Operation Varsity Blues
In late 2019, news outlets were flooded with breaking news involving rich parents committing white collar crimes to secure their child’s spot at a top-tier university. As the stakes of college admissions have become more intense, the phenomenon of using a backdoor to get into prestigious universities is not otherworldly. It’s very common for wealthy parents to pledge large sums of money in donation to a school in order to increase their child’s chances of getting in; Jared Kushner was admitted to Harvard after his father donated $2.5 million to the school. Networking and connections to certain administrators at a university can also be an advantage for a child applying to schools. Netflix’s new documentary, Operation Varsity Blues, however, was the first time we saw the 1% be condemned and convicted for behavior that we’re too familiar with, and silent about.
For the past decade, the stress of college admissions has intensified in students as the competition pool continues to grow each year. Last year, NYU broke a record after receiving over 100,000 applications and admitting just under 13% of students to their class of 2025. College enrollment rates have increased by 195% since 1970 as higher education has become a necessary commodity to achieving economic success in our society. For many parents, an undergraduate education is a requirement for their children even if the child isn’t interested in pursuing a career that requires a bachelor’s degree. While more kids are applying to college, just as many students are dropping out as they’ve found other interests outside of higher education.
As the documentary points out, a lot of parents see their children as extensions of themselves and may use them (subconsciously or not) as opportunities to right their own wrongs. In a twisted way, the institution a child attends becomes a claim to status for the parent depending on the level of “prestige” the university holds. However, what is prestige? From the word’s Latin and French roots it means to be an illusion of glamour, a facade of sorts. Operation Varsity Blues questions the implications of ranking systems and what such publications are actually measuring in their calculations.
What does it really mean to be a Top 10 school? For one, the university is probably a private institution, it’s most likely an Ivy, and an education there will cost you a pretty penny. The price of higher education continues to increase every year and tuition has become an exclusive factor in attendance statistics. Many students applying to college are looking for opportunities greater than the environments they grew up in but cannot afford the expensive cost of attendance. While financial aid and scholarships are helpful assistance programs, tuition continues to be a key deciding factor in a student’s choice of college. Additionally, students in America often have to face crippling financial debt after taking out loans to pay for their tuition.
Additionally, our society operates on the ideology that more money can buy a better product which explains the parallel between a university’s “prestige” and its cost of attendance. The implications of such thinking has inevitably resulted in a culture that favors the rich who can use their money to access opportunities that aren’t readily available to the masses. Such mechanisms in our culture paired with the competitive reality of college admissions were the perfect inspiration for Rick Singer’s multi-million dollar fraudulent counseling company.
After gaining momentum as a popular college counselor in Sacramento, Singer founded his company “Future Stars” which would work to get America’s richest kids into prestigious universities. From the beginning of his professional career, Singer was known for lying about small yet crucial pieces of information that would help him get ahead as a “successful” businessman. Similar to the beginning of Jeffrey Epstein’s career, Singer made a lot of money and connections by inserting himself into high power social circles. The college counselor would fabricate stories about his past experiences, like being on the board at Starbucks, to create a false narrative that he’s an experienced professional that you can trust. Also like Epstein, the college counselor had a casual aesthetic that many described to emulate the “beach bum Californian” type. This personable facade of Singer’s personality created a sense of trust that allowed him to get close to his clients, who likened him to a life-coach or therapist. Despite the charisma that Singer was able to fabricate, the counselor is a criminal at his core.
Once Singer was able to accumulate a client base, he was known for fabricating student documents to cut corners in the admissions process, like changing the child’s race in order for them to apply for Affirmative Action. Singer had a talent for exploiting vulnerability in his clients by inspiring doubt in a student’s ability to get into college the fair way. Future Stars in Sacramento was a space for Singer to practice his “side door” techniques before founding multi-million dollar company, The Key, a counseling service that could guarantee your child’s admission to a university for the right price.
Rick Singer’s entire operation is a very American example of white collar crime and the increasing potential for economic corruption in this country. The Key was fundamentally criminal in its structure and mission from the organization’s inception. While The Key operated as a for-profit counseling service company, Singer created The Key Worldwide as a non-profit charity organization that would be exempt from federal income tax. Clients would pay for Singer’s services through The Key while making their bribe payments to coaches and administrators through “donations” to The Key Worldwide, effectively masking the reality of the company’s operation. There were a variety of counseling services offered at The Key with prices varying based on the level of security desired by a client. Cheaper options included paying a special proctor to correct your child’s answers on standardized tests or falsely applying for extra time during testing, which is reserved for students with disabilities. However, an impressive score on a standardized test does not guarantee admission anywhere, it only accelerates your chances in getting in. Nevertheless, Singer was able to find a way to guarantee your admission to a school, for a precious price of course.
The only way to guarantee admission to any college is through an athletic commit to the school. Singer would target coaches, who are seen as the trusted members between athletic and academic administration, by offering money in exchange for a client’s “spot” on the team. However, client’s were not expected to have any athletic experience as Singer utilized the disproportionate amount of white kids in niche sports like fencing and rowing to easily fake recruitment. These are under the radar programs where it would be painless for Singer to execute his plan in making a non-athlete look like a recruited player, thus being admitted before they even applied. One of these cases involved Olivia Jade, YouTuber and influencer daughter of actress Lori Loughlin and fashion mogul Mossimo Guilliani, famously posing on a rowing machine in photos that would be photoshopped for her profile as a new member of USC’s rowing team. Singer cleverly exploited the importance of fundraising in college sports in his admissions scheme - the millionaire couple paid a total of $500,000 to the counselor and his two affiliates at USC for their daughters’ “spots” on the crew team.
One of the most puzzling elements of Olivia Jade’s case is that the YouTuber had zero interest in continuing her education and even wanted to drop out of high school her senior year. She had made a name for herself as an online personality and make-up connoisseur and often expressed her disdain for school in vlogs. Obviously Olivia had at least some awareness of how she was getting into USC given that she posed for the photos, but it’s also clear that she protested the idea of college and this was mostly her parents’ doing. As Loughlin never went to college and Guilliani dropped out of USC before receiving his degree, their daughters became opportunities for the parents to absolve themselves for their own mistakes of not pursuing higher education.
The surge in demand for higher degrees is largely due to the concept of college as a commodity that the industry of institutional education has thrived on for the past decade or so. Consequently, the college that a student attends has become a point of status for both the child and the parent. If a parent was unable to attend the “best” school, or any college at all, having a child who can pursue a bachelor’s degree is a way for the parent to vicariously obtain that lost experience. While the child has to fill out applications and take standardized tests, the parent has to pay for their tuition and any additional resources that could help the student get an advantage in the process. It’s an exclusive market for a resource that should be available to everyone, but isn’t, in an economy where bragging rights, aesthetic and prestige are the focus rather than the education itself. Bribery and corruption were inevitable results in such a society that functions under this kind of social order.
Every element of Singer’s operation was blatantly illegal and morally corrupt. The criminal exploited any possible advantage he could for his clients without regard to the ethical concerns about his practice. The most disappointing consequence of the collegiate cheating scandal is that spots were given to those who did not deserve an admission, thus being taken away from students who studied tirelessly to get into school. College admission anxiety is a plague - students obsess over homework, AP’s, extracurriculars, and whatever else they can do to get a competitive advantage in the process. Kids are devoting so much time and effort into an uncertain application process while the majority of them are left to deal with rejection. Although Operation Varsity Blues begins with home videos of students celebrating their acceptance letters, this uplifting image is broken by the following videos of heartbroken kids after reading their rejection letters. Too many students want to go to the same schools and are dissatisfied with acceptances from smaller, less prestigious schools. The college admissions conversation is no longer about education itself, but rather the prestige associated with where the student will receive their degree from.
