When news of the college admission scandal broke in the spring of 2019, it was the perfect story of scammers for the media to cling to. Detail after detail emerged about wealthy parents who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy their children’s entrance to high-end colleges, while the FBI pursued charges for mail and wire transfer fraud; more than 50 people have been charged.
Most of the public’s initial fascination was, predictably, fueled by the biggest names in celebrities. Actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, who have played healthy mothers in Desperate Housewives and Full house, respectively, became substitutes for all confusion, as memorable icons of hypocrisy and privilege.
The fact that Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, plot on behalf of their daughter Olivia Jade, who had already leveraged their celebrity closeness in a successful career as a beauty influencer, only made them major targets of scorn. And the ridiculous photos of her on the paddle – pretending to be in sports was part of the scam – helped to ignite the uproar on social media.
But these celebrities were not really central to the meaning of the scandal or the real scheme, both of which are examined and reworked in the documentary. Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal, now streaming on Netflix. This clever contextualization of the investigation is framed as a kind of thriller, narrating the rise and fall of Rick Singer, the former high school basketball coach who became a college admissions consultant and a fraudster who orchestrated the entire operation.
The documentary is based on the FBI recordings of conversations between Singer and his clients, dramatized in tacky but effective dramas, featuring unknown actors like his parents and a surprisingly attractive Matthew Modine like Singer (in a bad wig that is strangely suited for this one). story about falsehood).
But the reenactments are interspersed with interviews with Singer’s former colleagues, researchers and lawyers, all of whom add up to a criticism of the college prep industry, higher education in the United States and an entire class of parents with rights. Avoiding the obvious angle of celebrity or maternal melodrama, Operation Varsity Blues skeptically, it treats most of the college admissions industry as a kind of fraud in itself.
Singer, who left high school in Sacramento to become a college admissions consultant, is the central figure in the documentary. He made his name for the first time in the industry because, as a former colleague said, he was always “suspicious”.
He introduced himself as a friendly admissions “trainer”, helping families navigate the admission process and, in his well-finished and sloppy sports attire, projected a kind of anti-charismatic relationship. But he made promises he couldn’t keep to his parents, changed people’s ethnicities or races in enrollment, and lied to a couple about being responsible for putting their daughter in Stanford.
Eventually, he entered more openly criminal territory by identifying a way to get around one of the most blatantly flagrant ways in which the US class system and education collide: the “tradition” that billionaires can afford to give Ivy schools to. League multimillionaires donations increase their children’s admissions. (Jared Kushner is mentioned as one of those mediocre students.)
Singer saw these donations as an overly expensive “back door” for elite schools. Thus, he created a cheaper “side door” for the best schools, requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of tens of millions. He realized that niche sports – such as fencing, water polo, rowing, sailing and horseback riding – could be an easier way to attract students to these schools, because their departments did not have enough funds and needed donations.
In addition, admissions committees relied entirely on coaches ‘estimates of recruiting student athletes’ skills. So Singer bribed coaches and sports directors – a Yale football coach, a USC sports director, a Stanford sailing coach – who would accept students with a non-athletic background as supposedly promising athletes. As part of his services, he also worked with standardized test supervisors, who tested their clients’ children to increase their scores. Soon, he had a millionaire client base, such as the heir and lawyers for Hot Pockets, venture capitalists and wine entrepreneurs, to whom he could secure admission.
The documentary makes it clear that the admissions scandal was not just about a coup father or millionaire, but that the entire system is rigged in favor of those who already benefit from belonging to the upper class. As a college admission critic pointed out, the sports that Singer longed for are activities that most students in the United States would not even have access to. Even without Singer’s coup, the entire standardized testing industry fuels existing inequalities; the best predictor for good test results is family income. And the obsession with university rankings has led schools to redesign their admission criteria in search of ineffable prestige.
Singer knew how to play with his parents’ weaknesses in search of prestige – for example, he confused Huffman, suggesting that she spent a lot of time in her career to get her daughter to a good college, and told other parents that their children would never get into school. desired schools with the scores they had, even if it wasn’t true.
The documentary lurks in the parents’ mentality, exposing their right to class and shrewd cruelty. Michelle Janavs, the heiress of Hot Pockets, is caught debating with Singer how to hide from her youngest daughter that they are going to cheat to raise their standardized test scores. “My youngest daughter is not like my oldest daughter,” she explains. “She is not stupid. So if I say, ‘Oh, let’s get this sorted out on Rick’, she’ll wonder why. “” It’s a strange family dynamic, “says Janavs,” but every child is different. “
A recurring theme in recorded conversations with parents is that everyone wanted to put their sons and daughters in schools out of their reach, despite the possibilities already open to them thanks to the built-in class privilege, maintaining their children’s innocence and belief in meritocracy.
Although not a large part of the narrative, Loughlin and Giannulli seem to be an exception, as they have hidden nothing from their daughters. When a USC advisor starts asking questions about his daughters not being on the crew, Loughlin calls him a “weasel” in messages to his daughter; Gianulli writes: “Fuck him”, “nosy bastard”.
FBI surveillance of Singer moves the drama that unfolds, forming mini-portraits of the parents through their conversations with him. Intelligently, he does not try to humanize Singer or speculate much about his motives. (A former friend he tried to date explains it best when he explains: “I really don’t know what made him happy or what his desires were.” It’s almost like a mouse on a wheel, trying to reach a middle to an end, and there was really no end in sight. ”)
Still, it remains a compelling figure, mediated by Modine’s reenactments. At one point at the end of the documentary, we see the man himself on a film reel from a reality show that he tried to launch on the families he worked with.
However, despite some blatant cases – including a high school cheerleader who turned into a lacrosse player, or the fake rower Olivia Jade – no one has ever noticed and Singer’s scheme has not been exposed.
The whole scheme finally collapsed, in a kind of poetic justice, because one of his clients was sued for securities fraud and offered the FBI information about one of Singer’s allies, a Yale football coach. He, in turn, reported on Singer. Singer then agreed to arrest the parents via phone calls.
Almost all of the parents involved have been sentenced to months in prison, although Singer himself has not yet been sentenced. The series creates an effective drama out of schadenfreude, with real images of the parents coming out of their court appearances and details about their sentences.
But Operation Varsity Blues it does not frame prisons as easy answers to the problems it raises. The documentary is mindful of hypocrisy, for example, about the fact that Stanford did not return the $ 700,000 that a sailing coach was fired for accepting, that colleges still deny that donations help people get accepted and that the bloated college prep industry only gets bigger.
Operation Varsity Blues it is a reminder that the industrial college prep complex – like the college itself in the United States – looks more and more like a racket. In some final dramatic scenes, we see a reporter chasing a shirtless but completely calm Singer, apparently walking to his car after a workout. “Is the system broken?” the reporter asks. “Any comments on anything?” Singer doesn’t respond. But the answer is clear. ●