That alleged fixer behind the scheme described by the FBI is a business owner named William Rick Singer, who this afternoon pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, including several counts of conspiracy as well as obstruction of justice. The government accuses him of setting up a sham charity to launder the money he collected and spent while perpetrating two primary forms of bribery. One involved third-party individuals fraudulently taking the SAT or ACT on behalf of his clients’ children; the other involved paying coaches to recruit and admit students with made-up “impressive” athletic resumes, a federal official contended at the Tuesday press conference. Many of these so-called profiles , according to the court documents, were replete with staged (or Photoshopped ) images and fabricated narratives. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment submitted by The Atlantic through his admissions-advising company .

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Charges are also being brought against 13 college coaches, including Yale’s head women’s-soccer coach, who allegedly accepted a $400,000 bribe to admit a student as one of his recruits even though the student had never played competitive soccer.

The biggest victims of this epic alleged scheme, of course, are the higher-caliber students whose prospective tickets to the prestigious colleges were given instead to these teens, whose parents had the savvy and gall to break the rules. But what’s even more disenchanting is that these revelations, sensational details aside, underscore a fact of American life: that the elite-college admissions system is broken.

“When federal prosecutors indicted Hollywood celebrities and other wealthy individuals for paying bribes to have their children admitted to selective colleges, we saw the logical culmination of a more subtle practice that has been going on for decades,” said the education scholar Richard Kahlenberg, who studies legacy admissions and is a prominent critic of them, in an email.

In the Tuesday press conference, the U.S. attorney perhaps unintentionally emphasized this irony when he said: “We’re not talking about donating a building … We’re talking about fraud.”

His comment highlighted the mundanity of admissions favors for upper-crust children—when executed legally. Sometimes these favors are given through a practice known as “legacy admissions,” in which elite colleges give preference to an applicant who, say, is the child of an alumnus. A common denominator tends to be wealth, particularly if the applicant is otherwise underqualified. A parent may offer a college a handsome donation (and, sometimes, a namesake building) to boost her child’s admissions prospects.