The verdicts are in. On Friday, October 8, a jury in federal court in Boston returned guilty verdicts against the first two Operation Varsity Blues defendants to go to trial.
Gamal Abdelaziz, a former casino executive with Wynn Resorts, and John Wilson, a former executive with Staples and the Gap who is now a private-equity financier, were convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit bribery and fraud. Wilson was also found guilty of additional fraud and bribery charges and of filing a false tax return for taking a deduction for payments to coaches and the foundation run by Operation Varsity Blues mastermind Rick Singer.
On the afternoon that the verdicts were released, Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed reached out to me for comment for a story he was writing about reactions to the verdicts within higher education and the college counseling community. It will not surprise regular readers of this blog that I was happy to do so.
There were two parts to my response. The first, and easier, comment attempted to address the significance of the verdicts on the defendants and the legal system.
“The verdicts send an important message that ‘side doors’ and cutting in line for advantages in the admissions process are fundamentally wrong. They also maintain confidence in the judicial system.”
I wasn’t in the courtroom for the trial, so may be missing some of the nuances of the defense presented by attorneys for the accused, but I am struggling to figure out the strategy in going to trial in the first place. 47 of the 57 parents and coaches charged in the scandal have previously pled guilty or agreed to do so, making Abdelaziz and Wilson outliers. Every person deserves their day in court, but dating back to March 12, 2019, when the FBI indictments came out, the government’s evidence against Singer and the parents has seemed convincing and perhaps even overwhelming.
Early in his career, back when he was primarily a stand-up comedian, Steve Martin did a bit on how to be a millionaire without ever paying taxes. Today that bit wouldn’t be as funny, because it is routine for millionaires and billionaires to legally avoid paying their fair share in taxes.
There were two parts to Martin’s scheme. The first was “Get a million dollars.” The second was excuse your failure to pay taxes with two simple words, “I forgot.”
I don’t think Steve Martin served as Abdelaziz’s or Wilson’s lawyer, because news reports from the trial would have mentioned an attorney with an arrow through his head playing a banjo or claiming to be a “wild and crazy guy.” The defense attorneys, though, seem to have taken a page out of Steve Martin’s playbook. They claimed that their clients were victims, convinced that their payments to Singer and coaches were philanthropic donations. But both paid Singer and his cronies to construct fake athletic profiles so their children could be admitted as recruited walk-on athletes in sports the children did not play, or at least did not play at a level that would qualify them to play in college, so how clueless were they really?
Abdelaziz was accused of paying Singer $300,000 to get his daughter into the University of Southern California as a basketball recruit, ignoring the fact that she did not make her high school team. Wilson supposedly paid Singer $200,000 for his son to be designated as a water polo recruit for USC, half of which ended up at the university, and then contacted Singer about having his twin daughters admitted to Harvard and Stanford as ostensible sailing recruits. For both parents there are traces of Steve Martin’s “I forgot” defense, whether it be “I forgot that my child doesn’t play that sport” or “I forgot that bribery is against the law.” Thankfully the jurors did not buy the Steve Martin defense.
But what about the other defendant? A New York Times article on the verdicts argued that “the college admissions system was also on trial.” The second part of my response to Scott Jaschik focused on that issue.
“What the verdicts don’t do is resolve the issue of whether colleges were innocent victims of Rick Singer and the Operation Varsity Blues parents or were ‘unindicted co-conspirators.”
So were the scandal and the trial indictments of the college admissions process? The easy answer is no. The fraud was perpetrated by a corrupt con man masquerading as an independent college consultant, parents willing to go to any lengths to obtain admission to an “elite” college for their children, and coaches willing to trade slots on their teams for some easy money. There were no admissions officers caught up in the shenanigans. (It is also the case that no admissions officers uncovered the fraud.)
On a more global level, the answer is not as clear. While the extent and particulars of Singer’s scheme were shocking, no one was surprised to learn of the concept of the “side door” reserved for wealthy families.
But is that a college admissions issue, a higher education issue, or a societal issue? Colleges use the admissions process to achieve institutional goals and priorities, and like it or not, one of those goals is revenue. Higher education is a business, and colleges are looking for individuals with the ability to pay the sticker price or with the resources to be a development prospect (whether donations tied to or in the hopes of admission qualify as philanthropy is a discussion for another time).
Is advantage for the wealthy unique to higher education or part of a larger societal issue? Even if we know that the wealthy cut in line for all kinds of societal perks, should admission to college be different, given higher education’s aspiration to be a pipeline to access and opportunity? Those questions triggered the final part of my response to Scott Jaschik.
“We know that the wealthy bring all kinds of advantages to the admissions process just as they do in many areas of life. Should the college admissions process accept that as a fact of life? Should it provide further advantage to the already privileged? Or should admission to college be counter-cultural, guided by principles of equity and fairness? What will we learn from the scandal?”
What, indeed?