Parents On Edge As College Cheating Probe Deepens

and on Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. The biggest college admission scandal in our country's history is about to become even bigger as prosecutors investigate more parents, making some parents who haven't been charged or even notified so worried that they're hiring attorneys already joining me as Robert Mints, a

former federal prosecutor and a partner at McCarter. In English, Bob, The first parents to actually plead guilty are Bruce and Davina Isaacson, who admitted they paid at least six hundred thousand dollars to get their daughters into USC and u c l A. The government will seek leniency if they provide substantial assistance. How much more can the government learn from them when they already have the cooperation of the

ringleader William Singer. I think they can learn quite a bit, June, and I think the government is clearly in cooperation mode in that they are looking for additional people to assist them in this case. And what I say that, I mean not only parents, but also coaches who may have been involved in this fraud, because at the end of the day, they need to rely more on other individuals.

They cannot let this case rest simply with William Singer, who will be attacked by defense lawyers and his credibility is in any way dentity that hurts the government's case. The fact that they're adding co operators suggest to me that this case is only just beginning, and they're going to see a significant number of additional indictments and charges coming in the near future. So, as matters now stand, Bruce Isaacson faces about three years in jail. Davina Isaacson

faces about two years, a substantial amount of time. Explain how the guidelines are working here and how much a judge can diverge from those. Yes, well, these are very serious charges. These are people who have never had a brush with the law before, who are suddenly facing very real jail time. As you mentioned, for the husband, about thirty seven months and slightly less for his wife. In the federal system, there is no succe thing as parole, so if they were to be sentenced to those terms

without cooperation, they would do of that time. Here, though, with the cooperation, prosecutors can come in and tell the judge its sentencing how much their assistance was of value to the government. At the end of the day, the judge has the complete discretion whether to sentence them to jail time at all, or if he does sentence him to jail, how much time that will be. According to The New York Times, there are parents who have not been contacted by prosecutors but are worried and have already

hired lawyers. If you were representing one of them, how would you advise a client in a situation like that, Contact prosecutors and see what you can do, or lay low and wait. That is a really interesting question. You can be certain that there are parents in California in other places of the country who are spending many sleepless nights pondering that very question, trying to figure out what they should do. They know that they had contact with Singer.

What they don't know is whether or not any of their conversations with him may have been recorded, may have been picked up on these wire taps, and if that's the case, what do they do. Do they lay low and hope that maybe the government will simply pass over them and charge other people, or do they step forward and try to cut a deal. There's no real answer to that question. That's really an individual issue that they will have to decide when they talk to their lawyers

about how they want to roll the dice here. Now, target letters have been sent out to some students, and when we've talked before, it's been like, well, the students are probably won't be charged, but why if they're trying to send a message, why not charge some of the students who cooperate in the scheme. Why? I think that's still a possibility. You typically don't send out target letters

if you don't intend to charge those individuals. It does put pressure on the parents, certainly if they have to not only consider their own freedom, but now the freedom of their children. So that's one value in sending out those letters. But I think they also may find some students out there who clearly knew what was going on, who knew what their parents were doing, who knew what

their parents were paying for. Perhaps those who were involved in the in the part of the scheme that had to do with posing as an athlete, but in fact they weren't athletes. If they can find cases where the evidence is particularly strong, it's possible we may see the government charging students as well as parents and coaches. Here.

Yale has rescinded the admission of a freshman whose parents paid one point two million for her admission, and Stanford rescinded the admission of a Chinese student whose parents paid a whopping six point five million. But what about the students who have already received diplomas and didn't know about the scheme? It could the could the schools take away their diplomas well. The schools are clearly looking into these

issues for a host of reasons. They have reputational issues here that they're concerned about, and they want to make sure that there was no further wrongdoing by anybody else on the inside, because part of this scheme that is so troubling to the schools is not only did it involve these educational consultants, but there was a lot of activity on a lot of culpability on the part of coaches inside these universities who accepted bribes in order to

create these false athletic profiles. For students, So schools will take a close look at that, to the extent that they're looking at students who may have already graduated, I don't think there's a lot that they can do at this point, but probably be looking more at students who are at the school right now, because they can still take action by dismissing those students if they find that their admission was in somehow, in some way tainted by

this kind of fraud. Now, speaking about that, there's a federal class action suit on behalf of qualified rejected students accusing eight of the schools of negligence, saying that missions process was warped and rigged by fraud. Is that a tough case to make? I think that is a bit of anfl case. Uh. The government has portrayed the schools here as victims, putting aside the fact that there may have been some people on the inside of these universities

that played a role. Innus people in the admissions process do not seem to have been involved, and so I think it's going to be difficult to make that case stick. They really have to show that the admissions process was so tainted across the board that each of these individuals who applied what we're in some way damaged by this

fraudulent scheme. So, you know, Bob, as far as one of the things, I've been curious the the uh the students who got in on the fake scholarships, the athletic scholarships, and their their faces were photoshopped into ports, into pictures within their sport, and they're alleged sport and it seems like that's something that easily can be checked out by a school or should be maybe you know, whether or not there on the teams they say they are. Well, I do think schools are going to be looking at

how this could have happened. Even with the culpability if some of these insiders, some of these assistant coaches who were involved, it certainly suggests that there was not the type of scrutiny and verification that should have been going on here to have allowed this to have gone on for so long, involving so many different students over many years. Thanks so much, Bob. That's Robert Mintz is a former federal prosecutor and head of the white collar practice at

McCarter and English. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law podcast. You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and on bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. I'm June Brosso. This is Bloomberg yea