Corruption

Paying bribes to get their kids in elite schools is going to send some very wealthy people to jail

Manicure salons all over America probably enjoy a booming business around this time every year, because it’s nail-biting time for parents of high school students awaiting acceptance letters from college admissions departments. But until indictments were handed down this week by a grand jury that heard evidence in the so-called Varsity Blues investigation by the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Andrew E. Lelling, at least 33 parents of children seeking admissions to several elite universities weren’t biting theirs.

That is because the parents thought they had put the fix in for their kids. They had paid a man named William Singer, the founder of a college preparatory business called the Edge College & Career Network hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to insure their children received positive admissions letters in the mail. Between 2011 and February of 2019, the parents of more than 700 children had paid Singer a total of more than $25 million to bribe college administrators, coaches, and test administrators of the SAT and ACT to guarantee their children’s admissions to schools like Yale, USC, Stanford and other elite universities.