"What laws for the rich?"

—Jack McCoy, Executive Assistant District Attorney for New York County.

I have been around college sports in one way or another for most of my life, and for all of my professional career. One of my sons was a college athlete and is now a college coach. But I never thought I'd live long enough to see a college recruiting scandal that involved athletes who couldn't play. From The New York Times:

Parents paid Mr. Singer about $25 million from 2011 until February 2019 to bribe coaches and university administrators to designate their children as recruited athletes, which effectively ensured their admission, according to the indictment. Mr. Singer is also accused of bribing Division 1 athletic coaches to tell admissions officers that they wanted certain students, even though the students did not have the necessary athletic credentials.

Most elite universities recruit student athletes and use different criteria to admit them, often with lower grades and standardized test scores than other students. Admissions officers typically set aside a number of spots in each freshman class for coaches to recruit students to their teams.

“At each of the universities the admissions prospects of recruited athletes are higher — and in some cases significantly higher — than those of non-recruited athletes with similar grades and standardized test scores,” the indictment said. Mr. Singer also helped parents go to great lengths to falsely present their children as the sort of top-flight athletes that coaches would want to recruit.

Stanford University sailing coach John Vandemoer was implicated in the scandal. Scott Eisen Getty Images

Mr. Singer fabricated athletic “profiles” of students to submit with their applications, which contained teams the students had not played on and fake honors they had not won. Some parents supplied “staged photographs of their children engaged in athletic activity,” according to the authorities; and Mr. Singer’s associates also photoshopped the faces of the applicants onto images of athletes found on the internet.

In one example detailed in an indictment, the parents of a student applying to Yale paid Mr. Singer $1.2 million to help her get admitted. The student, who did not play soccer, was described as the co-captain of a prominent club soccer team in Southern California in order to be recruited for the Yale women’s soccer team. The coach of the Yale soccer team was bribed at least $400,000 to recruit the student.

400-Gs to the women's soccer coach to help admit someone who couldn't play soccer? I'm telling you, the economics of college sports scandals is way out of whack.

The whole scheme, as described in the indictment unsealed in Boston on Tuesday, is a master class in wealth and privilege. (The only small diamond amid the sewage is that it makes all those people who went to court arguing that their Caucasianism had been discriminated against through affirmative action look completely ridiculous.) Otherwise, this prosecution is going to be a feast of fat things. Wealthy people paying to have the books cooked on their kids' SATs, and putting on a little pageant in order to do it.

Those parents were willing to pay between $15,000 and $75,000 per test, which went to college entrance exam administrators who helped their children cheat on them by giving them answers, correcting their work or even letting third parties falsely pose as their children and take the tests in their stead, according to the indictment. Mr. Singer instructed at least one parent, Mr. McGlashan, the partner at TPG, to claim that his son had learning disabilities in order to gain extended time for him to take his college entrance exam alone, over two days instead of one, according to court documents.

I wonder how parents of kids with real learning disabilities feel about that one. Guillotine futures just went through the roof. And, as someone not me tweeted out earlier, what we have here is helicopter parenting by people who actually own helicopters.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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