought elite-college admissions under national scrutiny.

Admission Through the ‘Side Door’

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.

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Coaches at the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and Yale University, among others, used their clout with the admissions office as a commodity to sell for personal gain, court documents allege. That clout took the form of an “admission slot” — a designation applied to a recruited athlete that typically improves, sometimes drastically, their chances of admission. In giving those slots to nonathletes, the coaches made use of a gaping loophole in the admissions system.

And they were rewarded handsomely for the service, authorities say. Ernst was paid nearly $2.7 million by William (Rick) Singer, the mastermind of the scheme, who has pleaded guilty to a litany of charges, to secure the admission of at least 12 students, according to an affidavit released by the U.S. Justice Department. (Ernst has been charged with racketeering conspiracy and was placed on leave from his job, at the University of Rhode Island, on Tuesday. He did not immediately return a message from The Chronicle on Wednesday.)

Like people across the country, athletics administrators have been eagerly following news of the case. Karen Peters, senior associate athletics director at the University of Portland, spent some of Tuesday night reading the coverage. She said she was shocked.

“It’s crazy that it happened,” she said, “but when you read through it, it was clearly a loophole there to be exploited.”

‘Fairly Common’

How colleges manage admissions for athletes varies widely, Peters said. But it’s “fairly common” for selective institutions to grant a specific number of slots to the athletics department each year, she said. For example, Georgetown gives its coaches roughly 158 slots per year to work with, according to the affidavit.

Whether the “slot” given to a student guarantees admission or just a leg up in the process also varies among colleges, Peters said. At the universities named in the affidavit, designation as an athlete results in admissions prospects that are “higher — and in some cases substantially higher — than those of nonrecruited athletes with similar grades and standardized-test scores,” according to the document.

Stanford is one of those universities. The university’s sailing coach, John Vandemoer, agreed to designate two nonathletes as recruited athletes in exchange for $270,000 paid to the sailing team, according to the affidavit. He pleaded guilty on Tuesday to one count of conspiracy to commit racketeering.

Peters, who worked at Stanford for 10 years as an athletics administrator, said the university had a specific number of admissions slots, but she would not say what the number was. At Stanford, Peters said, admissions officers had the ultimate authority to grant admission, with coaches only giving input. “Something like this never would have crossed my mind,” she said. (In a statement, the university said the behavior of the coach, who was fired, ran “completely counter to Stanford’s values.”)

Competition has a way of creating exceptions to academic standards at selective colleges, said Welch Suggs, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Georgia. “These schools relax their admissions standards for ‘recruited’ athletes because they want to be competitive with larger institutions with lower admissions criteria,” wrote Suggs, a former Chronicle reporter, in a Twitter thread on Tuesday.

Take the University of Louisville, which admits roughly 70 percent of applicants. Its athletics department is allotted five slots each year for special consideration by the provost in cases where recruited athletes who receive scholarships do not meet academic admissions requirements, said Matthew J. Banker, an associate athletics director. The department has never exhausted those slots, he said.

Wake Forest University — which accepts about 29 percent of applicants and is a frequent athletic opponent of Louisville’s — designates up to 128 slots for the athletics department to seek “special consideration by the admissions office” each year, a spokeswoman wrote in an email.

Wake Forest, too, was named in Tuesday’s affidavit. The women’s volleyball coach is alleged to have accepted $100,000 for designating a student on the admissions wait list as a volleyball recruit. (The university placed the coach on administrative leave.)

Recruited Walk-Ons

For the coaches who took part in the scheme, participation seemed to have little cost, according to the affidavit. When a parent seeking a child’s admission to USC asked Singer whether coaches would notice anything amiss, he answered:

“No, not at all, because their boss, who’s Donna Heinel, essentially put ’em on the recruited walk-on list, which happens all the time, and they just don’t show up for practice, and that’s fine. Coaches are OK with that because, essentially, donations are going to help their programs, and they know that,” Singer said. (Heinel, who was fired by USC on Tuesday, did not answer The Chronicle’s request for comment.)

Recruited walk-ons create “a more qualitative dynamic,” said Banker, the Louisville administrator. Hypothetically, a friend of a university’s soccer coach might advocate for his or her child, a soccer player not quite good enough to get a scholarship, as a possible walk-on. The coach might consider that, “and reasonably so,” he said. “But when you add to the equation that at a highly selective university those admission spots obviously are coveted, that raises the stakes.”

Tuesday’s news may prompt colleges to discuss new methods of oversight. Georgetown placed Ernst on leave in 2017 after an internal investigation found that he had “violated university rules concerning admissions.” (The University of Rhode Island subsequently hired Ernst as women’s tennis coach before placing him on leave on Tuesday.)

After that investigation, Georgetown instituted a new policy on athlete admissions. The university will now conduct audits “periodically” to make sure students recruited as athletes are actually on the rosters of the team that recruited them.

Andy Thomason is a senior editor at The Chronicle. Send him a tip at andy.thomason@chronicle.com. And follow him on Twitter @arthomason.