How Admissions Really Work: if the College Admissions Scandal Shocked You, Read This (Www.npr.org)
Eric Rosen smiled every bit he recalled how his team of federal investigators in Boston stumbled on the college admissions scandal. They were working on a routine case of securities fraud in 2018 when a doubtable in Los Angeles told them he was paying coin to Yale'south soccer coach in exchange for recruiting his girl as an athlete.
"That was really the offset time I think anybody had e'er heard that that was a quote unquote 'affair,' or that's what people do," said Rosen, who, until last October, led the prosecution of the largest college admissions scandal the federal regime has ever pursued.
Rosen recently left the government for the private sector. Concluding week, he gave GBH News an within look at the nationwide investigation known as Operation Varsity Blues that, to his surprise, captured the nation's attention. He discussed, for instance, details of the undercover wiretapping of the ringleader and how the team obtained his emails and bank records to build the case.
After receiving the unexpected tip, Rosen's team recorded conversations between the suspect and Yale coach Rudy Meredith within a room at a downtown hotel, which he declined to place.
"Like most investigations, it begins typically when you sort of fissure open a seam," Rosen said. "It exposes a lot more than — and hither it obviously exposed a lot more than we were expecting right off the bat."
Rosen's team had croaky open up a sprawling higher admissions scandal. Dozens of wealthy parents, including actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, were charged with paying a total of $25 million in bribes to get their kids into selective colleges by having them pose as athletes or having ringers have the SAT, a standardized college admissions examination, for them.
Rosen's boss at the time, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling, announced the charges two years ago this calendar month in Boston. "There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy," Lelling said at the fourth dimension. "And I'll add together that at that place will not be a split criminal justice system, either."
Steven Senne/AP
Before the salacious details were splashed across the cover of People Magazine and the scandal penetrated popular culture on Goggle box, Rosen told GBH News that he didn't think the public would even care. The outrage surprised him.
"It probably took me a couple of months to sort of effigy out the import that I think it had for America," he said.
Today, Rosen, 42, is in individual practice with the law house Roche Freedman and has 3 kids who nourish Boston Public Schools. Built-in and raised in Belmont, he went to Belmont High, Harvard University and Columbia Law School before joining the U.S. attorney's office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he focused on big-scale narcotics traffickers.
"Heroin, Oxycodone, Opana pills," he said, ticking off the names of opioids his cases involved.
That work in Pittsburgh, he said, prepared him for Varsity Blues.
"Y'all're familiar with the wiretap process, what you need for a wiretap, how the wiretap is going to assist your case — the fact that recordings are so important sometimes in developing bear witness of criminal activity," he said.
In 2015, during the Obama administration, Rosen was reassigned to the U.S. attorney's office in Boston.
By now, nearly of the parents and coaches involved in the Varsity Dejection scandal have been sentenced and served their time in prison, ranging from a mean solar day to nine months. But the case isn't over.
Ringleader Rick Vocaliser has yet to announced for his sentencing in Boston'southward federal court, where he faces a maximum 65 years in prison. The California-based college counselor to the one percent converted the money he had received from wealthy parents into bribes for coaches who guaranteed seats at selective colleges like Stanford, Georgetown and the University of Southern California. His sentencing on fraud, racketeering and money laundering charges has not been scheduled, but prosecutors take recommended prison house fourth dimension at the low end of federal guidelines for his cooperation in the investigation.
"We did approximately 4 months of wire tap without Vocaliser knowing," Rosen said, explaining some of his squad's investigation tactics.
"We had discovered emails he had written. Yous await at bank records. All the things you tin exercise to approve what's going on," he said.
In the fall of 2018, Rosen said FBI agents showtime approached Singer and presented him with the evidence they had gathered. After that, he agreed to cooperate.
Rosen said in one case the charges became public in March 2019, he was most surprised by students' reactions.
"How important the case was to them and how hard they had worked to get into school and how a big issue for them was whether they could even afford anything related to higher teaching," he said. "I hadn't been involved in the admission process in xx odd years, and then you sort of forget the anxiety yous experience when you lot're a 17- or eighteen-year-one-time."
Asked whether he thinks the case would have generated then much attention if celebrities weren't involved, Rosen said: "It'southward hard to pinpoint one specific thing that collection the media coverage. I'yard sure celebrity was i of them, but I think most of the comments were non focused on the celebrity aspects of it, but really about the unfairness aspects of information technology."
Critics of the case — and how information technology was handled — point out that two years later on the expansive scheme was unveiled, not much has inverse in college admissions. The number of applications to selective colleges are higher than ever, and legacy and athletic admissions still give the wealthy and well-connected a lawful edge through the backdoor, rather than what Singer chosen the "side door."
"[The sentencing] was more like a slap on the wrist," said sociologist Tony Jack, who teaches at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and is author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Declining Disadvantaged Students. "People are at present taking notes on what non to do."
Jack, a sociologist, said he thinks Rosen'south team was not aggressive enough in seeking tougher sentences.
"One parent got to choose which jail she wanted to go to," he said. "I've never heard anything similar that in my life. People are getting light sentences. It just shows you that that argument that 'there will exist no separate access and legal system' was wrong on both accounts."
In Boston this month, U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani sentenced the quondam men'due south soccer charabanc at UCLA, Jorge Salcedo, to viii months in prison for taking $200,00 in bribes to have unqualified students admitted as athletes. It is the second longest prison sentence handed down in the example then far.
Rosen, the former atomic number 82 prosecutor, said he thinks the combination of these sentences and the intense scrutiny college admissions has received every bit a result of his squad's investigation volition, in the terminate, exist effective.
"From a deterrence point of view, I don't run into something similar this happening once more," he said. "I'd want to think that people participating in the college admissions organization now going frontward will have learned a lesson."
Source: https://www.wgbh.org/news/education/2021/03/29/varsity-blues-prosecutor-surprised-by-public-outrage-at-college-admissions-scandal
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