What happened to students in college admissions scandal?
Kate Taylor
They have been expelled from schools, haunted by nightmares and panic attacks, whispered about by classmates, and mocked online. For the young people whose parents were charged in the nation’s largest college admissions cheating scandal, society’s punishment came swiftly, often before their parents had their cases heard in court.
While Sophia Macy, a daughter of the actors Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy, was flying to Juilliard for a final round of auditions for admission to the performing arts school, officials sent her an email withdrawing the invitation. “She called us from the airport in hysterics,” Macy wrote to a judge last year, as Huffman was being sentenced for arranging cheating on her daughter’s SAT test. “From the devastation of that day, Sophia is slowly regaining her equilibrium and getting on with her life.”
Twenty parents, including Huffman, have pleaded guilty in the sweeping scandal, which prosecutors say involved cheating on college admissions exams and bribing coaches to get children admitted to elite schools as athletic recruits based on false credentials. Many have been sentenced to penalties ranging from probation to nine months in prison. Fifteen other parents, including actress Lori Loughlin, have pleaded not guilty and appear headed to trial, possibly this year.
Most of the parents have faced consequences outside the courtroom: They lost high-paying jobs, had professional licenses suspended or investigated, or were publicly shamed as examples of greed and bad parenting.
But since the case was announced a year ago, far less has been heard from the children of those involved in the scandal, many of whom were on the cusp of going to college or were already enrolled. No students were criminally charged, and prosecutors have said that many of them were unaware of the actions their parents had taken to try to get them admitted to top schools. Still, some of them have faced penalties as well.
After arrests last March, colleges opened investigations into students with ties to the scandal. Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, Northwestern and the University of Southern California expelled students or revoked students’ admissions. Some students who were seniors in high school when their parents were arrested had their college applications denied or were forced to withdraw them.
Others were admitted to colleges not tied to the cheating scheme, and some students who were already in college were investigated and allowed to stay.
Matteo Sloane, whose father admitted to paying $250,000 to secure his admission as a water polo recruit, is still enrolled at USC. Matteo Sloane told The Wall Street Journal that it was hard to find out that his father had intervened in the admissions process. “It kind of takes the value away of the work I did to get there in the first place,” he said.
“I was mad,” he said, “and then it kind of transformed into me feeling sorry for him.”
It has been less clear how high schools have treated families ensnared in the scandal.
Other parents have described how much their children have struggled.
The wife of Agustin Huneeus, a Bay Area winemaker who pleaded guilty to participating in both the test cheating and bribery schemes, wrote in a letter to the judge sentencing her husband that her four daughters had suffered from panic attacks since they saw their father arrested.
Macarena Huneeus, the wife, said that one daughter not connected to the cheating had nonetheless faced hostility from teachers and students at her high school. Another daughter — who prosecutors have said was aware that her father had paid a proctor to correct her SAT answers — had a very difficult year but had been resilient, Macarena Huneeus said. She retook the SAT and started “at a great college” last fall, she said.
Loughlin’s two daughters were enrolled at USC when Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, were arrested on charges of conspiring to pay $500,000 in bribes to get the girls admitted to USC as crew recruits. Neither girl is enrolled now. The younger daughter, Olivia Jade, who had a lucrative career as a social media influencer before the scandal broke, addressed the situation in a YouTube video she posted in December.
She spoke haltingly, saying that “as much as I wish I could talk about all of this” she was “legally not allowed to speak on anything going on right now.”
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