William Singer departs federal court in Boston on Tuesday after he pleaded guilty to charges in a nationwide college admissions bribery scheme. | Steven Senne/AP Photo Education How Congress could finally tackle elite college admissions

A sweeping college admissions scandal revealed this week raises the question of why it's OK for wealthy parents to cut a check worth millions to get their child admitted to an elite school, but they can't pay a coach to slip in a kid as a recruited "athlete."

One is entirely legal and eagerly accepted by colleges while the other has led to criminal charges for dozens of well-to-do parents.


But this week's scandal has sparked widespread outrage and could open the door for Congress to finally take a hard look at the ways the wealthy have long legally bought their kids’ way into college: Legacy admissions, massive donations and athletics.

The FBI on Tuesday charged dozens of wealthy parents, including celebrities Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, in a major cheating and bribery scheme to get their children admitted into some of the nation's most elite colleges. Coaches at Georgetown, USC, UCLA and other schools face racketeering charges. The FBI has said more parents — and maybe some students — could still be charged.

The White House so far has said little, aside from snarky tweets from White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump Jr. That may be because the Trump administration has not previously wanted to touch the role of money in elite college admissions, a former administration official told POLITICO.

“The West Wing communicated that this is not a priority," the former official said, noting the administration has so far said little about the scandal. "The silence is deafening."

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In a statement issued Wednesday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said: "Every student deserves to be considered on their individual merits when applying to college, and it’s disgraceful to see anyone breaking the law to give their children an advantage over others. The department is looking closely at this issue and working to determine if any of our regulations have been violated."

But the scandal nonetheless is unfolding just as Congress is working to overhaul the federal higher education law and as a host of Democrats scramble to curry favor with 2020 voters. House Democrats, meanwhile, are already vowing it's time for the education committee to scrutinize admissions.

“The stars are starting to align for a genuine legislative effort to both rein in unfair practices in admissions that undermine diversity and don’t reward merit and to hold institutions accountable for their level of access to working class families,” said Michael Dannenberg, a former Sen. Ted Kennedy aide who has made it his quest for the last decade to end preferences for the wealthy.

“You’ve got a juicy scandal, a host of presidential candidates who want working class votes, a rewrite of the Higher Education Act pending in Congress, at least two anti-affirmative-action cases making their way through the courts,” said Dannenberg, now the director of strategic Initiatives for policy at the think tank Education Reform Now. “So there’s a confluence of events and circumstances that make it the right time to attack the host of preferences and policies that undermine diversity and fairness in higher education.”

The scheme largely involved bribing coaches — with about $25 million in payments over seven years. Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, bribed USC with $500,000 to have their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team, even though they did not participate in crew, officials allege.

While at a lower price point than contributing funds for a research wing, these kinds of actions constitute a crime, federal officials said. “We’re not talking about donating a building so that a school’s more likely to take your son or daughter,” Andrew Lelling, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said. “We are talking about deception and fraud. Fake test scores. Fake athletic credentials. Fake photographs. Bribes to college officials.”

The ringleader of the scheme, William Singer, who ran a sham college counseling company that bribed college coaches and administrators and helped students cheat on college entrance exams, told parents he had created a “side door” to admissions — which involved cheating and bribery, according to charging documents. But he acknowledged there has long been a “back door” for those who write big checks directly to the schools. He claims to have helped more than 800 students get into college through that “side door.”

Some don't see much difference between donations and bribes. "What strikes me is that this wouldn’t be possible if the admissions system weren’t corrupt in the first place,” said Kevin Carey, a higher education expert at the left-leaning think tank New America. “You have a system that purports to be a meritocracy but in fact there are a number of well-established ways to get around that, many of which either indirectly or directly involve money.”

“You can just outright pay a large donation to the university, you can spend a lot of money to strategically put your kid in a sport that a lot of people don’t play,” Carey said, pointing out that a Stanford sailing coach is among those accused of accepting a bribe.

“How many people can afford to train their high school children to be expert at sailing?” Carey said. “On some level, the coaches were just catching the checks that normally go to the university, at a discount.”

House Democrats have called for hearings to examine the role of wealth in admissions.

“We’ll have them at some point,” Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.), the former president of the University of Miami, told POLITICO Wednesday. “I think that they’re jammed up at the moment but we will have them at some point.”

“We need to look into how admissions people organized their work,” she said. “I was surprised — this is basically using the walk-on process as an end run to get people on in a university. I have not seen very much of that. I’ve run a lot of universities. And I want to question the admissions people. ”

But the last serious push to do anything about preferences for the wealthy was Kennedy’s attempt to end legacy admissions more than a decade ago. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, pushed a “name and shame” bill that would have required colleges to report their admissions preference for legacy applicants and those who applied early, among other things.

Some see the political environment shifting. The higher education lobby’s influence has shown signs of a slow erosion in Congress, which took a shot at the nation’s richest schools in the GOP tax bill in 2017. The bill included a new tax on endowments of the wealthiest colleges.

“That you would explicitly call out these ultra-rich institutions and say — it was essentially a millionaires tax for colleges,” Carey said of the significance of the tax bill. “It established a principle — that they could be seen as extremely wealthy institutions that are tax exempt and not paying their fair share. That’s thematically pretty consistent with the bad things that have been revealed this week.”

There’s bipartisan support now, as well, to include new measures to hold colleges accountable for how well their students do after graduation — something universities themselves have long opposed — or for how well they’re serving working class students.

But it's no secret how it's worked until now. Harvard is not involved in this week's scandal but Harvard's admissions chief admitted in the course of a trial on the school’s use of race in admissions last year that he has added children and relatives of donors to his list of potential students he tracks closely, even if he didn't know whether they would otherwise be strong applicants. He testified that considering the children of large donors is "important for the long-term strength of the institution" and helps ensure Harvard has the "resources" for things like scholarships.

Emails revealed as evidence during the trial showed how donations may influence admissions decisions.

In a June 2013 email, for example, David Ellwood, then dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, wrote: "I am simply thrilled about all the folks you were able to admit. ... All big wins." The names in the email were redacted, but one, Ellwood wrote, "has already committed to a building" and "committed major money for fellowships ... before the decision from you!) and all are likely to be prominent in the future. Most importantly, I think all of these will be superb additions to the class."

In what's often cited as an example of donations and acceptances, the father of White House adviser Jared Kushner in 1998 pledged $2.5 million to Harvard shortly before Jared was admitted, though his scores and profile were said by high school administrators to not meet usual standards.

“The difference here is not in kind but in degree,” said Dan Golden, whose 2006 book, “The Price of Admission,” first told of Kushner’s father's donation to Harvard. Kushner Companies has denied any connection to Jared’s acceptance into the Ivy League, telling Golden in 2016 that the allegation “is and always has been false.” The White House did not comment.

“We have an unfair system that benefits the wealthy, and this scheme appears to have been cleverly designed to exploit those advantages,” Golden said. “It touches on the points in the system that benefit the wealthy and then it takes it to the nth degree.”

Michael Stratford contributed to this report.