Southern California sports chief pleads guilty in admissions case

A leading figure in the US college admissions scandal, Donna Heinel of the University of Southern California, has agreed to plead guilty in return for an expected prison sentence of about three-and-a-half years.

Dr Heinel, the former senior associate athletic director, was portrayed by prosecutors as the key partner of the scheme’s admitted mastermind, William Singer, at the university where Mr Singer was found to have arranged the largest number of cases.

The overall scandal led to 57 arrests, most of them wealthy parents accused of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to help their children win slots in selective US universities, achieved in the majority of cases by falsely portraying them as athletes.

Dr Heinel was critical to that effort at USC, according to prosecutors, because she was the intermediary between the sports teams and the admissions office entrusted with designating applicants with legitimate athletic skills.

Her plea leaves former USC water polo coach Jovan Vavic as the only university official still facing trial in the overall scandal. Four of the 33 parents charged in the case are also awaiting trials scheduled for early next year.

As part of her plea deal, Dr Heinel agreed that government prosecutors would recommend she receive a prison sentence ranging from 37 months to 46 months.

The agreement was accepted during a hearing held by Indira Talwani, a federal judge in Boston, but only after she admitted struggling to see the difference between the crimes being prosecuted in the scandal and the legal payments that parents can regularly make to US universities to gain preferences in admissions.

Those distinctions varied among the cases arranged by Mr Singer, according to evidence presented by prosecutors. In many instances the parents made their payments directly to a charitable organisation controlled by Mr Singer, but in some cases the money went to the sports teams.

That was more clearly the case with William Ferguson, a former Wake Forest University volleyball coach and the only person to have the charges against him dropped by prosecutors. He was alleged to have helped only one student gain admission, and the $100,000 (£75,000) payment was split between his team and other sports groups.

Other than Mr Ferguson, Mr Vavic and the four parents still awaiting trial, the only other person charged in the case and not yet convicted was a parent pardoned by Donald Trump just before he left office as US president.

Only two other cases went to trial, both involving parents who were convicted. Those parents, John Wilson and Gamal Abdelaziz, both worked to win their children entry to USC, and they sought during their trial to portray officials such as Dr Heinel as pressured by their university to to raise revenue.

They and several other key figures including Mr Singer have not yet been sentenced. Sentences issued to date have typically been for terms of a few months.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com