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By David K. Li
The first lawsuits — targeting several elite universities and individuals charged by federal prosecutors in a sweeping college admissions scandal — were filed by students and a parent on Wednesday in California.
Jennifer Kay Toy claimed in a state court that her son — with a 4.2 grade-point average — was not admitted to some schools because parents implicated in the scandal thought it was “OK to lie, cheat, steal and bribe their children’s way into a good college.”
The scheme, led by cooperating witness William Rick Singer, allegedly included bribes to university sports coaches, campus officials and fake test scores.
The scandal came to light in federal indictments unsealed Tuesday in Massachusetts implicating Singer, who organized the complex schemes for wealthy parents, including actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman.
In addition to Toy’s civil complaint, two Stanford students filed a class-action lawsuit against the Palo Alto school and all the other implicated universities, claiming their degrees will not be “worth as much as” before.
Lawyers for Erica Olsen and Kalea Woods are also suing Singer, Stanford, the University of Southern California, UCLA, the University of San Diego, the University of Texas, Wake Forest, Yale and Georgetown.
While Olsen and Woods both gained admission to their top-tier Northern California school, they claim to be damaged because of the time and money wasted on applications to other schools implicated in the scandal.
Olsen said she applied to Yale and Woods to USC, according to the lawsuit.
“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. She also did not receive what she paid for — a fair admissions consideration process,” according to Olsen’s civil suit.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Olsen and Woods were accepted by Yale and Southern Cal.
“At the time she applied, Woods similarly was never informed that the process of admission at USC was an unfair, rigged process, in which parents could buy their way into the university through bribery and dishonest schemes,” the suit said.
And even though they both got into and are now attending Stanford, ranked No. 7 in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings, their degrees now won’t carry as much weight, according to the federal lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California.
“Like Olsen, Woods has also been damaged because she is a student at Stanford University, another one of the universities plagued by the fraud scandal,” according to the lawsuit. “Her degree 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 rich parents who were willing to bribe school officials.”
A rep for Stanford could not be immediately reached for comment on Thursday.
CORRECTION (March 14, 2019, 11:39 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misspelled the first name of an actress charged in the college admissions scandal. She is Lori Loughlin, not Lauri.