SAN FRANCISCO — Two college students have filed a lawsuit against the University of Southern California, Yale University and other colleges where prosecutors have accused rich and famous parents paying bribes to ensure their children’s admission.

The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco and alleges the students were denied a fair opportunity for admission.

Erica Olsen and Kalea Woods claimed they were denied a fair opportunity to apply to Yale and USC. The lawsuit also named the University of California, Los Angeles, Wake Forest University, the University of San Diego, the University of Texas at Austin, Georgetown University and Stanford University.

The alleged scheme gave unqualified students admission to highly selective universities, said the plaintiffs, who are both currently students at Stanford.
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• Southern California is at the center of nationwide bribery for college admissions scandal “Each of the universities took the students’ admission application fees while failing to take adequate steps to ensure that their admissions process was fair and free of fraud, bribery, cheating and dishonesty,” the plaintiffs said in the lawsuit.

Charges were announced earlier this week against 50 people, including coaches and dozens of parents, in a scheme where prosecutors have said wealthy parents paid to rig standardized scores and bribed sports coaches to get their children into elite universities.

The colleges named have cast themselves as victims of the scheme, and have moved to distance themselves from the coaches accused of involvement.

“We understand that the government believes that illegal activity was carried out by individuals who went to great lengths to conceal their actions from the university,” USC officials said in a statement earlier this week.

Yale officials said earlier this week they were cooperating with the investigation.

“As the indictment makes clear, the Department of Justice believes that Yale has been the victim of a crime perpetrated by its former women’s soccer coach,” Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said. </s> Two women are suing eight elite universities claiming that the schools have a “rigged” admissions process that allowed unqualified students to be accepted ahead of worthy candidates who paid admissions fees thinking they had a fair chance to be accepted.

The class-action lawsuit that was filed Wednesday in federal court in California is the latest in a scandal involving celebrities and other wealthy parents who federal authorities say sought to have their children admitted into universities by bribing athletic coaches and having other people take tests for their children.

The eight schools are Georgetown; Stanford; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of San Diego; the University of Southern California; the University of Texas at Austin; Wake Forest; and Yale.

University of Texas tennis coach Michael Center was one of the coaches charged with fraud as part of the scheme, after authorities say he accepted a $100,000 bribe to get a student into the university as a tennis recruit when the student did not play competitive tennis.

The university announced Wednesday it had fired Center, and officials have said the bribery scheme was an isolated incident that involved a single coach and no other university employee or officer.

However, Erica Olsen and Kalea Woods, both students at Stanford University, are now suing UT and others, saying they applied to some of the named schools and paid admissions fees, thinking they were getting a “fair admissions consideration process,” according to the suit. Instead, the process was “rigged by fraud” and schools allowed unqualified students to take slots that could have gone to others, the suit says.

“Each of the universities were negligent in failing to maintain adequate protocols and security measures in place to guarantee the sanctity of the college admissions process, and to ensure that their own employees were not engaged in these type of bribery schemes,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit also names The Edge College & Career Network and The Key Worldwide Foundation, the for-profit college counseling company and the non-profit charity owned by William “Rick” Singer, who pleaded guilty Tuesday to money laundering, racketeering and other charges in connection with the scheme alleged by authorities.

Investigators’ charging documents allege that Singer made about $25 million from 2011 to 2018 to bribe college coaches and create fake athletic profiles, some with staged photographs. In exchange, coaches would designate the clients’ children as recruited athletes, thereby helping them gain easier admission. College athletic entrance requirements are typically lower than those for regular students.

The lawsuit says that the UT System has specifically denounced the influence of money in its admissions process, saying that it has faced suspicion in the past of “a double standard that favors well-connected students.”

“Ensuring that fair and transparent admissions processes exist across the UT System is necessary to maintain public trust,” the university has stated. “Recruitment and admissions policies that are disclosed to the public and are consistent with stated university goals garners public trust that student admissions are centered on merit.”

The women also say in the lawsuit that their degrees from Stanford University are not worth as much now, because they come from a school involved in the scandal and that employers may now question whether they were admitted on their own merits. They are asking to be reimbursed for admissions fees and other damages.

The suit was filed in California, where many of the named universities are located. It also claims that California is the proper jurisdiction for a claim against UT because the university has solicited students residing in California, accepted money, including application fees, from California residents and has recruited athletes residing in California. </s> Legal experts say the students could have difficulty holding the colleges responsible

In the first lawsuit to come out of the college bribery scandal, several students are suing Yale, Georgetown, Stanford and other schools involved in the case, saying they and others were denied a fair shot at admission.

The plaintiffs brought the class-action complaint Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of themselves and other applicants and asked for unspecified damages.

They argued that applicants who played by the rules were victimized when rich and famous parents paid bribes that enabled unqualified students to get into highly selective universities.

“Each of the universities took the students’ admission application fees while failing to take adequate steps to ensure that their admissions process was fair and free of fraud, bribery, cheating and dishonesty,” the lawsuit said.

Legal experts, though, said the students could have difficulty holding the colleges responsible.

The scandal erupted on Tuesday when federal prosecutors announced charges against 50 people, including coaches and dozens of parents, among them TV actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. Prosecutors said parents paid to rig standardized exams and bribed coaches to get their children designated as recruited athletes in sports they didn’t even play, thereby boosting their chances of getting in.

READ MORE: Vancouver businessman among those charged in U.S. college exam scandal

READ MORE: Parents charged in admissions scheme roll through US courts

The colleges have cast themselves as victims and have moved to distance themselves from the coaches, firing or suspending them.

The investigation began with a tip from an executive under suspicion in a securities fraud probe, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to discuss the case and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The executive told Boston authorities that the women’s soccer coach at Yale offered to label the executive’s daughter a recruited athlete in exchange for cash, the official said.

— The Hallmark Channel cut ties with Loughlin, a longtime star of its feel-good movies.

— Golfer Phil Mickelson said he used the college consulting company accused of orchestrating the scheme, but emphasized his family was not involved in any fraud. One of his daughters is a sophomore at Brown University. Brown said it has found no evidence of fraud among its athletes.

The class-action complaint was brought initially by Erica Olsen and Kalea Woods, now students at Stanford. It was revised Thursday to remove Olsen and add three new plaintiffs, students at Tulane, Rutgers and an unnamed community college.

One of the institutions being sued, the University of Texas at Austin, issued a statement saying that it is “outraged” over the bribery scheme and that any wrongdoing at the school does not reflect its admissions practices and was carried out by “one UT employee.”

Other schools named in the lawsuit were the University of Southern California, the University of California at Los Angeles, Wake Forest University and the University of San Diego.

The students in the lawsuit could have a difficult time tying the schools to the fraud in the absence of further evidence, said Joy Blanchard, a professor at Louisiana State University who focuses on higher education law.

“They won’t be able to prove that the universities were behind some grand scheme,” she said.

Kyle McEntee, an attorney who has pushed for reforms in law school education, said the lawsuit “reeks of opportunism.”

“It’s tough to see these succeeding,” he said.

Legal experts said the plaintiffs at highly selective Stanford would have had an especially hard time showing they suffered any harm, since they still got into an elite institution. Messages seeking comment from Olsen and Woods were not immediately returned.

Among other claims, the lawsuit said that the universities should have discovered the bribes and that their failure to do so through audits or other practices reflects “an unfair business practice.”

USC officials said earlier this week that prosecutors believe that the perpetrators “went to great lengths to conceal their actions from the university.” Yale, likewise, said it was “the victim of a crime.”

Sudhin Thanawala And Michael Melia, The Associated Press

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter </s> The massive college admissions scam that snared 50 people in a federal indictment now appears to have cost one of the two famous actresses a major contract.

Lori Loughlin, known to many as Aunt Becky from the television show "Full House," was dropped from the Hallmark Channel where she has been featured in a number of movies in recent years, the company said in a statement.

"We are saddened by the recent news surrounding the college admissions allegations," the Hallmark Channel's parent company Crown Media announced Thursday afternoon. "We are no longer working with Lori Loughlin and have stopped development of all productions that air on the Crown Media Family Network channels involving Lori Loughlin including Garage Sale Mysteries, an independent third party production."

No more of Loughlin's work will air on the network, including shows that have already been filmed.

Loughlin appeared in court Wednesday and was released on a $1 million secure bond. According to court documents, she and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, "agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team -- despite the fact that they did not participate in crew -- thereby facilitating their admission to USC."

Mona Shafer Edwards

Loughlin isn't the only one in the family to lose work over the scandal. Sephora announced Thursday that they were dropping their partnership with Loughlin's daughter, Olivia Jade, who is a popular YouTube vlogger and a freshman at the University of Southern California (USC).

"After careful review of recent developments, we have made the decision to end the Sephora Collection partnership with Olivia Jade, effective immediately," the makeup company announced in a statement.

FilmMagic/Getty Images, FILE

Those directly involved in the federal criminal case are not the only ones who are entering the legal fray over the college admissions scheme. Now a class-action lawsuit has been filed in Northern California federal court by two students at Stanford University, one of the eight elite colleges named in the legal action, all of which had associated individuals implicated in the bribery case.

In the suit, students Erica Olsen and Kalea Woods claimed they both went through the legitimate and rigorous admissions process to Stanford and were "never informed that the process of admission was an unfair, rigged process, in which rich parents could buy their way into the university through bribery."

The suit also names as defendants the University of Southern California, UCLA, the University of San Diego, the University of Texas, Wake Forest University, Yale University and Georgetown University.

The college admissions scam investigation found that people associated with various athletic teams at each of those schools were involved in getting students admission.

Olsen, according to the lawsuit, applied to Yale University in 2017, submitting "stellar" standardized test scores, and a glowing profile that included being a talented athlete and dancer.

AP

Olsen noted that she paid an application fee of approximately $80, according to the suit.

"Had she known that the system at Yale University was warped and rigged by fraud, she would not have spent the money to apply to the school," the lawsuit states. "She also did not receive what she paid for — a fair admissions consideration process."

Olsen contends she had been damaged by the admissions scandal because her degree from Stanford "is now not worth as much as it was before, because prospective employers may now question whether she was admitted to the university on her own merits, versus having parents who were willing to bribe school officials."

Stanford University said the lawsuit "is without merit."

"We take the issues raised through the events of this week very seriously. While we continue to closely examine our policies and processes to see if improvements should be made, we stand behind the integrity of our admissions process," the university said in a statement.

ABC News' Meghan Keneally contributed to this report. </s> Thirteen parents and one coach charged in the college admissions scandal will plead guilty, federal prosecutors announced Monday. One of the parents is Felicity Huffman, the actress who is among the best-known of the wealthy individuals arrested in the cheating case that broke last month.

The 14 defendants were charged with one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud. They have agreed to plead guilty in accordance with plea agreements.

Authorities charged 50 people in the scheme: parents allegedly paid millions of dollars to have their children's test scores and athletic achievements falsified to get them into elite colleges such as Yale University and the University of Southern California.

At least two of those colleges, Yale and Stanford University, have since revoked their offers of admission to students involved in the case.

Prosecutors say that plea hearings in the case have not yet been scheduled. </s> New details continue to emerge about the alleged college cheating scheme involving Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin.

On Tuesday, March 12, E! News obtained court documents which show that both Huffman and Loughlin have been charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud. The Desperate Housewives alum and the Fuller House star are among over 40 individuals who have been charged in connection with the scandal. According to the FBI affidavit, the scheme involved getting students admitted into elite colleges.

"Beginning in or about 2011, and continuing through the present, the defendants—principally individuals whose high-school aged children were applying to college—conspired with others to use bribery and other forms of fraud to facilitate their children's admission to colleges and universities in the District of Massachusetts and elsewhere, including Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California, and the University of California – Los Angeles, among others," the affidavit states. </s> Stunning details continue to emerge in an alleged multi-million-dollar bribery plot that, just a day after exploding into public view, has exposed what federal prosecutors describe as a corrupt exchange of wealth, fame and influence for admissions to the nation’s most elite universities.

Fifty people — from Hollywood stars and top industry CEOs to college coaches and standardized test administrators — stand accused of participating in a scheme to cheat on admissions tests and admit to students to leading institutions as athletes regardless of their abilities, prosecutors revealed Tuesday in a federal indictment. The scandal is being called the largest college admissions scam ever prosecuted.

As the alleged culprits, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin and fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, position their defenses, the fallout continues for players across this wide-ranging case, which spans six states and raises seminal questions about how level the post-secondary playing field really is.

Still hanging in the balance is the fate of the privileged scholars, at least some of whom may not have known about their parents’ alleged acts. It was no accident that none were immediately charged, US Attorney Andrew Lelling of Massachusetts said Tuesday.

“The prime movers of this fraud” were the parents and other defendants, Lelling said, though he noted some students may face charges down the road.

Meantime, officials at universities including Yale, Stanford and Georgetown must now examine criminal claims made against key staffers, some of whom already have part ways.

Perhaps most critically, they’ll also have to answer for whether qualified students were denied entry into their programs in lieu of the children of the rich and famous.

“For every student admitted through fraud,” Lelling said, “an honest, genuinely talented student was rejected.”

Parents spent up to $6.5 million, the FBI says

The sums that authorities say the accused parents paid in bribes would, for many, finance a college education many times over.

Some spent between $200,000 and $6.5 million to guarantee admissions for their children, FBI Special Agent Joseph Bonavolonta said.

The relatives of one applicant paid $1.2 million to have the applicant falsely described as the co-captain of a well-known California soccer team, although the applicant did not play competitive soccer, prosecutors said.

By comparison, the average annual cost of tuition and fees at a private, four-year college is $29,478, the US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics’ most recent report shows.

“This case is about the widening corruption of elite college admissions through the steady application of wealth combined with fraud,” Lelling said. “There can be no separate college admission system for the wealthy, and I’ll add that there will not be a separate criminal justice system either.”

The ringleader got $25 million, US attorney says

Much of the indictment revolves around William Rick Singer, the founder of a for-profit college counseling and preparation business known as The Key.

“OK, so, who we are … what we do is we help the wealthiest families in the US get their kids into school,” Singer told one parent, according to prosecutors.

There were dual avenues for carrying out the scheme, Lelling explained.

“There were essentially two kinds of fraud that Singer was selling,” Lelling said of the accusations, which run from 2011 to 2019. “One was to cheat on the SAT or ACT, and the other was to use his connections with Division I coaches and use bribes to get these parents’ kids into school with fake athletic credentials.”

For example, Singer and his co-conspirators used photo-editing technology to superimpose the face of a patron’s student onto stock photos of athletes, prosecutors said.

Singer was paid roughly $25 million by parents to help their children get in to schools, the US attorney said.

Singer pleaded guilty on Tuesday to racketeering conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of justice, prosecutors said.

Best known for her role on TV’s “Desperate Housewives,” Huffman is accused of paying $15,000 to Singer’s fake charity, the Key Worldwide Foundation, to facilitate cheating for her daughter on the SATs, the complaint says.

Her daughter received a 1420 on her test, which was 400 points higher than a PSAT taken a year earlier without the same administrator, the complaint states.

Huffman also discussed the scheme in a recorded phone call with a cooperating witness, the complaint says.

Huffman has been charged with felony conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud, according to federal court documents filed Monday in Massachusetts. She was arrested without incident at her California home, the FBI said.

She appeared Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles, where a judge set her bond at $250,000 and federal agents took her passport. Her next court appearance was set for March 29 in Boston.

Loughlin, who played Aunt Becky on “Full House,” faces the same felony charge. Her husband, Giannulli, was also charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud.

Loughlin and Giannulli allegedly agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the University of Southern California crew team, even though they did not participate in crew, the complaint said.

The money was given to Singer’s fake charity, and in a recorded phone call, Singer clarified that the money was actually intended for getting their daughters into USC crew, according to the complaint.

Giannulli appeared in court Tuesday, where a magistrate judge set a $1 million bond and ordered him to surrender his passport.

Though she was not present in court, prosecutors and Loughlin’s attorneys agreed on similar terms, as well as permission for her to travel to Vancouver and back for work.

CNN has contacted Iconix Brand Group, which owns Giannulli’s namesake fashion company, Mossimo. CNN also is seeking comment from the actresses’ representatives.

Coaches from Yale, Stanford, Wake Forest and Georgetown universities and USC, among others, are implicated in the case.

“The Department of Justice believes that Yale has been the victim of a crime perpetrated by a former coach who no longer works at the university,” Yale’s president said in a statement. “The corrupt behavior alleged by the Department of Justice is an affront to our university’s deeply held values of inclusion and fairness.”

The Georgetown coach who was arrested “has not coached our tennis team since December 2017, when he was placed on leave after the Office of Undergraduate Admissions identified irregularities in his recruitment practices and the University initiated an internal investigation,” a university spokeswoman said in a statement.

USC is reviewing the school’s application process, officials said. </s> Fifty people were charged Tuesday in a scheme in which wealthy parents allegedly bribed college coaches and other insiders to get their children into some of the nation's most elite universities.

According to federal prosecutors, here is how the college admissions bribery scheme worked:

Parents of prospective students conspired with a college entrance consultant to beat the system and ensure their students were admitted or had a better chance to be admitted to certain colleges or universities, including Yale, Stanford, Texas, UCLA, USC, Wake Forest and others.

Prosecutors allege several methods were used including:

— Bribing those administering college entrance exams to provide answers, change answers or allow someone other than the student to take the exam and centers "controlled" by the consultant. Often students were told to declare a disability that would require they be given extra time, often a second day, to complete the exams.

— Bribing college coaches or athletic administrators to make it appear the students were athletes being recruited to the school, including creating fake athletic credentials.

— Having someone take classes in the place of a student and using those grades on applications.

— Between 2011-2018 prosecutors allege parents paid the consultant $25 million to bribe coaches and college administrators to designate their children as student athletes or member of other groups given favored admission status. Prosecutors say payments were often disguised as charitable donations that were then funneled to the coaches and administrators.

— Prosecutors say the consultant represented to parents that the scheme had worked successfully more than 800 times.

— The consultant, William "Rick" Singer of Newport Beach, California pleaded guilty in Boston federal court on Tuesday to charges including racketeering conspiracy and obstruction of justice .

William 'Rick' Singer founder of the Edge College & Career Network, departs federal court in Boston on Tuesday, March 12, 2019, after he pleaded guilty to charges in a nationwide college admissions bribery scandal.

— Nine coaches are accused, including former Yale women's soccer coach Rudy Meredith; UCLA soccer coach Jorge Salcedo, Wake Forest volleyball coach Bill Ferguson and Stanford sailing coach John Vandemoer.

John Vandemoer, former head sailing coach at Stanford, arrives at federal court in Boston on Tuesday, March 12, 2019, where he plead guilty to charges in a nationwide college admissions bribery scandal.

— More than 30 parents are accused of paying bribes, including well-known actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli.

This combination photo shows actress Lori Loughlin at the Women's Cancer Research Fund's An Unforgettable Evening event in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Feb. 27, 2018, left, and actress Felicity Huffman at the 70th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on Sept. 17, 2018. Loughlin and Huffman are among at least 40 people indicted in a sweeping college admissions bribery scandal. Both were charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud in indictments unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Boston. (AP Photo)

— No students were charged, prosecutors said they were often unaware of the measures being taken on their behalf. </s> The Justice Department on Tuesday charged 50 people - including two television stars - with participating in a multimillion dollar bribery scheme that enabled privileged students with lackluster grades to attend prestigious colleges and universities.

The alleged crimes included cheating on entrance exams and bribing college officials to say certain students were athletic recruits when those students were not in fact athletes, officials said. Numerous schools were targeted, including Georgetown University, Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California and UCLA, among others.

Boston's US. attorney, Andrew Lelling, called it the largest-ever college admissions scam prosecuted by the Justice Department. Of the 50 people charged in the FBI's Operation Varsity Blues, 33 were parents, officials said, warning that the investigation is ongoing and that others could be charged.

The scheme was discovered accidentally by the FBI while working an unrelated undercover operation about a year ago, officials said. That tip led to a sprawling, nationwide corruption probe.

"These parents are a catalogue of wealth and privilege," said Lelling. "This case is about the widening corruption of elite college admissions through the steady application of wealth combined with fraud. There can be no separate college admission system for the wealthy, and I'll add there will not be a separate criminal justice system, either."

No students were charged because prosecutors said their parents were the scheme's principal actors.

Court filings released Tuesday paint an ugly picture of privileged parents committing crimes to get their children into selective schools otherwise unlikely to accept them.

Among those charged are actresses Felicity Huffman, best known for her role on the television show "Desperate Housewives," and Lori Loughlin, who appeared on "Full House." A representative for Loughlin declined to comment. A representative for Huffman did not return messages seeking comment.

Others arrested Tuesday include a private equity executive in northern California, a senior lawyer at a major law firm in New York, and a public relations executive in Los Angeles. Prosecutors said they took part in a criminal conspiracy to bribe test officials and college sports officials.

In the wake of the charges, universities began firing or placing on leave some of the accused coaches.

The scheme's chief architect, William Singer, pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday. Officials described Singer as a well-connected college admissions adviser, and say he disguised the bribery scheme as a charity, enabling parents to deduct the bribes from their taxes.

Singer was charged with taking about $25 million from 2011 to 2018 - paying some of it to college coaches or standardized-testing officials for their help rigging the admissions process and pocketing the rest, according to the criminal complaint. He allegedly disguised the money using a nonprofit, the Key Worldwide Foundation, which prosecutors described as a slush fund for bribes.

Singer pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy charges for racketeering, money laundering and obstruction of justice. He had been cooperating since September. Prosecutors said that a month after he came to the government's side, Singer alerted several people under investigation about the inquiry - which earned him the obstruction charge. Lawyers for Singer did not respond to requests for comment.

Another defendant is Gordon Caplan, co-chairman of the prestigious international law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. Caplan did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did his firm.

Court papers charge that in one secretly recorded conversation, Caplan asked Singer: "If somebody catches this, what happens?"

"The only one who can catch it is if you guys tell somebody," Singer replied.

"I'm not going to tell anybody," Caplan said, and the two men laughed, according to the court papers.

Two California parents paid Singer in the form of Facebook stock - 2,150 shares worth $251,159 at the time of the bribe in July 2016, according to court papers. Those parents claimed that payment as a charitable donation, the papers said.

Early in the investigation, the FBI was able to flip Yale's former women's soccer coach, who provided evidence against others, officials said. Rudolph Meredith pleaded guilty nearly a year ago, after prosecutors gathered evidence he took a $400,000 bribe to pretend that one prospective student was a recruit, despite the fact that the student in question did not play competitive soccer. The student's parents paid $1.2 million in bribes, officials said.

Yale's president, Peter Salovey, sent a letter to the Yale community calling the allegations "an affront to our university's deeply held values of inclusion and fairness. I want to assure our community," it says, "that I am committed to making certain the integrity of the admissions and athletic recruitment processes is not undermined again. As the investigation unfolds, the university may take further actions."

Prosecutors also charged Georgetown's former head tennis coach, Gordon Ernst. Authorities said he made $950,000 promoting several students as potential tennis recruits - when they were not tennis players of that caliber.

For example, prosecutors alleged, Ernst flagged a California couple's daughter as a "potential spot," and her application falsely indicated she had played club tennis through high school and achieved a Top 50 ranking in the U.S. Tennis Association's junior girls category from her sophomore through her senior years. In fact, she had not played at any Tennis Association tournaments in high school, officials said.

"At her best," prosecutors wrote, "she appears to have ranked 207th in Northern California in the under-12 girls division, with an overall win/loss record of 2-8."

In a statement, Georgetown said the school was "deeply disappointed" to learn of the criminal charges against Ernst, and said he "has not coached our tennis team since December 2017, following an internal investigation that found he had violated University rules concerning admissions. Georgetown cooperated fully with the government's investigation."

After leaving Georgetown, Ernst was hired as the University of Rhode Island's tennis coach. The school said Tuesday he had been placed on administrative leave.

Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, were accused of paying $500,000 in bribes so their two daughters would be designated as recruits for the University of Southern California crew team - even though they were not part of the team. That helped the pair get into USC, according to the complaint.

Some of the money was directed to Donna Heinel, a USC athletics official, the complaint alleges. In a statement, USC officials said the school is cooperating with the federal investigation and has launched its own review.

Jovan Vavic, the former water polo coach at USC, was charged with taking bribes to pretend students flagged by Singer were recruits for the team. Prosecutors alleged Singer paid private school tuition payments for Vavic's children, under the guide of a fabricated scholarship. Vavic did not return an email seeking comment.

USC said Tuesday that Heinel and Vavic had been fired.

"We understand that the government believes that illegal activity was carried out by individuals who went to great lengths to conceal their actions from the university," the statement says. "USC is conducting an internal investigation and will take employment actions as appropriate . . . the university is reviewing its admissions processes broadly to ensure that such actions do not occur going forward."

Besides fake athletic credentials, the other main thrust of Singer's schemes involved cheating on college entrance exams. Sometimes, that was done by paying a 36-year-old Florida man, Mark Riddell, to take the tests for students. Riddell was so proficient at the exams that he could get a perfect score, or calibrate his answers to get very high marks, but not a perfect score, the U.S. attorney said. Riddell also agreed to plead guilty in the case and cooperate with investigators, according to officials. Riddell did not immediately return messages, and no attorney was listed for him in court records.

Other defendants are accused of bribing college entrance exam administrators to facilitate cheating - in some cases, providing students with answers to exams or correcting their answers after they had completed the exams, according to the criminal complaint filed in federal court.

Prosecutors said a key element of the test-cheating scheme was to make arrangements for the tests to be administered privately over a two-day period, making it easier for Riddell stand in for the students, or for a corrupt test administrator to fix the answers.

Huffman is accused of paying $15,000 - disguised as a charitable donation - to the Key Worldwide Foundation so her oldest daughter could participate in the scam. A confidential informant told investigators that he advised Huffman he could arrange for a third party to correct her daughter's answers on the SAT after she took it. She ended up scoring a 1420 - 400 points higher than she had gotten on a PSAT taken a year earlier, according to court documents.

Huffman also contemplated running a similar scam to help her younger daughter but ultimately did not pursue it, the complaint alleges.

Other defendants include William McGlashan, a senior executive at a global private equity firm, TPG Growth, which is a major investor in the ride-share service Uber and the music-streaming app Spotify.

A TPG spokesman said "as a result of the charges of personal misconduct against Bill McGlashan," he has been placed on "indefinite administrative leave effective immediately."

According to the criminal charges against McGlashan, he and Singer agreed to trick admissions officials at USC into believing McGlashan's son was a kicker for a football team - even though his high school didn't have a football team. Singer offered to edit an image of the child's head onto a photo of a football kicker, officials alleged. As they discussed it, McGlashan said the situation was "pretty funny," court documents say. "The way the world works these days is unbelievable."
Eight universities are sued by two Stanford University students in regards to the college admissions bribery scandal.