Former Georgetown tennis coach admits admissions fraud

The former head tennis coach at Georgetown University agreed to plead guilty in the US college admissions scandal and face the longest prison sentence to date in the two-year-old set of prosecutions.

The coach, Gordon Ernst, agreed to accept a prison sentence ranging from one to four years, for having received millions of dollars in payments for helping applicants fraudulently gain admission to Georgetown.

Ernst accepted the plea in the middle of the first courtroom trial of defendants in the scandal, involving two wealthy parents accused of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their children admitted to elite institutions.

From 2012 to 2018, Ernst allegedly helped at least 12 students win admissions to Georgetown by presenting them to his institution as legitimate candidates to play on the university’s tennis team.

It was one of several such schemes at elite US universities that William Singer, a Los Angeles-area admissions adviser at the centre of the scandal, has admitted he helped orchestrate.

A total of 57 people, including 33 parents, have been charged in the cases. Most have pleaded guilty and sentenced to jail terms averaging three months.

The longest to date is the nine-month sentence for Douglas Hodge, a former corporate chief executive who paid $850,000 (£615,000) to get four children admitted to Georgetown and the University of Southern California (USC).

Ernst is facing substantially longer imprisonment and the repayment of $3.4 million. Along with accepting the bribe money, he admitted failing to pay federal income taxes on much of it.

Georgetown officials had discovered sufficient rules violations in his athletic recruiting that they asked him to resign well before they were contacted by federal investigators unravelling Singer’s activities.

Ernst did, however, manage to get hired to coach tennis at the University of Rhode Island without URI learning of Georgetown’s concerns.

While at Georgetown, Ernst provided tennis lessons to Michelle Obama and her daughters.

The first court trial in the overall scandal began this week in federal court in Boston for two of the six parents whose cases remained to be resolved. That trial – involving Gamal Abdelaziz, a former executive of the casino operator Wynn Resorts, and John Wilson, a former executive of the retailers Staples and Gap – was expected to run for several weeks.

Three former college officials also still face trial for their alleged roles in Singer’s activities: Donna Heinel and Jovan Vavic of USC, and William Ferguson of Wake Forest University.

Heinel, a former senior associate athletic director, and Vavic, a former water polo coach, have been described by prosecutors in the trial of Abdelaziz and Wilson as having helped their children fraudulently gain admission to USC. The defendants have suggested they had no reason to believe the system presented to them by Singer was illegal.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com