Transcripts For CSPAN2 Melissa Korn Jennifer Levitz Unacceptable 20240712

Melissa korn, shes a reporter for the wall street journal and previously she wrote for dow jones newswire. Shes a graduate of Cornell University and Columbia University graduate school of journalism. Also we have jennifer levitz, jennifer is National Reporter for the wall street journal and previously she wrote the Providence Journal and has been a member of two Pulitzer Prize finalist teamswhen she graduated from wyoming university maryland. In their review of unacceptable, curtis wrote the authors highly readable exposc goes well beyond tabloid level. A capable examination of the seamy intersection of ambition, money and Higher Education. And Library Journal calls it a fastpaced account of the massive College Admissions scam designed by rick singer read this indictment of contemporary American Culture offers an indepth look at families who are willing to break the law and ignore Ethical Principles to provide Higher Education for their children. A well researched detailed picture of crime emerging in an American Culture corrupted by wealthand celebrity. A pleasure to have them here to tonight to talk about the book with us and with that i will handle things off to emily. We are thrilled to be here talking with you tonight about this captivating book. Lets start with the scam. Melissa, why dont you start us off. How did what prosecutors call operation for varsity blues work . How did mastermind ricksinger think of it . It was a complex scheme and thats one reason it was just how many parts there were two it and how many people needed to be involved for it to be successful. Theres the testing part where rick singer paid off administrators and a test proctor and had his clients get their students tested for learning differences so they could get expanded time on their app or sat and once they got extended time they could register to take their test at these particular sites that a proctor would go after the team was done, fix the wrong answers and in some cases sit alongside the students and kind of repeat them the answers and in one case even take the test for a teenager who was sitting homesick in another state so that was the testing part. The other part was athletic recruiting and really kind of underminingthat system. Singer would pitch kids to teams as a star athlete, soccer players, rowers, tennis players and he would send out an athletic profile for them, kind of a onepage resume about all theaccolades and championships they back and pitch them to a school. Pay off the coach to have that team flagged as a root recruit and the kid would get into school because the recruiter athletes at such a benefit in the admissions progress. That is a scam. And jennifer, what drove singer with this . Was he trying to get rich . Was it Something Else . Rick singer was an extraordinarily competitive man to the point that everyone we spoke to from his childhood years, college, that was one of the first things they would say. This guy did not want to lose. If you pay play pickup basketball he was throwing elbows. If he coached the junior high kids he would try to run up the score by 50 points. He ran a call center and just got everyone to get on the phones more and turn the place around and there was something about him as one employee said, it was almost like his mindwas jolted like a gambler when he won. It seems that with the parents, he took it as a personal challenge. He had these parents often were almost just as competitive as him come to him and it was a puzzle. His family went to georgetown , the kid didnt quite cut it , with a need to take it upon themselves to do this and i dont think it was really about money. He did become very rich and we know he bought a big house and he had a nice car and things but he worked constantly and he just worked around the clock and didnt take vacations. His house didnt look like he lived in it that much. He didnt hobnob, he was invited to parties and paris and didnt go instead at night he be at the municipal schools tryingto get his name on the leaderboard. Thats competitive and what drives a parent to do this . I think its the culture and community in which these parents lived. Its this strange bubble that allows them to have a very warped view of the world and what success was so a lot of these parents had short list of what acceptable destination schools might be for their teenager. A lot of them were limited in that and it was almost a provincial view of Higher Education and the idea that these few schools are bought without understanding the nuance and how many other wonderful colleges were out there but these parents as jennifer said were quite competitive. They had targets, they wanted to meet their goals and they were also wanted someone to help make it happen or do it for them and singer often came highlyrecommended by friends, by Financial Advisors , by neighbors so that his name got passed around and for some of them they went to singer specifically for the Illicit Activity and for others they started on the legal side and then went over the line as they worked closer and closer tocollege. Jennifer, how did the parents come to cross the line . It very. Some of the parents hired singer for Legal College counseling and that went on for a good long time before they crossed the line. Other parents really came to him almost immediately for his dark arts. Some of these little niceties but they got quickly down to business. And its part of how he got them tocross the line. Am of the parents argued they were manipulated, misled. They were confused and we do know that there were conversations where he would talk to a parent and really just paint a grim picture of this kids chances and of course the parent is sitting there shocked because they had thought they would just keep moving in these very elite circles and he saying no, youre not getting in anywhere, youre not getting into schools and so they would come away convinced that there had to be something to make their child stand out. Thats what many of them have said and we also know that he was very emotionally intelligent and he was very good at figuring out what a parent was worried about. Maybe they were worried the kid was a poor testtaker and figuring out who might be amenable to crossing the line because remember he had many legal clients that he didnt cross the line with but on the other hand as the prosecution haspointed out this was a criminal conspiracy so you needed one person , rick singer to ride the coaches, set up the test site but then you needed a parent to write the check and do all sorts of other things ranging from flying the kid to a test site in houston or West Hollywood to opposing them on spat athletic equipment for sports they didnt play or making up cover stories for the school to writing a big check and these crimes often played out over months. It wasnt one day i just went into a store and, it was months so there were chances for people to back out along the way so its very interesting the decisions that people made and we tried to get and it really ranged and you could see people just wrestling with this but at some point at least the ones who pledguilty at some point got on board. Its amazing and melissa, as jennifers talking and thinking of a couple of scenes from your book that just really stuck out where you show parents sort of question it or questioning their judgment, when miss hoffman is driving her daughter, can you tell us how that played out through the West Hollywood site. Hoffman was working with singer for her younger daughter for College Counseling and the older daughter as jennifer described it solely slowly got more and more on board with this team and then the day comes when she has to drive her daughter to the test site to take the test and the daughter know that anything is amiss. Shes going to take her sat but felicity knows that this corrupt proctor is going to fix her answers afterwards so they drive down from their house in the Hollywood Hills and the daughter isnervous, shes taking her sat. He says maybe we can get ice cream after felicity agrees her mind is clearly elsewhere. She is thinking turn around, i need to turn around and she does it and she goes and her daughter takes the test and mike rendell fixes her answers and she gets a wonderful score and hoffman has spoken about how awful she felt in that moment. Her head is spinning just thinking she knows what shes doing iswrong, she just didnt stop, she kept on going. She goes to her younger daughter a year later and says were not going to do this and she and her husband bail on the scheme for the younger daughter week before their writing the case in and two weeks before they were arrested. And jennifer, tell us what that arrest moment was like for the family. How did that morning play out . It still amazes me to think of what happened and what i would do if this was me. Basically this had been in the works for weeks and had been kept very quiet and so the fbi, ill give you the example in los angeles as it was kind of the epicenter so the fbi there would have met in the dark very early in the morning in a startup parking lot and about 13 different teams of many agents and then they stand out and they went to the home, big home. Behind the gates and long driveways and they banged on the door. Fbi, they were on and people were inside and they were almost all asleep. I know one mom was in her pilates close and they were just up but mostly asleep and they were startled and they went to the door and theres a team of people andthen if they cooperated , they were allowed to kind of change into sweats or tees or something and they were, they brought them out and put them in the government sedans and took them to downtown la to the big Federal Building and they were really, this was a real exposure for them. There was nothing spare here, it was shackles, it was brought into this space with their photograph taken and fingerprinted and then they were put into big cells and they were, the men were put in one and the women were put in another and they were given some bologna sandwiches or something and they were all sitting there and in the mens cell curious things started to happen which was a couple people started to recognize one another. Like, they really knew a couple people and then there was a doctor in their and his scrubs so they had moved in similar circles some of them and we know that Felicity Huffman and jane buckingham, they are friends. Youre here to so in the mens cells there sitting there and some of them knew why they were there but some of them didnt and they didnt know what they all have in common. One of the coaches spoke up and says do you guys know rick singer . And the whole cell went quiet and everybody looked at one another and said oh my god. And thats when they realized what was going on. So the fbi didnt have to tell them when they showed up that morning. They told them what they are being charged with. There being charged with Honor Services fraud which is, people dont really know exactly what that means. So i think some of them probably knew remember, some of these people they had done business withrick singer. Thats an extraordinary scene. And melissa, what should readers think or maybe not what should what do you think readerswill think of the parents after reading your book . What should we make of them . I think its a range, one of the challenges in writing this book and getting to know some of them was that i could as parents relate to some aspect of who these people are area not in their actions but in their approaches and their intentions perhaps, wanting to do the best for their kids and maybe feeling insecure as a parent and having this person come and say i can fix it all for you and wanting to rely on the experts so much so i think it would be too easy to outright hate these parents and say they all did awful things yes , parents have pled guilty to felony criminal charges but they all got there from some different reasons. So i think i can kind of relate a little bit to them and maybe feelbad for some of them. Not too bad but you feel a little bad for some of them that clearly they got off track in their parenting and their understanding of what was success and you also end up getting a little angry at them that they did give their kids the space to figure themselves out. But they had this myopic view of success and what it should look like and they didnt bother with their kids to go down that path on their own. There were more overbearing than perhaps they should have been. They also just became so focused on success which is frustrating as somebody who knows that so many other schools out there that these teenagers would have been perfectly fine for them to say usc or boston or it must be georgetown. So its really just emotion but i think each parent and each family story and a like rick singer for various reasons. Fascinating and jennifer, what about the kids . Were any of them charged . What do they think about all this . The Us Attorneys Office in massachusetts when they announced the charges against the parents , they said that some of the kids new and some of them didnt and it was a possibility that the kids could get charged. That was march 2019 and none of the kids had beencharged and i personally dont think any of them will. And they said this that day, the parents were the primary drivers here. The parents set this up and the kids, most of them werein high school. It was hard on the kids area we got the first interview with one of the kids to talk about how he felt about it and it was pretty heartbreaking because he was a young man who was so talented already on his own. He was working so hard. He would go up the classes and he been on the college as a train and in ninth grade, practicing and so the also had a list of colleges that didnt even include usc. He had a range of schools. There were some state schools and smaller schools. He was interested in the environment but he felt betrayed when this happened. His father came home that day after being in the jail cell and they have to post bail and hewas in the kitchen and his father walks in and the first thing he said to his father was why didnt you believe inme . It sounds so heartbreaking. He talked about it from anger that he shifted to sort of feeling a little bad for his dad for not quite getting it and upsetting himself for not speaking up so there was that anger and that visceral reaction. And then when jennifer spoke to him months later he took a little more time to think about it, a little more perspective and a little bit more of like , thats sad that my dad thought he needed to do that. I think you grow up a lot from this incident. He said he realized that his parents, that a lot of parents in his committee had been trying to do the best in the kids lives and he had gone along and he was 20 now and he said he realized he wasnt going to do this anymore. He was going to make his own decisions and in fact he made the decision to speak he didnt consult with any lawyers or family representatives and i had to call to get a little bit of information about the kid and the lawyers were like he spoke to you and later i found out the father was thinking i cant believe he did this and this is a huge mistake but then when the story came out and his point of view was out there he was so thoughtful and well spoken , they all said we were wrong , that he could handlehimself and he almost spoke out to prove a point. You can trust me. Thats fascinating that he proves them wrong twice in a way. Where are the kids now . Its a range. A number of the universities went out so georgetown and yale and stanford, they were taking admission offers or someone who lives at northwestern, but one of the coaches womens volleyball coaches had been charged in pled not guilty, the school returned that the students didnt seem to know what was up when the parents took rick singer to allege, the kids didnt know what they could say and usc reviewed dozens of cases or cases of this, the parents were charged and also other kids who had carried out and were connected to all of this even if their parents didnt Face Criminal Charges and not everyone was kicked out at usc. This young man that jennifer and i had been talking about , he was still there and we spoke to him over the winter. Others just left voluntarily. Its been arrangement those who did stay at their schools , they really had to defend themselves and to say listen, i do belong here on my own merits. Amidst all this, tell us a little bit more how hard is it to get tocollege . I know they felt they needed to do this but today . It depends on what school they wanted to go to. For the vast majority of students that go to colleges that admit the vast majority of athletes so it does not hurt to get into college. It is very hard to get into certain schools and it has gotten a lot harder to get into some of those schools in the past five, 10, 15 years and application volumes have risen. People see that, they get nervous and they decide to apply the more schools and its a vicious cycle and when youre looking at schools that have rates in the 5 to 10 percentrange , high schools in the low teens with usc in their, it seems really daunting so you can kind of understand why some parents or some families think they need to boost their odds a little bit whether thats with an essay coach or having their kids go in onvolunteer trips. People are looking for a way to stand out and this is followed by applicants, these kids are taking it to quite another level but there is a palpable anxiety among parents of High School Students when they see their low admit rates and they hear the Horror Stories of someone with a 4. 5 rated gpa who didnt get in anywhere. Jennifer, whats different from the high schools that are sending the kids to these schools or the high schools where rick singer had clients. Is there any reform happening there . Yes, theres high schools were interesting in this book as they were on one hand a lot of these schools seemed to almost perpetuate this anxiety by promoting how many kids we got into these great schools, theyd have little maps on their website and clearly they were interested in that maybe they said that, maybe they told people it didnt matter where you go but people are absorbed in a different message that there was always this tension between the guidance counselor school these private counselors at the parents would hire and that came up a number of times where you had a guidance counselor at the school say look, talk to a college and say kind of raise red flags like it seems that little donnie is applying to school and asked me if hes on the track team and i know hes not and they tried to get involved so there was this tension but i think what we seen is that some of the schools have just said to parents, if you work with a private counselor, you cant work with us. You have to pick. Were not going to be party to something youredoing that may be sketchy. To answer that a little bit some of the private schools in particular, the families are paying all this tuition to go to the high school and the counselor the principles , have enough to say this iswhat we do and let us do it. We will help support your student, your kid as their applying to college but some family vegas dont like to hear it. Like when theres too much of a reach perhaps or their other kids on this class applying there and your odds are its not great. And theyre going going to just go until they find someone will tell them what they want to hear. Thats a tough sign to be in and melissa, what surprised you in reporting on this story the most. Im cynical by nature so i dont know if i was surprised that there were people finding very creative ways to get an edge here. I think part of what surprised me was i saw the complexity of the operation that we discussed earlier, just how many people needed to be in on it and test administrators, the proctor, parents, coaches. Singer had a fulltime staff. His bookkeeper and his assistants and all of that to make this work. I think the thing that surprised me was how many close calls there were. Times when singer almost got caught in the whole scheme almost came crashing down in and it was surprising to learn about why it didnt and as i write in the book it was often a mix of inertia and this closed loop of information so at usc when there was a question, the person got put in charge of getting to the bottom of this and figuring it out and all that was somebody that proctors say was working with rick singer. So he was on actually on the Baseball Team or the crew team or whatever it was. So youre learning about all these things and you think they were so close. And the fact that ultimately when this whole scheme got taken down it had nothing to do with singer eventually area that led to the takedown. Tell us more about what led to the takedown. Sure, yes read as melissa said it was just a strange unrelated case of the security and Exchange Commission had data from an investor in the area and they start looking into this staff fraud which is this very routine pump and dump scheme and it led to them to this businessman in los angeles. They get the documents and anyway, he comes back to boston to try to make a deal with prosecutors and perhaps be a witness and help them expose the larger staff scheme in return for leniency and during, when that happens the prosecutors have to dig into a persons past because if theyre going to use them as a reliable witness dont want the defense to Say Something so everything is bad a persons done so theyre looking at his financial records, they see money moving between him and connecticut. And he just came out and said the coach at yale solicited me for a bride to get my daughter to schooland ive been paying him money. You can imagine this room in boston with these prosecutors but they had a regular fraud case. And they started to talk to him more and he told them lets learn more about that and then one of them got out of the room and ran down the hall to his boss said i think we might have something really interesting here so this guy did not know rick singer but what they did is they used him to bring in the yale coach. They set the yale coach up in boston, got him on case and during the course of watching that interaction he said something about rick singer so they said i wonder who rick singer is so they flipped the yale coach and then they get rick singer. They have him on the phone and they listen to his calls for awhile. Ring rick singer in september 2018 and his frontier at a hotel in boston and you can figure outthe rest. Rick singer flips and turns over his rolodex and there you have operationvarsity blues. A daisy chain of arrests there, its amazing. It really is. I remember talking one time with one of the lawyers and i said i probably understand now in mob movies if you did a crime with somebody you had to kill this person because they weregoing to flip on you. So they have to disappear. This is not how these investigations should be going, usually someone goes up the chain and here pretty quickly after they got rick singer gives up all these other people all these parents which it was a very unusual way of going about this criminalinvestigation. The us attorney in massachusetts was very worried originally about booking with singer does it a bit risky to have your Main Operator be a crook. So you cant really, can you trust that can we believe what you say so it turns out when they first flipped him he goes off the rails a little bit. Its kind of the first few days, they give him the starter phone and he goes back to california and they say just go back and do your thing and they were going to get more parents but he gets a separate phone and he tips some parents off. Im wearing a wire, you havent done anything yet so he takes that chance. I think he later said he felt bad for some of the families. I think he may be just didnt want to lose. That was the other part of it too but they find out pretty fast and they, the us attorney in boston was like get him back here now. Cannot have him out there rolling around. We need to babysit this guy so they bring him back to boston and they just set him up at the conference table. Overlooking Boston Harbor and he is in there making his calls with agents next to him and doing his thing in his tracksuit. They would describe him just Walking Around and people even walked with him if he had to go to the bathroom and walked with him he was on a short leash after that but then he became probably because he so competitive at one point he decided if im going to be a witness im going to be the best witness and he just made one call after another and he turned over from what i understand 150 names so weve seen 55 people arrested but they probably could have gone further but i guess at some point you have to decide we have enoughhere. Go back, there were 150 . This is what i heard. He writes well over 100 names. He was going to be the best witness so you could go after , it was this question that there had to be more parents but from the prosecutors point of view you have to build a case. You have to have a lot of information and they didnt have it on a lot of these people but he did give them a lot of names and we know after this that you remember there was that case and it would seem like this trickle of cases. Along the way and were still wondering sometimes who else is out there. And are some parents, like we know for instance there were quite a few parents who got lawyers because they were kind of anticipating, somebodysgoing to come knocking. One guy just came forward and i dont think he detected it, youve got me. Went over to the cops and said im involved in this. Right, so there presumably 70 something parents out there wondering if one predawn knock on the door. Yes. I saw one question, are we doing questions or howshould we do it . Im not sure. I did have some questions in the chat unless you have any. I can always come back, lets start in with those. A couple good questions from the chat. One was sent to me what was the difference between writing a fulllength book about a story like this and writing an article . Jennifer and i talked about a lot from newspaper reporters, the longest stories i normally write most about 2000 words. And this was close to100,000 words. So very daunting. Our agent actually helped us framing from the very beginning before we knew how to do any of that or kind of what it was going to look like and then we test each chapter at a time and we both worked on individual chapters are a different part of the chapter and we each kind of took ownership of certain families or certain characters in the book and we built a whole book in google docs so you know, its quite daunting at the outset and then again at the very end kind of intimidating but each chapter was like a couple of those really long stories and after that it seemed a little less terrifying. I kept thinking i had an editor who would say one at a time so i started thinking just break it down. Not writing an entirebook, today im writing this. And i will say it wasnt just scary, it was also liberating in some ways and i say this with emily who was our editor at the journal that you have anopportunity to write dialogue , to create scenes and its all fact, none of this stuff is made up but we were able to a full picture in a way that you cant you are limited to a few hundred words to tell the entire story so it was a really interesting and fun opportunity to stretch these very differentlevels. Another question, could you please give us your best tips for interviewing witnesses and sources. I think just acknowledging to people that this is, i know this is really hard and that youre probably scared to talk and that maybe you even feel like why should i talk. But i could say this because it was true. We really want to hear your side of the story and youre going to be in the book because youre in the files, everything is written about you and we know everything from these documents but help us fill in you. Help us humanize you. And present you, present the full story and i think once we kind of did that, we did get some people to open up. It was hard. There were a number of awkward kind of lunches or something where somebody would come and order and just not eat and sit there and that kindof thing. But. Sometimes theres a matter of sitting there and letting the person slowly start to tell their story. You get a little prompt and they would open up more and more and then going back to them again a few weeks later and theywould have more to share. Their memories would have been jogged by that first conversation and made a little bit more about this time or maybe actually, i think about it more and i came across an email and heres what reallyhappened. Essentially you cant hide from this, youre going to be part of this story. You can help make sure that it is full and fair and accurate or you can pretend its not happening and stick your head in the sand and were still going to find ways to learn all this information about you. And there were people who didnt want to talk themselves sometimes they would say this person is sort of a proxy for me and this person can tell my back story. Or sometimes if they werent offering up those people we would go find them ourselves and circle back to that person again and say more about your now, are you ready to share your side and not in a threatening way but as i said, we want to hear this story. Another good question from the chat, how much of the parents decision you think was driven by a sense that everyone does this. Did you feel like that feeling was person pervasive among people you investigated. I think this is Party Conversation for parents. In a certain Social Circle so i think there was so much discussion of who are using as as a coach, who your private soccer coach. People lived in a world where this was normal. At bare minimum you were going to do was get a test proctor. You were being somehow remiss in your parenting duties if you didnt do at least that so there was an assumption that everyone else is trying to game the system somehow, trying to get ahead. Someone knew someone who had donated a building or Something Like that so there was a sense that if you werent doing something your kid was going to bemissing out. Now, they didnt all think everyone else was doing exactly this or something to this extent but they did kind of assume that other people were finding angles and edges a friend whos on the board somewhere right a letter of recommendation. Those things that are on the team and of the spectrum perhaps. And to add to that was funny, i dont thing dialogue in some of the key conversations where parents are trying to get out of rick if someone else was doing it. But it would make the letter. Im not going to get into it but i think they wanted to know im not the only one. Doesnt seem likely to you that if rick singer was operating like this on the west coast that there are not similar operations in other wealthy communities and other geographies . We discussed in the a little bit couple of other cases of people who found weaknesses found ways of manipulating the system. So here on long island their case not that long ago somebody was taking sats for other teenagers. When he left, he would fly home on the weekends and would take them for other young men or women. So yes, there are other people doing improper things, seeking an edge to game the system singer was just in california, crying all over the country, all over the world both legally and otherwise. We tell the story somebody in the boston area was working with an International Family taking money for not great counseling. There certainly are other College Counselors who were people who call themselves College Counselors who find loopholes. There somebody in the chicago suburbs who encouraged families to give up guardianship of their children so that the kids could apply for Financial Aid and get scholarships. Something the wall street journal and propublica reported on this year so there are crazy schemes all over the place and we will try to uncover more of them new ones will,. As schools move away from required the sat ace going to use other criteria as soon as people figure out what that information is there going to try to find away to game that. Did you talk more about the private collegecounseling industry . Your reporting you find those who use those Services College acceptance or are these parents being sold. Good . So its a huge fastgrowing industry and its everyone from people who have prosecutions undergraduate degrees in counseling, former College Admissions officers often go into this business. Former High School Guidance counselors. All the way to a parent who their kids into princeton though they must know what theyre doing. Its an odd range there are any licensing requirements or standards of practice. You can join certain organizations and show your intentions up there isnt any policing of the industry so its hard to say how effective they are. For certain people yes even with rick singer we heard families and kids talk about it wasnt on my radar until he mentioned and it turned out to be the best place possible for the kid. But yes, they can be helpful, they can be affected and while theres an assumption that it will work with super wealthy families they have rates that are reasonable for more income families that are private counselors who do go to work with students in high school. And maybe they need Additional Support and guidance their high school is private so someone from outside will be able to help. Its not my way of saying all that theyre all helpful, theres. Another question from the chat. Thank you all for your excellent reporting. From a degree of culpability were there other factors that determine which parentsthe prosecutors decided to charge. Is, our Felicity Huffman and transcends celebrity status play a role . Were highprofile but i dont know that their celebrity status play a role because there were a number of parents who were wealthy and who you would have never heard of. I think that his clients, rick singer, they were wealthy people but you kind of have to be to work with him so they are going to be from some of the higher tiers and professions. I think that one of the main things that as a prosecutor they had cases that they had some kind of, they felt they had some evidence that the parents knew that they were doing somethingwrong. They wanted to get people, they wanted to know that they had paid rick singer so they were looking for concrete evidence to try to build this case so thats why they went to the lengths they did to get him to call all these people. Even parents he been seen earlier and have a cover story which is my charity is getting on and i want to let you know that you may be getting acall. So just lets talk about remember how i got your son into school as a tennis player he didnt play some of theparents were like yes, thats right, okay. And then they got them to reiterate what they had done on the phone because apparently when youre doing these sting operations, a tax call is a real winner because everyone, no one likes to get audited and they want to get the story straight. What should i say and what is the score so they would have to because thats why they haveto do that. In view of the government, you had done something wrong so those are the cases they went after there were a number of cases they just does not to pursue but they had some other big names that we heard of that they didnt go after. I think it was more about the certainly those parents became like the face of it because they were so well known but there were some big names in the financial world and Silicon Valley so it was almost worse for the actresses. I think i have time for one last question that you sort of touched on earlier melissa but its worth asking again. Can and is this still happening . Can it happen again . Of course it can happen again and we just have to depend on interrupted reporters like yourself tocover it. But is it still happening . Are you on the case now . After the story broke in the spring a bunch of schools came out but schools that had coaches names in this and other lives came out and said were going to tighten the ship. Going to start to audit applications a little bit more. Were going to try to verify some of the materials on the application are accurate to the best of our ability. Were going to make sure if people was recruited to a particular team that they join the team and play and if not they better have a good explanation but they acknowledge they cant dothat for every application. And i have written the attorney general that some applications are so high that youre getting a few minutes, five or 10 minutes to look at an application to make the first decision so youre not able to go to an Old Folks Home to make sure somebody volunteers 20 hours a week or call the high school to make sure somebody is apresident and not the Vice President of some club. They just cant do it so theres so much trust baked into the system and because of that there are people who will take advantage of that trust and lie about certain things or exaggerate or try to create some nonspecific club just to put it on to their resume or pretend to be abetter athlete then they are. So there are schemes and games people are playing. One more question from katie. Ladies, what impact do you believe this has on Higher Education. We will let melissa answer this one. My answer might have been different a few months ago but with the pandemic weve seen so many schools face serious financial challenges, existential questions at the moment of how do they proceed given everything going on and i think its really hard for a school right now to say that theyre not going to Pay Attention to whos a full paying student or who can angle 100 million, not that its a direct quid pro quo but thats really appealing and you have to think about the institutional needs. And you know, whats best for the school and admissions or their longtermviability. Its hard to say that this scandal will have a huge impact on Higher Education with moments of introspection and soulsearching and all thatstuff. There was a little bit of that but a lot of schools did quickly return to their kind of standard operating procedure. A lot of high schools are still certainly pushing certain schools for certain students. You still have plenty of College Nights seeking earlier and earlier and the parents are still plenty paranoid. We continue to get reader emails talking about their own kids case and these uppermiddleclass teenagers are disadvantaged these days but the craziness and anxiety is absolutely still there. So i dont know if this fundamentally changes Higher Education. Maybe a few people look more closely at their own practices but beyond that i think thejury is still out. This has been wonderful, thank you melissa thank you jennifer and thank you emily leading our discussion. The book is unacceptable. , unacceptable privelege, deceit, and the makings of the College Admissions scandal theres a link to buy it from us in the chat if you go to mcnally jackson. Com. I hope you learned a little bit more about this book so thank you very much andthank you to everybody who watched. Heres a look at books being published this week, chris murphy of Connecticut Offers his thoughts on the role of firearms throughout american history. And Public Safety and the violence inside us. In mililani and me Stephanie Winston wolcott recalls her time as the first ladys Senior Advisor the why she left ministration. And in their book and oil the wall street journals bradley hope justin check report on the life and leadership style of saudi arabia and crown Prince Mohammed bin solomon. Also being published this week and i have something to tell you just and brutish edge recalls his occurrences growing up may gay and his marriage to people to judge businessman and Philanthropist David Rubenstein offers advice from leaders in the field of finance, entertainment, government and more in how to lead. And know about Kerry Arsenault investigate a paper mill in her hometown of mexico made effective the financial and physical wellbeing of its residents. Military historian in toll complete astrology on the Pacific Theater during world war ii in twilight of the gods. Find these titles this coming week wherever books are sold and watch for many of the authors in the near future tv on cspan2. Former president of the Temple Emanuel Streicker Center and the donor who is allowed his family namesake this is erica. By masha mimran, member of