Mr. Ernst was arrested in March 2019 with more than four dozen other coaches, parents, testing center officials and the admitted mastermind of the admissions scheme, Mr. Singer, who began cooperating with the government in 2018 and has pleaded guilty but has not yet been sentenced.
After the arrests, Georgetown said it planned to dismiss two students connected to the scandal.
Since then, 57 people have been charged in the case, and about four dozen have pleaded guilty, including 33 parents.
The two parents now on trial, Gamal Abdelaziz, a former casino executive, and John Wilson, a former Gap executive, say they are innocent and were duped by Mr. Singer into thinking that they were making legitimate donations to the University of Southern California in order to smooth the way for their children to be admitted as recruited athletes.
Mr. Wilson’s son was admitted as a water polo player and Mr. Abdelaziz’s daughter was admitted as a basketball player. Both of them played those sports, and Mr. Wilson’s son was, according to the defense, a serious water polo player, but prosecutors have questioned their credentials to play at the collegiate level. Mr. Wilson is also accused of paying $1.5 million, in another scheme orchestrated by Mr. Singer, to get his daughters into Harvard and Stanford by falsely presenting them as sailors.
Other parents in the case are accused of agreeing to have their children diagnosed with learning disabilities so they could get 100 percent more time to take the SAT or ACT test and could take the test at testing centers that Mr. Singer controlled. Mr. Singer told parents that he could guarantee them any SAT score they wanted, according to a recording made while Mr. Singer was cooperating with the government. He said their children would never know about the fraud and would just think that they’d had a lucky day.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.