)
Thirty-three parents were charged in the case. Also implicated were top college coaches, who were accused of accepting millions of dollars to help admit students to Wake Forest, Yale, Stanford, the University of Southern California and other schools, regardless of their academic or sports ability, officials said.
Along with Hollywood stars Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, those charged included prominent business leaders, a fashion designer and a top lawyer, as well as exam administrators accused of manufacturing students’ achievements and private admissions counselors accused of coordinating it all, officials said.
The case unveiled Tuesday was stunning in its breadth and audacity. It was the Justice Department’s largest ever college admissions prosecution, a sprawling investigation that involved 200 agents nationwide and resulted in charges against 50 people in six states.
The charges also underscored how college admissions have become so cutthroat and competitive that some have sought to break the rules. Authorities say the parents of some of the nation’s wealthiest and most privileged students sought to buy spots for their children at top universities, not only cheating the system but also potentially cheating other hardworking students out of a chance at a college education.
“The parents are the prime movers of this fraud,” Andrew E. Lelling, U.S. attorney for the district of Massachusetts, said Tuesday during a news conference. Lelling said that those parents used their wealth to create a separate and unfair admissions process for their children.
But, Lelling said, “there will not be a separate criminal justice system” for them.
“The real victims in this case are the hardworking students,” who were displaced in the admissions process by “far less qualified students and their families who simply bought their way in,” Lelling said.
At the center of the sweeping financial crime and fraud case was William Rick Singer, founder of a college preparatory business called the Edge College & Career Network, also known as The Key.
Authorities said Singer, who has agreed to plead guilty to the charges and cooperated with federal prosecutors, used The Key and its nonprofit arm, Key Worldwide Foundation, which is based in Newport Beach, California, to help students cheat on their standardized tests and to pay bribes to the coaches who could get them into college with fake athletic credentials.
Lelling said that Huffman participated in the SAT cheating portion of the scam.
Singer also bribed Division 1 athletic coaches to tell admissions officers that they wanted certain students, even though the students did not have the necessary athletic credentials.
Lelling said that the first lead in the case came when the target of an entirely separate investigation gave prosecutors a tip that the bribery and cheating might be occurring.
—
Those Charged in the Admissions Cheating Scandal
— Gregory Abbott
— Marcia Abbott
— Gamal Abdelaziz
— Diane Blake
— Todd Blake
— Jane Buckingham
— Gordon Caplan
— Michael Center
— I-Hsin “Joey” Chen
— Amy Colburn
— Gregory Colburn
— Igor Dvorskiy
— Gordon Ernst
— William Ferguson
— Robert Flaxman
— Martin Fox
— Mossimo Giannulli
— Donna Heinel
— Elizabeth Henriquez
— Manuel Henriquez
— Douglas Hodge
— Felicity Huffman
— Agustin Huneeus, Jr.
— Bruce Isackson
— Davina Isackson
— Michelle Janavs
— Laura Janke
— Ali Khosroshahin
— Elisabeth Kimmel
— Marjorie Klapper
— Lori Loughlin
— Toby MacFarlane
— Steven Masera
— William McGlashan
— Rudolph Meredith
— Marci Palatella
— Mark Riddell
— Jorge Salcedo
— Mikaela Sanford
— Peter Jan Sartorio
— Stephen Semprevivo
— David Sidoo
— William Rick Singer
— Devin Sloane
— John Vandemoer
— Jovan Vavic
— Niki Williams
— John Wilson
— Homayoun Zadeh
— Robert Zangrillo
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.