Getting into college is supposed to be a great accomplishment for a student, not a product of a parent’s career. This week on March 12 possibly the largest college admissions scandal ever was unearthed. Fifty people were justly charged with bribing officials of many different organizations to unfairly earn their children a spot in a university, sometimes even without the child knowing.

This fraud’s ring leader was William Rick Singer. He ran a college counseling group called The Key. Through this company, he helped organize two different types of advantages for these students. One of the advantages was to pay up to 75,000 dollars to get someone else to take college entrance exams, like the ACT and SAT, for their child, or to have this person’s answers to replace their child’s. They did this by bribing test administrators and even faking ADHD to have the test be taken in a room alone with extra time. The other advantage given to these students was the bribing of college coaches to give their children another advantage. While these coaches don’t get to directly decide who is accepted they do have an influence on if these “athletes” should be accepted or not.

Fifty people have been caught and charged for this misconduct, and schools have been making decisions on a case by case basis for the punishment. Most schools, such as Wake Forest, Yale, UCLA, Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Texas at Austin, have fired or suspended any coach who has been caught. The students who were the victims of their parents’ manipulations are unlikely to be punished; however, older students who were even aware of the manipulation are more likely to receive punishments.

This scandal has even caught celebrities, the most famous being Lori Loughlin, most known for Fuller House. Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, have been slammed for their contributions to this scheme. Their affluence has caused a spiral of lawsuits by students and parents of students at these universities. They claim that this misconduct has caused their education to be less respected by future employers and have caused less privileged kids to lose spots at schools that they have worked so hard to attain.