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USC seems to have telegraphed that the kids won’t necessarily get punished. Officially it said it’s still investigating but then added ‘some of the kids may have been minors during the application process’, as if that’s salient.

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John Vandemoer

Stanford sailing coach

Vandemoer is accused of taking financial contributions to his championship-winning sailing program from an intermediary in exchange for agreeing to recommend two prospective students for admission. “Neither student came to Stanford,” Stanford said in a statement Tuesday. “However, the alleged behavior runs completely counter to Stanford’s values.” Stanford said Vandemoer had been fired.

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Originally posted by Cindysphinx:
You know what would be great fun? If college admissions were completely blind.

You submit your essays, your scores, your transcript, class rank, your other soft qualities. College knows nothing about you otherwise.

I'll bet a lot of rich kids would get left out. They would all have these carefully crafted profiles, but they wouldn't have legacy or admission based on connections or donations. Poor babies.

I think we would wind up with some really interesting, deserving people getting admitted, and diversity would take care of itself.

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Originally posted by jon-nyc:
The SF Chronicle quoted some excerpts from the phone conversations that implied at least one of the kids didn’t even know about her fake athletic admission.

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Ross residents Todd Blake, an entrepreneur and investor, and Diane Blake, an executive at a retail merchandising firm, are also accused of bribing Heinel to get their daughter admitted as a volleyball recruit.

“So very excited that my daughter ... will be attending USC next year! #FightOn #trojanfamily,” Todd Blake wrote in a March 2018 Twitter post with a picture of a certificate of admissions to the university.

According to prosecutors, when the cooperating witness told Diane Blake that USC’s athletic records had been subpoenaed, she asked, “should I be concerned,” before saying, “I mean, (our daughter) doesn’t even know, you know?”

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Originally posted by jon-nyc:
I can see how you could do this and keep the kid in the dark. The coach is in on it, so you don't need to worry about him tracking the kid down and bringing him to the field.

You're not actually seeking a scholarship, so all the official paperwork around that doesn't show up.

The coach just tells the admissions folks 'I want this kid'. I can't imagine they do too much due diligence after that, they just factor that in to their decision.

(But I bet there will be due diligence on coach recommendations in the future)

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Pump, dump, Yale

One good way for federal criminal investigations to work is, you investigate someone for a while for doing some dumb criminal thing, you tap his phone, you gather evidence, and eventually you bring him in and show him the evidence and say “we’ve got you, you’re going away for a long time, unless you give us something we can use.” And then he sees the trouble he’s in and rolls up on a bigger criminal, or at least, a criminal who is of more interest to you. Sometimes this is the criminal you were really after in the first place—you bring in a low-level drug dealer to get the head of the cartel, etc.—but sometimes it’s just sort of random: Your guy is a criminal, he hangs out with criminals, he knows a bunch of criminal stuff that you don’t, and so to save himself he will tell you the answer to an unsolved murder or a famous art theft or whatever.

I like to imagine that when the Feds brought in Morrie Tobin and laid out the case against him for running a stock pump-and-dump scheme, he looked it over, nodded sadly, took a long drag on his cigarette, and then said: “Have you ever heard of … Yale?”

Mr. Tobin was being questioned in an alleged pump-and-dump investment scheme—in which people conspire to inflate the price of a stock so they can sell it at a profit—when he offered a tip to federal authorities in an effort to obtain leniency, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Tobin, who attended Yale University, told investigators that the head women’s soccer coach at Yale had sought a bribe in return for getting his daughter into the Ivy League school, a person familiar with the investigation said.

The guy knew how to read a room, you know? The elite college bribery scandal has been front-page news all week; pump-and-dump scams generally are not. Tobin pleaded guilty to a bit of securities fraud; prosecutors, presumably as a small token of their gratitude to him for giving them such a high-profile and ridiculous case, are not recommending prison time.