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When he first heard about it, Gordon Caplan said he thought a cheating conspiracy that would allow his daughter to have a high standardized score on a key college entrance exam “was a little weird.”
Caplan, a firm leader and top dealmaker at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, went forward anyway, paying $75,000 to a broker so his daughter’s answers on the standardized test could be corrected and then submitted, according to prosecutors’ court documents.

“I’m not worried about the moral issue here,” Caplan said, according to a wiretap transcript cited by federal prosecutors in Massachusetts. “I’m worried about the—if she’s caught doing that, you know, she’s finished.”

The revelation this week that dozens of players ran a huge college-admissions bribery scheme sent ripples of shock and outrage through the country. But the counselors who work with students applying to elite colleges weren’t surprised.

Adults on the frontlines of the high-wire process of selective college admissions have long known that wealth and privilege buy access. Parents get that access not only through regular channels—the savvy prepping, drafting, and monitoring that fuel the process—but by the “backdoor,” as the lead player in the bribery scheme called it: making big donations, using alumni connections, or capitalizing on their children’s athletic prowess.

The “side door” of admissions unveiled in the indictment—costly systems rigged to falsify admission-exam scores or pass off applicants as recruited athletes—struck many veteran counselors as being only a hair’s breadth away from the loopholes savvy parents routinely exploit to get their children into top schools.

Counselors all over the country told Education Week that parents often ask them for help working the admissions system to their children’s advantage. And most frequently, though not exclusively, the requests come from well-off, college-educated parents.