US News and World Report began ranking colleges in 1983, and each year, students vie for a limited number of seats at top-ranked institutions by striving to excel in their sports, make straight As, take as many advanced courses as their schools (or local colleges) offer, participate in clubs and organizations, and bank a few volunteer hours if they are able. With exceptionally competitive acceptance rates at Ivy League and top-rated institutions, a student’s maximum effort could very well not be good enough.
For affluent families accustomed to solving problems with cash, reports of the admissions scandal exposed just how far families and students would go to secure admission at an esteemed institution. Viewing Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal paired with reading Admission by Julie Buxbaum will provide context for graduate students studying the law and ethics that impact higher education. The combination of these pieces delivers the facts while also considering the perspectives, or potential positions, of everyone involved.
Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal
Operation Varsity Blues, a documentary, opens with social media clips of high school seniors accessing their admissions decisions through online applicant portals. Director Chris Smith chooses these snippets to showcase the fear, anxiety, and tension expressed by students as they discover their academic fates. To further capture viewers’ attention, the documentary opens with this disclaimer: “The conversations in this film are real. They are recreations of wiretap transcripts released by the US government,” (Smith, 2021, 3:53).
Operation Varsity Blues follows independent college admissions counselor Rick Singer and reveals the means by which he was able to provide nearly guaranteed admission to prestigious schools for those able to write the checks to cover the fees he charged for his services. Through wiretapped conversations, interviews with federal investigators, test prep experts, college counselors, former clients, and even an ex-girlfriend of Singer’s, Smith introduces viewers to the mastermind behind the college admissions scandal that broke in 2019. After his own volatility got him fired from his job coaching basketball, Singer noted a need for a different kind of coaching in Sacramento and quickly became well-known for his work as an independent college counselor – or coach. While some of this work coaching students through the process of getting into college may have been legitimate, Rick often assisted families in accessing what he referred to as the “side door” into college admissions.
In recorded and reenacted wiretaps, Singer, played in reenactments in the series by Matthew Modine, explained the doors to college to his prospective clients: the “front door” to admissions is getting into college on your own merit – easier said than done for families fixed on prestigious institutions. The “back door” into a college can only be afforded by the exorbitantly rich as it requires making a multimillion-dollar donation to the institution. Rick then offered his “side door” to college admission to his clients – and that side door could look different based on each student, each desired institution, and the amount of money each family was willing to pay. “Side door” applications could employ any number of fraudulent strategies from lying about a student’s race, modifying photos to give the perception that a student played a certain sport, falsifying test scores, feigning academic disabilities, or forging a student’s handwriting and signature on documents making claims that the student may not have been aware of. If all went according to plan, Singer and a student’s parents could submit a “side door” application, complete with a sizeable donation to Rick Singer’s foundation, which he would then funnel to the college of choice. Sometimes the entire process happened without the student ever being aware.
After at least eight years (but likely many more) of running “side door” admissions for the rich and famous, one of Singer’s former clients was arrested on unrelated charges. This arrest prompted him to volunteer information about a Yale soccer coach, Rudy Meredith, who had been accepting admissions bribes. After Meredith was indicted, the dominoes fell rapidly as he, in turn, offered information on Singer, who chose to cooperate by working with federal agents to have his own clients arrested. Through clandestine meetings and wiretaps, Singer assisted the FBI in arresting dozens of his wealthy and often famous clients.
Smith ends the documentary with heart-wrenching social media clips of students checking their admissions status and receiving disappointing news. The shots of tearful teenagers transition to footage of Singer, his accomplices, and his clients – listing how they pled to the charges against them and the sentences that were handed down (if they had been sentenced by the time the documentary was released). News of the inequitable admissions processes angered the nation, but perhaps the greatest offenses were the sentences handed down to the hyper-privileged group of defendants. Most notably, Lori Laughlin was sentenced to two months in prison, and Felicity Huffman received only fourteen days.
A final scene depicts brief reflections from those interviewed for the film. They speculated on whether harsher sentences would have made a difference, the level of culpability that should be assigned to each party, and whether the competitive culture of higher education was to blame for whole debacle. Meanwhile, Rick Singer was shown living comfortably in Newport Beach, out on bail until his own trial began.
Strengths and Limitations
Strengths
Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal is dramatic, engaging, and uncomfortable. Smith’s film gives the audience a glimpse into Rick Singer’s life and the ease with which he was able to deceive others. From reenacted scenes of his interactions with college coaches – some of whom expressed confusion about the legality of their involvement – to wiretaps with the clients that Singer turned witness against, the portrayal of these crimes leaves viewers unsettled.
While the scandal itself is confusing and involves many accomplices, clients, and their children, one of the strengths of the film is that Smith was able to simplify the scandal’s complexity and depth in a way that makes it more relatable to viewers. The documentary takes the take time to highlight a few clients in particular – including well-known Full House actress, Lori Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli. Much of the time that the documentary devotes to covering the Loughlin-Giannulli family was specifically dedicated to discussing their daughter, Olivia Jade, who had created a significant following on YouTube, garnering for herself other financial opportunities with her own beauty lines and makeup partnerships.
Olivia Jade’s case in particular shows the consequences that the students themselves faced – regardless of the depth of their involvement in the scheme. The film details Olivia Jade’s lackadaisical attitude toward school and provides pieces of her vlogs that mention her parents’ wishes for her to attend college, though by her own confession, she had wanted to drop out of high school. In this way, the audience is left to work out for themselves how much (or how little) some students might have been involved and forces them to question the impact that the scandal had on the students who seemingly benefitted from it. Ultimately, the investigators and judicial system found only the parents to be culpable. While some of the students received penalties, such as reversed admissions decisions, criminal charges were never filed against any of them. For Olivia Jade, this meant losing her partnerships with beauty brands that had once promoted and sold products from her own makeup line. Regardless, during the trials, prosecutors noted that many of the students had no knowledge of their parents’ actions.
Limitations
Chris Smith’s documentary does an excellent job of showing the various perspectives of the victims, local professionals, unwitting participants, and the law enforcement who uncovered the scandal. Understandably, the main perspective missing is that of the clients and their students. Through reenactments, the film shows how brazenly candid parents could be with Singer in their conversations, and we lose the perspective of being able to understand the involvement, emotions, and responses of the students.
As is to be expected with a scandal involving so many players, Operation Varsity Blues is unable to detail the extent of the crimes committed by Singer, the schools, the athletic partners, and the wealthy/celebrity clients. In the amount of time that a documentary allows, it would be impossible to discuss all the charges, the massive amounts of money involved, the sentences of each defendant, and the extent of Rick Singer’s lies. Although the film integrates several clips of teens reacting to the scandal, there is a noticeable absence of interviews from applicants who feel that their spot at implicated institutions had been wrongfully taken from them. While there would be no way of locating and identifying the student victims, students having received a rejection letter from an implicated school may always wonder about their true eligibility to attend their preferred school.
The timing of the documentary places another limitation on the film in that many of the defendants had not yet been sentenced or even tried. Watching the film end with Rick Singer living his normal life leaves the viewer with an unresolved tension that is both creative and deeply frustrating. In 2023, Singer was ultimately sentenced to three and a half years in prison followed by an additional three years of supervised release. He ended up serving 16 months and has since returned to helping students get into college (Korn & Levitz, 2024).
Admission
If one of the main criticisms of the Operation Varsity Blues documentary is the lack of student perspective, Admission by Julie Buxbaum provides that missing piece. The novel is a provocative way through what could possibly be described as “fanfiction” about the college admissions scandal. Although Buxbaum provides a disclaimer noting that the book is a work of fiction, the text creates a parallel version of the events of the college admissions scandal seen through the eyes of Chloe Wynn Berringer, the daughter of a B-list celebrity best known for her stint on a sitcom. Chloe lives with her mom, Joy, her dad, Richard, and her little sister, Isla – not too unlike Olivia Jade, her parents, and her sister, Isabella. Readers only need a few paragraphs before realizing the line between the reality of Olivia Jade’s circumstances and the fictionalization of Chloe’s story is quite thin.
The book opens with Chloe hearing a heavy knock on the front door, assuming the family has received a package containing a script or high-end makeup or promotional materials but opening the door to discover the FBI wielding weapons and looking for her mother. As she watches agents arrest her mother, hears her father call lawyers, and watches the headlines pouring through in the days to come, Chloe’s charmed life collapses. After this startling first chapter, Buxbaum goes back and forth from the past to the present in each subsequent chapter, showing the reader Chloe’s journey from a popular college applicant to a social pariah in need of her own lawyer.
The unique timeline of Admission compels the reader to fluctuate between feelings of anger and empathy for Chloe as she recounts what she knew about her fraudulent college admissions process and then manages the repercussions it had for her family, her friends, and her own future. Readers will find it all too easy to look at the college admissions scandal and resent the students who benefitted. However, Buxbaum gently suggests the possible ignorance, confusion, and ambivalence of the students entangled in the scandal due to their parents’ actions. What if some of these students never planned to attend any college, much less a prestigious institution?
Themes
Privilege and Inequality in Education
Throughout Admission, Chloe’s best friend, Shola, serves as a foil to expose Chloe’s extensive privilege. The daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Shola receives an academic scholarship to attend the prestigious and private Wood Valley High School in Los Angeles. Aside from highlighting the obvious differences in familial responsibilities, housing, and finances, Shola’s character highlights the discrepancies between her educational opportunities and Chloe’s.
While Shola has had to prepare for the SAT/ACTs on her own, Chloe worked with a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour tutor. Shola also tutors her own siblings in the hope that they, too, will be able to earn academic scholarships to Wood Valley, but she could not access a private admissions consultant to help her with applications. Although Wood Valley recommended against it, Chloe’s family employed consultant Dr. Wilson – and while doing so proved to be a great mistake, Chloe received advantages in her college application process. Dr. Wilson’s connections afforded Chloe access to learning disorder testing, resulting in privately (and fraudulently) proctored standardized tests and assistance with submitting her application materials.
In one of Shola’s particularly poignant conversations with Chloe about her privilege, Chloe laments having a life so uninteresting that she has nothing to write her college essay about. Shola responds by correcting her saying “Chlo, when you say, ‘least interesting’ what you mean is ‘most privileged’ – like nothing bad has ever happened to you… and the idea that you’d complain about that is the height of entitlement” (Buxbaum, 2020, p. 148). To further emphasize the difference in college stress between these young women, Shola tearfully shares that she needs to keep up with tutoring her siblings while trying to decipher the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). In another exasperating display of Chloe’s ignorance of what others go through to attend college, she responds, “What’s a FAFSA?” (Buxbaum, 2020, p. 150).
Family Dynamics
In the stressful, illegal process that depends upon family members lying to each other, family dynamics are tested and strained in the book. Buxbaum leaves readers guessing about the resilience of the Berringer family relationships through most of the book. In the first chapter, Buxbaum introduces this complexity by how Chloe weaves through a single monologue commenting about both her mother’s vanity and sympathy for how her mother was treated as she was taken into custody. Each subsequent chapter introduces a new tension between the Berringer family members – Chloe obtaining independent legal counsel to potentially protect her from the actions of her parents, Isla’s concerns about her own future college options, Chloe’s devastation at her parents’ lack of confidence in her academic ability, and disagreements regarding the best legal options for Chloe’s mother, Joy.
Nearly every chapter from the present time introduces a new twist in the Berringer family drama, never hinting at a resolution until the final pages of the book. Eventually, Buxbaum emphasizes the communication difficulties the Berringers faced by addressing that a condition of Joy’s bail was that she was not permitted to discuss the alleged crimes with anyone. While this should prevent Chloe from confronting her parents about the scandal, the family continues to talk through issues and Chloe confronts her mother. As Chloe watches her mother weep in response, Chloe summarizes the state of the Berringer family dynamic through internal monologue, stating, “I didn’t know you could feel blistering love and hate at the exact same time, but here we are,” (Buxbaum, 2020, p. 155). Tensions continue to rise and fall, yet a resolution for the family does not come until the epilogue.
“Knowing”
The most complex theme Buxbaum presents in Admission is how to define what it means to “know” something. Throughout the text, Chloe often struggles to identify the line between “suspicion” and “confirmation.” While most of her friends and acquaintances had completely cut contact with Chloe because of the scandal, those left all asked, “Did you know?” We learn of Chloe’s suspicions about Dr. Wilson and her parents altering her college application materials, but she never fully voices her concerns or tries to stop the process.
The moment Chloe begins to question her own complicity was when Isla told her that she needed her own lawyer. Chloe contests that had she truly not known what was happening she would not need a lawyer. Isla responded, “Come on, the dumb act might fool Mom and Dad, but it doesn’t fool me. I wouldn’t count on it fooling a jury either,” (Buxbaum, 2020, p. 46). Some of the most profound moments of Admission come from Chloe and Isla’s contemplation of their own culpability.
I keep thinking about what it means to know something. Like whether the concept of knowing is something active or passive. When does something graduate from being a suspicion?” … Leave it to my sister to boil down everything I’ve been thinking into a simple question … Isla is talking about passively knowing, and I wonder if there is such a thing as actively choosing not to know. (Buxbaum, 2020, pp. 241-243).
Although the reader is never given a definitive answer on whether Chloe knew about the admissions scheme, a gripping moment with her best friend, Shola, exemplifies Chloe has begun to take responsibility for the role that she played. As Shola harshly confronts Chloe about the scandal, her lies, and her moral failure in ignoring her suspicions, Chloe can finally admit to herself that while she was not explicitly aware of every single detail, she “aggressively chose not to know” (Buxbaum, 2020, p. 258).
Implications for Student Affairs Programs and Practice
It would be difficult to discuss the current context of law and ethics in higher education without discussing the 2019 college admissions scandal. This event touches on issues of educational access, equity, merit, privilege, and other topics that remain relevant. In relation to privilege and equity, the consideration of legacy status being used as a factor in university admissions continues to be troublesome for those concerned with access and fairness.
Operation Varsity Blues and Admission while complex, provide remarkable insight into both society and higher education, especially when studied in tandem. Although there is debate around the multiple roles enrollment management plays in student affairs, practitioners must remain aware of the pressures and systemic issues in high school and throughout the enrollment process. Understanding these pressures is necessary for student affairs practitioners to be informed and considerate of the emotions that new students may be sorting through not only during high school or their first year on campus, but throughout their higher education experiences.
Operation Varsity Blues highlights the status symbol that higher education has become, and Admission displays the temptation for parents to push their children toward elite institutions even when the student has no desire to continue their education or when a student may feel more comfortable attending a different type of institution. Both works provide insight into the stress and anxiety students have faced throughout enrollment. This is an important conversation for student affairs professionals as we consider how we react to our students – some who may be attending their dream school and others who may be disappointed in the options they had for college and still others who may not be living their own dreams, but the dreams of their families instead.
Conclusion
In preparing for, or in the development of, a career in student affairs, the combination of watching Operation Varsity Blues and reading Admission provides helpful insight into some of the very first challenges a student may face coming into college. Admission offers a natural segue into discussion about how to advise and assist students during the turbulent shift from parental dependence to solo decision-making. In a variety of ways college applicants, and later, matriculants will struggle with parental involvement – whether that be in relation to what schools to apply to, what to major in, or what social or financial decisions a student should make. In any functional area, professionals should be prepared to help students navigate the transition in the student/parent relationship. Admission can also spark feelings of empathy for affluent students who are just beginning to learn about and face the realities of the privilege they may have (and be oblivious to) in comparison to their peers.
While Admission focuses more on the student facing issues of the admissions scandal, Operation Varsity Blues will help professionals understand the legal and ethical issues that can arise in the field of higher education. Realistically, the majority of practitioners will not be faced with bribery attempts or engage in falsifying academic records; however, seeing the documentary interviews with former Stanford sailing coach, John Vandemoer, provides insight into how innocuous an ethical issue might seem at first. This demonstrates how important it is for new higher education professionals to receive training on legal and ethical red flags. Looking towards the root causes of the scandal, Operation Varsity Blues can prompt discussion on the status symbol that higher education has become and how professionals can help relieve some of the unrelenting societal pressure to not just achieve but overachieve.
Operation Varsity Blues leaves the viewer feeling unrelenting disdain for the families who participated in the scandal. Admission is its perfect counterpart, adding nuance and perspective as to what these families went through as they faced the consequences of their actions. For student affairs practitioners, the internal tension that watching both the documentary and reading the book provides is important and thought-provoking, in a way that only consuming both works could provide.
Questions for Practice
- Discuss your feelings regarding Chloe as the main character in Admission. Did your perspective on Chloe’s personal responsibility in the scandal change over the course of reading the book?
- What is an appropriate role for student affairs practitioners to play in facilitating students’ changing relationships with their parents? How do you help a student conflicted between their own goals versus the wishes of their parents?
- How can we, as student affairs professionals, work to change the toxic culture surrounding the perceived status and prestige of attending one school versus another and emphasize “best fit” as a determining factor in college choice?
- Spend some time looking into the sentences handed down to those convicted in the Varsity Blues scandal. Do you think these sentences were just? Were the sentences harsh enough to deter other attempts at “side door” admissions in the future?
- What legal and ethical issues might you face in your current or future student affairs position? What resources does your institution have for reporting events you may find questionable?
Author Biography
Rachel Mustin (she/her/hers) currently serves as the Assistant Director of Student Services for the College of Arts and Humanities at Clemson University. She is a December 2024 graduate of Clemson’s M. Ed. in Student Affairs and has over 10 years of experience working in higher education. When not on Clemson’s campus, you can find Rachel at home – trying out new recipes or watching cheesy paranormal tv shows with her husband and her dog, River.
References
Buxbaum, J. (2020). Admission. Delacourt Press.
Korn, M. & Levitz, J. (2024, October 19). Varsity Blues Mastermind is Out of Prison—and Wants to Help Get Your Kid Into College. New York Times.
Smith, C., Karmen, J., & Henley, Y. (Producers) & Smith, C. (Director), (2019). Operation varsity blues: The college admissions scandal. [Documentary]. Netflix.