Over the past few weeks, one of the largest college admission scandals became widely known. According to the FBI, who named the investigation Operation Varsity Blues, fifty people were involved in this scheme. People were involved by either cheating on SAT/ACTs or bribing college coaches and school administrators to accept students as college athletes even when they were not. Nine prestigious universities, Georgetown, Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, University of California, San Diego, USC, University of Texas, Austin, Wake Forest, and Yale were all involved in this case. Some of the most well-known celebrities, including Lori Loughlin who played Becky in Full House, and Felicity Huffman, best known for her role as Lynette, are involved in this scandal.
So how exactly did this scheme work? It was mainly coordinated by William Rick Singer, a college admissions counselor who was CEO of Key Worldwide Foundation and The Edge College & Career Network. Parents would pay him up to $75,000 to get someone, mainly Mark Riddell, to take the standardized test for their student or use his connections to get college coaches to “recruit” these students for their Division I team. For parents who wanted their child in an athletic team, they were asked to send the coaches a picture of their child so it could be edited onto the school’s athletic website.
Singer got away with this for so long by disguising these payments as donations to his companies. Ironically, Singer claimed his company aimed to help poorer families.
Across the country, the reaction of this scandal has been incredibly negative, and rightfully so. People are outraged that privileged celebrities can bribe their way into getting their children accepted into universities, while the majority of students have to put in hard work to get the opportunities that these privileged students were sadly given. This scandal shows true flaws in the college admissions system, and how rich and privileged celebrities can cheat their way through this system, being exempt from any actual hard work. Hopefully, all the students who were admitted, despite their lack of merits, into these universities will be expelled and a student who is deserving of the spot will take their place.