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Lies, Money And Cheating: The Deeper Story Of The College Admissions Scandal

Elissa Nadworny

Marco A. Treviño

A new book tells the story behind Operation Varsity Blues, the largest college admissions scandal ever prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice. Elissa Nadworny/NPR hide caption

A new book tells the story behind Operation Varsity Blues, the largest college admissions scandal ever prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The college admissions process has long been sold as a system of merit: Do well in school, write a killer essay, score well on the SAT, and you'll get in. Yet the recent nationwide scandal, dubbed Operation Varsity Blues, laid bare just how much money, instead of aptitude, often drives admissions at elite colleges.

In March of 2019, federal prosecutors charged 50 people with participating in a scheme to cheat the college admissions system at select colleges nationwide. The investigation into widespread cheating and corruption included Hollywood celebrities, Division I college coaches and wealthy parents who conspired to cheat the process. At its center was a college counselor named Rick Singer, who made millions by bribing coaches at major universities to admit his clients' children as athletes for sports they often didn't play, and by rigging SAT and ACT test scores.

In the new book Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit, & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal journalists Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz , who covered Operation Varsity Blues for the Wall Street Journal , give life to the largest college admissions scandal ever prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The interview was edited for brevity.

What did you find most interesting about Operation Varsity Blues?

Melissa Korn: I found the complexity of the scheme to be the most interesting part. This wasn't just one corrupt guy helping a crooked parent. Each prong of the operation, both testing and bribery/fake athletes, involved multiple players working together, or sometimes being kept separate from one another as best suited the end game. It could have fallen apart in so many ways, at so many different stages.

U.S. Charges Dozens Of Parents, Coaches In Massive College Admissions Scandal

The [initial criminal] complaint is 204 pages and could be published as a book alone. It's so detailed that it leaves you with so many interesting questions. It moves beyond a juicy news story because there is something close to home for many people. If you're a parent or anybody who has a loved one, you want to do what's best for them. You want to help your loved one succeed. Some people just went a little too far.

As you were reporting, the case was still underway, and you were reporting and writing in real time. What were some of the challenges you faced because of that?

Jennifer Levitz: The biggest challenge was getting people to speak with us. This case was still a criminal case, so a lot of people were reluctant to speak. It can be tough to break into circles where you have people surrounded by teams of lawyers and PR consultants. We had to get very creative in telling these stories and I think the writing was hard, but the reporting was where the real sweat came in.

I also found that the door knocking aspect of it was different. I've generally been a reporter driving 'round, knocking on doors and talking to neighbors. Well, it's really hard to do that when people live in communities where nobody is walking down the street, and everyone's behind a gate with alarm systems. You just cannot physically run into anybody.

I'm a big believer in getting to people directly. It's an art to work with people whose job is to protect this person while keeping you at bay. I wasn't confident that our messages were even getting to people. So, I wanted to get to people directly and at least give them a chance.

One of the big "gets" in the book is your interview with one of the students involved in the scandal, Matteo Sloane. His father, Devin Sloane, was sentenced to four months in prison for paying to have Matteo admitted to the University of Southern California. How did that interview come to be?

Levitz: I reached Matteo Sloane through Facebook Messenger, saying, "Hey, we would love to talk with you." A couple months go by. Then he wrote back wanting to tell his side of the story. We went ahead and spoke with him, and he was just so honest.

Then I remember going the next day to confirm a couple of things with the people representing that family. They were like, "You did what? You talked to him?" Had we gone through them, that wouldn't have happened.

[In the book] we went beyond the headlines, and our own Wall Street Journal coverage, to connect the dots between all the players and to tell the stories of the individuals involved. It's not sympathy for them, but we do make them actual people — flawed, complex people — rather than just names in a tabloid or court document.

As you mentioned earlier, this case brings up issues about meritocracy, equity and access. How has Unacceptable shaped your current work or view on higher ed?

Korn: So I have been covering general U.S. higher ed for almost six years now. I love the beat, and I have always approached it somewhat cynically. This project made me question what I'm hearing from schools more than I already did. As schools are talking about their devotion to diversity, equity and access, I am saying, "OK, let me see that," because schools put out these great press releases or talk about their percent of Pell Grant students . But then they were involved with this, or their coaches did this, or they gave preference to these types of students.

Audit: University Of California Admitted 64 Students Over More Qualified Applicants

College admissions scandal reveals difficult path to acceptance.

This has helped me cement in my mind the need for that cynicism or the "prove it" attitude that I might take right now. I try to describe how the [higher education] system works, where there are fault lines, and where it's a little bit broken. I also highlight what's working and who's improving it and how people are reforming it, if they are.

Levitz: We still have a long way to go before the playing field in college admissions is truly leveled. This scandal wasn't born in a vacuum. Unacceptable provides context about how the admissions system for selective colleges was already quite broken and extremely unfair. We note that some in the admissions world refer to it as a "blood sport," and that's all too apt in some of these fiercely competitive communities. An acceptance letter to a particular school isn't a prize to be won or a badge showing one kid's parents are somehow better than another's.

Marco A. Treviño is an intern on NPR's Education Desk.

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The Varsity Blues Scandal

A college admissions prep advisor told wealthy parents that while there were front doors into universities and back doors, he had created a side door that was worth exploring.

Rick Singer was an independent college counselor who held the golden ticket for his clients. He had concocted a “side door” that guaranteed admission to the college of a student’s choice. Students could enter the “front door” of a college by using the normal admissions process, which meant making the necessary grades and test scores and engaging in the appropriate extra-curricular activities to gain a “thumbs up” from the college’s admissions committee. Or, students could enter the “back door” of a college when their parents donated large sums of money – say $20 million or so – to the school, which pretty much guaranteed that the school would not deny their childrens’ applications for admission.

In Singer’s model, the “side door” was a little more complicated. He had learned that many universities’ non-revenue sports programs underpaid their coaches. These coaches had the ability to label applicants as “athletes,” which sent them to the front of the admissions line and made their admission to the school a near certainty. So, if Singer promised donations from parents that would go to these sports’ budgets and/or directly into the pockets of these coaches, he could tell his clients: “If we just pretend that your child is a fencer (or a rower, or a tennis athlete, or a soccer athlete, etc.), and you donate $X to my foundation, I can funnel that money to Coach Y and admission will be guaranteed.”

Another way to use Singer’s “side door” was to improve standardized test scores, which he also rigged. Singer had bribed people who administered standardized tests at a site in Houston and a site in Los Angeles. If parents could get their child certified as needing special accommodations for taking the exam (ideally, extra time over several days), and could also make up an excuse for having their child take the test at one of these locations (instead of their normal site), then Singer could manipulate the child’s test score. He had a “ringer” who would either take the test for the student, or make enough corrections on the student’s test before it was turned in, to acquire the desired score.

Singer pursued clients of children who were rich. As the scheme progressed, he pursued richer and richer parents. He also cultivated relationships with coaches at more and more prestigious universities (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, USC, University of Texas at Austin, etc.). Singer was clever in playing on parents’ insecurities and devotion to their children. He would commonly begin by counseling students in the typical way—what courses to take, what activities to participate in, and so on. He would also advise students regarding their choice of schools, often getting their heart set on a particular school. Then, OMG!! He would tell the parents that their child had no chance of getting into their dream school on their own. But, TA-DA!! He had a “side door” that could do the job.

Singer suggested to parents that they simply take a picture of their child playing water polo (or soccer or tennis, etc.) or Photoshop their child’s face onto the body of someone playing that sport. He then advised parents to be prepared to make a sizeable donation (a little over one million dollars was the largest single donation he acquired) and admission to the school of their child’s choice was guaranteed. Singer would funnel some of the donation to the coach and usually some to the school. The coach would request that the student be put on a preferred admission list for athletes, and admission was sure to follow. The student would show up at school the next year, claiming an injury, and later “retire” from the sport.

It turns out that wealthy people love their kids and want their dreams to come true, just like everyone else. And rich people are just as insecure about being parents as everyone else. While a couple of the parents Singer dealt with were jerks (and at least one was a criminal), most were good people and loving parents. For example, Douglas Hodge was a top executive at one of the world’s biggest bond companies and a tremendous philanthropist. Gordie Caplan was the co-managing partner of a major law firm who constantly preached acting with integrity to his firm’s young lawyers. Felicity Huffman was an actor who also blogged about being a mom, selling “Good Enough Mom” mugs, and advising her readers not to try to be “supermoms” or to raise perfect kids. Writer Jane Buckingham’s mantra was to ‘try to take joy in who my kids ARE not who I want them to be.”

But all these parents, and many more, actively engaged in Singer’s schemes of fraud and bribery in order to get their children into the schools their children desired. Many had deep reservations about the morality of what they were doing. As Huffman drove her daughter to the site of the SAT test that was to be manipulated, she told herself: “Turn around, turn around, turn around.” But she didn’t.

Interestingly, most parents (though not all) went to great lengths to ensure that their children did not know about the cheating. They wanted their kids to believe that they had been admitted to these colleges on their own merit.

College admissions’ processes have had scandals over the years, but the so-called “Varsity Blues” scandal is the biggest one in the history of the college admissions process. When Singer’s schemes were ultimately discovered by the FBI, he went to prison. Many of the parents involved also went to prison, though for shorter periods. And many parents lost their jobs when their wrongs were publicized.

Discussion Questions

• How did this happen? Why did the parents do it? With a couple of exceptions, most of Singer’s clients led honorable lives and seem unlikely to have paid bribes in order to advance their own careers or financial situations. But these parents were willing to do so in order to get their kids into the college of their choice. Is it possible that while playing the role of “loving parent,” these parents thought they had to do these things to protect their kids from disappointment and failure? Could role morality have played a part here? Explain.
• According to Korn and Levitz, while working with Singer, mother Jane Buckingham wanted (more than anything) to help her son. Her main thought was: “If there’s something I can do, I should do it.” Does this sound like a person playing the role of “devoted parent”? Why or why not?
• Psychologist Daniel Houser and colleagues ran an experiment where parents were given the opportunity to cheat under various circumstances. They found that parents were most likely to cheat when (a) it benefited their children rather than themselves, and (b) the children were not present. When children were present, parents cheated less, presumably to model good behavior for their kids. Does this experimental result seem to accord with the facts on the ground in the Varsity Blues scandal? Explain your reasoning.
• Regarding role morality, psychologist Keith Levitt has explained: “When people switch hats, they often switch moral compasses. People like to think they are inherently moral creatures – you either have character or you don’t. But our studies show that the same person may make a completely different decision based on what hat they may be wearing at the time, often without even realizing it.” Does this passage help explain how Gordie Caplan could preach integrity while playing the role of head of a law firm, yet cheat while playing the role of devoted parent? Or how Doulas Hodge could be a great philanthropist while playing the role of “good citizen” while being a cheater while playing the role of devote parent? Discuss.
• Regarding the Varsity Blues scandal, Korn and Levitz wrote:
• “[Jane] Buckingham didn’t let herself think much about it. She knew that this was cheating, even if she wasn’t picturing a federal crime. She told no one. But it also seemed like a straightforward way to solve a problem. Singer was going to help make this better. She knew it was wrong but not that wrong, right? [Her son] Jack would just get into the schools he was supposed to get into if she and Marcus [her husband from whom she was separated] had been better parents.”
• Do you see parallels between Adoboli’s playing the role of “good and loyal employee” and Buckingham playing the role of “devoted parent”? Explain.
• How did both use their roles to give themselves permission to do something they knew was wrong?
• Did the self-serving bias also play a part here? Why or why not?
• Which do you think was the stronger influence – role morality or the self-serving bias? Explain your reasoning.
• Was framing also an issue here? Did the parents’ overwhelming focus on the desired outcome—admission for their children—push moral considerations out of the parents’ frame of reference when they were deciding whether or not to go along with Singer’s schemes? What do you think and why?
• According to Nicole LaPorte: “Singer was ‘good at getting inside these guys’ heads,’ said one source. ‘He’d talk about famous, wealthy kids who went to certain universities and say: You think they got in on their smarts.? He made it sound like everyone got into college through connections and giving money, building libraries.’” If this is accurate, might the conformity bias also have played a role here, making the frauds and bribes seem innocuous to the parents because “everybody does it”? Explain.

Related Videos

Role Morality: Sports Edition

Our moral standards are often determined by the role we see ourselves playing at the time. This can lead us to make decisions and act very differently in the moral realm depending on our role.

Bibliography

Nick Anderson, “From ‘Master Coach’ to a Bribery Probe: A College Consultant Who Went off the Rails,”  Washington Post , March 12, 2019.

Devin Barrett & Matt Zapotosky, “FBI Accuses Wealthy Parents, Including Celebrities, in College-Entrance Bribery Scheme,”  Washington Post  March 12, 2019.

Brian Davis, “Texas Tennis Coach Michael Center Among Coaches Charged in Sweeping College Admissions Scheme,”  Austin American-Statesman , March 12, 2019.

Daniel Golden,  The Price of Admission  (2006).

Mariah Haas & Tyler McCarthy, “Lori Loughlin, Mossimo Giannulli sentenced in college admissions scandal case,”  Fox News , Aug. 21, 2020,

at  https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/lori-loughlin-mossimo-giannulli-sentenced-college-admissions-scandal

Daniel Houser et al., “On the Origins of Dishonesty: From Parents to Children,” NBER Working Paper #20897 (Jan. 2015).

Melissa Korn & Jennifer Levitz, Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal (2020).

Nicole LaPorte, Guilty Admissions: The Bribes, Favors, and Phonies Behind the College Cheating Scandal (2021).

Jennifer Medina et al., “College Admissions Scandal: Actresses, Business Leaders and Other Wealthy Parents Charged,”  New York Times , March 12, 2019.

Anita Raghavan, “A Rogue Trader Blames the System, but Not All Are Persuaded,” New York Times , March 24, 2017.

John Wertheim, “He Got Punished. The System Got Off,”  Sports Illustrated , Feb. 2022.

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A Year After the College Admissions Scandal, Here’s What Has (and Has Not) Changed

S ally Rubenstone has not been able to go to the grocery store in a year without someone asking her, the college admissions expert among her neighbors in Northampton, Mass., about the so-called “Operation Varsity Blues” scandal.

Did it surprise her that rich parents were cheating to get their kids into good colleges? It did not. Could it affect their own children when it comes time to apply to college? It should not, she assures them.

In the year since more than 30 parents were charged with facilitating fraud and paying a combined $25 million in bribes to get their children into elite schools, the specter of the scandal has hovered over the world of college admissions—a cautionary tale of helicopter parenting taken to its illegal extremes and a stunning reminder of how flawed the U.S. college application process is. The scandal, which drew in Hollywood stars , hedge fund millionaires, and athletic coaches, exemplified the advantages afforded to wealthy applicants and fueled debates about fairness and equity in admissions. But for all the conversation about the need for admissions reform, and as hundreds of thousands of high school seniors wait to hear back on where they’ll be starting classes in the fall, experts say little has changed.

“There has to be sweeping changes in order to bring both equity and sanity to this process. And the changes I’ve seen so far may be baby steps in the right direction, but they’re not moving the needle in a way that I view as significant,” says Rubenstone, an independent college counselor and former admissions officer at Smith College in Northampton. “Any sort of changes that are being made now — or might foreseeably be made in the next year or so — are going to be a spit in the ocean.”

If there’s one thing the admissions scandal has done, though, it has energized advocates who have long pushed for changes that could alleviate the inequities plaguing low-income and minority students as they vie for spots at top colleges and universities.

In December, a group of minority students and advocacy organizations filed a lawsuit challenging the University of California to stop requiring the SAT and ACT in admissions. The lawsuit argues that the standardized testing requirement “systematically and unlawfully denies talented and qualified students with less accumulated advantage a fair opportunity to pursue higher education at the [University of California].” A faculty task force at the university pushed back, insisting that test scores are a good predictor of how well students will do in college. The university has filed an objection to the suit, claiming the plaintiffs don’t have a case. A judge will hear the case in May, the same month that the university’s Board of Regents is scheduled to vote on the testing requirement.

“The Varsity Blues scandal—I think it’s the tip of the same iceberg, but it wasn’t like that’s what woke us up,” says Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney at Public Counsel, which filed the lawsuit. “This case could’ve been brought generations ago.”

Akil Bello, the advocacy director for FairTest, which opposes standardized testing, has used the scandal to encourage low-income students who might suffer from imposter syndrome , or doubting that they are qualified to attend top schools.

“You have some people who will, implicitly or explicitly, tell them they don’t belong,” Bello says, but he thinks Varsity Blues has provided those kids with the perfect retort: “How much did your mommy pay for you to get in?”

The schools caught up in the admissions scandal say they’ve taken steps to prevent it from happening again. The University of California system—which saw UCLA and UC Berkeley ensnared in the corruption— said it had begun to monitor donations to prevent them from affecting admissions decisions. It also said it was creating a clear document trail to explain admissions decisions based on athletics or other special talents; improving the process of verifying those special talents; and working to identify potential conflicts of interest in admissions. The University of Southern California—where three former coaches and a former senior associate athletic director were accused of helping students gain admission in exchange for bribes— said it had strengthened its process for reviewing student-athlete applications, requiring that three athletics officials review each file before sending it on to admissions officers. The university will also audit athletic rosters twice each year and cross-check it against admissions lists.

“Up until last year, admissions officials would often question if an athletic recruit was academically qualified for their institution, but they never considered whether a recruit was athletically qualified,” Rubenstone says. “That’s no longer true.”

Parents who pleaded guilty to the scheme have been sentenced to as much as nine months in prison, while others continue to fight the charges. Perhaps the most closely watched case involves Full House actor Lori Loughlin and her husband, designer Mossimo Giannulli, who are expected to go on trial in October. Both pleaded not guilty to charges that they paid $500,000 to get their two daughters admitted to the University of Southern California (USC) as crew team recruits, even though neither student was a rower. Their daughters are no longer enrolled at USC.

Jon Reider, a former Stanford admissions officer and an independent college counselor in San Francisco, says the efforts to prevent fraud won’t stop wealthy families from gaining an advantage. “I think the guard rails are a good thing, but I don’t think we should pretend it’s going to be a solution,” he says, adding that more drastic measures are necessary.

Reider would like colleges to eliminate early decision applications and stop giving an edge to athletes and legacy applicants. Rubenstone would like to simplify the process to a single, proctored application, preventing parents or consultants from rewriting students’ essays. Bello wants to limit the use of standardized testing and stop the practice of awarding financial aid based on test scores.

“A few different institutions nibbled around the edges,” Bello says of the efforts to prevent application fraud. “You know, ‘We’re not going to have one set of eyes on it. We’re going to have three.’ It’s like, great, so now we have three people to bribe instead of one,” he says. “The loopholes that were exploited are baked into the system.”

Lucy Kane—who works with Bottom Line, a nonprofit that helps low-income, first-generation students through the college application process—encounters those loopholes regularly as she guides New York City high school students through the process of deciding where to apply, writing essays and parsing financial aid offers. When Kane meets with students for the first time, she asks what scares them most about applying to college.

“By far, the most popular answer is affording it,” Kane says. “‘I don’t know how my family and I are going to be able to afford this.’”

One of the students she worked with this year is 17-year-old Youssef Hasweh, a high school senior in Brooklyn who is getting ready to attend the University of Chicago in the fall. Hasweh was preparing to apply to schools when news of the college admissions scandal broke last March. It didn’t surprise him.

“You need to work twice as hard to just get to the same level as students of privileged backgrounds,” he says. “So it didn’t shock me because I had already known that. I had already been pushing, as much as I could, to catch up.”

That included taking the SAT three times, knowing that he’d “bomb” his first score because he hadn’t prepared yet. After using free test prep materials available online, he brought his score up to 1300 out of a possible 1600. That placed him in the 86th percentile nationally , but below the 1500 to 1560 score earned by the “middle 50%” of students admitted to the University of Chicago.

Just as the SAT can be especially challenging for students whose parents cannot afford high-priced test prep courses or private tutors, the entire application process presents obstacles for less-advantaged students. Hasweh, whose parents did not attend college, turned to Kane for help filling out complicated financial aid forms, and she helped him craft his essay about being his high school’s first male cheerleader.

At the top of his list of extracurricular activities—before cheerleading, law team or Key Club — Hasweh listed his time spent caring for his older brother, who has cerebral palsy, which Hasweh describes as “the biggest role I’ve ever had.”

“I didn’t consider it an activity. I considered it a really important obligation,” he says.

In the end, Hasweh was accepted to the University of Chicago, one of eight schools he applied to through Questbridge, a nonprofit that matches low-income students to full-tuition scholarships at top universities. It’s also the only school he applied to that does not require students to submit SAT or ACT scores, a change rolled out in 2018. It is still the only school ranked in U.S. News & World Report’s top 20 national universities to go test-optional .

But it’s the kind of change that Hasweh, and advocates for admissions reform, want to see more of. “I’m a firm believer that the SAT only measures someone’s income,” says Hasweh, who has a 4.32 weighted GPA and credits the University of Chicago’s test-optional policy, in part, for his acceptance there.

After the school made the change—and began guaranteeing free tuition to students from families with annual incomes less than $125,000—it says the number of first-generation and low-income students in the 2019-20 freshman class rose by 20%.

In a similar vein, Johns Hopkins University President Ronald Daniels says the elite Baltimore school has increased the number of students eligible for Pell Grants—federal funding for low-income students—since it stopped giving preference to legacy applicants. Daniels announced this year that the elimination of legacy admissions was quietly put in place in 2014 after he decided they were “impairing our ability to educate qualified and promising students from all backgrounds and to help launch them up the social ladder.”

But legacy preference is still standard practice at many colleges, and wealthy parents continue to be able to give extra help to their children. “It’s really frustrating to hear about how these massive sums of money can be just snuck under the table, when for the students we work with, major life decisions are being made over $1,000,” says Kane.

Last month, USC announced it would wipe out tuition costs for students from families making $80,000 or less—which many say is a step in the right direction in the face of a $1.6 trillion national student debt problem. It costs more than $77,000 to attend USC today, including tuition, housing, books and meals. Across the country, the average cost of attendance is more than $43,000 at a private four-year school and more than $20,000 at a public four-year school.

Change will have to come not only from schools, but also from parents, says Richard Weissbourd, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a longtime advocate for reform in the admissions process. Last March, just as news of the admissions scandal broke, he released a coincidentally timed report warning that the focus on academic achievement was leading to ethical lapses, particularly among middle- and upper-income parents.

“In an effort to give their kids everything, these parents often end up robbing them of what counts,” the report said.

The admissions scandal exposed the kinds of ethical lapses he warned of, but Weissbourd says it will take a lot more than some criminal prosecutions and extra scrutiny of college applications to fix the underlying issue.

He suggests, for example, that college admissions offices limit their focus on Advanced Placement courses—which are not available in equal numbers in all high schools—and stop touting their low acceptance rates as evidence of their desirability.

“I think that there’s a lot more that colleges and college admissions can do,” he says.

As for parents, Weissbourd urges them to stop focusing on the most selective universities in the country, warning that it puts excessive pressure on students and tempts mothers and fathers to pull strings for their children. “So long as parents are hyper focused on this small number of colleges,” he says, “they’re going to be looking for an angle to get their kids into those colleges.”

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Lies, Money and Cheating: The Deeper Story of the College Admissions Scandal

Please try again

The college admissions process has long been sold as a system of merit: Do well in school, write a killer essay, score well on the SAT, and you’ll get in. Yet the recent nationwide scandal, dubbed Operation Varsity Blues, laid bare just how much money, instead of aptitude, often drives admissions at elite colleges.

In March of 2019, federal prosecutors charged 50 people with participating in a scheme to cheat the college admissions system at select colleges nationwide. The investigation into widespread cheating and corruption included Hollywood celebrities, Division I college coaches and wealthy parents who conspired to cheat the process. At its center was a college counselor named Rick Singer, who made millions by bribing coaches at major universities to admit his clients’ children as athletes for sports they often didn’t play, and by rigging SAT and ACT test scores.

In the new book Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit, & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal journalists Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz, who covered Operation Varsity Blues for the Wall Street Journal , give life to the largest college admissions scandal ever prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The interview was edited for brevity.

What did you find most interesting about Operation Varsity Blues?

Melissa Korn: I found the complexity of the scheme to be the most interesting part. This wasn’t just one corrupt guy helping a crooked parent. Each prong of the operation, both testing and bribery/fake athletes, involved multiple players working together, or sometimes being kept separate from one another as best suited the end game. It could have fallen apart in so many ways, at so many different stages.

The [initial criminal] complaint is 204 pages and could be published as a book alone. It’s so detailed that it leaves you with so many interesting questions. It moves beyond a juicy news story because there is something close to home for many people. If you’re a parent or anybody who has a loved one, you want to do what’s best for them. You want to help your loved one succeed. Some people just went a little too far.

As you were reporting, the case was still underway, and you were reporting and writing in real time. What were some of the challenges you faced because of that?

Jennifer Levitz: The biggest challenge was getting people to speak with us. This case was still a criminal case, so a lot of people were reluctant to speak. It can be tough to break into circles where you have people surrounded by teams of lawyers and PR consultants. We had to get very creative in telling these stories and I think the writing was hard, but the reporting was where the real sweat came in.

I also found that the door knocking aspect of it was different. I’ve generally been a reporter driving ’round, knocking on doors and talking to neighbors. Well, it’s really hard to do that when people live in communities where nobody is walking down the street, and everyone’s behind a gate with alarm systems. You just cannot physically run into anybody.

I’m a big believer in getting to people directly. It’s an art to work with people whose job is to protect this person while keeping you at bay. I wasn’t confident that our messages were even getting to people. So, I wanted to get to people directly and at least give them a chance.

One of the big “gets” in the book is your interview with one of the students involved in the scandal, Matteo Sloane. His father, Devin Sloane, was sentenced to four months in prison for paying to have Matteo admitted to the University of Southern California. How did that interview come to be?

Levitz: I reached Matteo Sloane through Facebook Messenger, saying, “Hey, we would love to talk with you.” A couple months go by. Then he wrote back wanting to tell his side of the story. We went ahead and spoke with him, and he was just so honest.

Then I remember going the next day to confirm a couple of things with the people representing that family. They were like, “You did what? You talked to him?” Had we gone through them, that wouldn’t have happened.

[In the book] we went beyond the headlines, and our own Wall Street Journal coverage, to connect the dots between all the players and to tell the stories of the individuals involved. It’s not sympathy for them, but we do make them actual people—flawed, complex people—rather than just names in a tabloid or court document.

As you mentioned earlier, this case brings up issues about meritocracy, equity and access. How has Unacceptable shaped your current work or view on higher ed?

Korn: So I have been covering general U.S. higher ed for almost six years now. I love the beat, and I have always approached it somewhat cynically. This project made me question what I’m hearing from schools more than I already did. As schools are talking about their devotion to diversity, equity and access, I am saying, “OK, let me see that,” because schools put out these great press releases or talk about their percent of Pell Grant students . But then they were involved with this, or their coaches did this, or they gave preference to these types of students.

This has helped me cement in my mind the need for that cynicism or the “prove it” attitude that I might take right now. I try to describe how the [higher education] system works, where there are fault lines, and where it’s a little bit broken. I also highlight what’s working and who’s improving it and how people are reforming it, if they are.

Levitz: We still have a long way to go before the playing field in college admissions is truly leveled. This scandal wasn’t born in a vacuum. Unacceptable provides context about how the admissions system for selective colleges was already quite broken and extremely unfair. We note that some in the admissions world refer to it as a “blood sport,” and that’s all too apt in some of these fiercely competitive communities. An acceptance letter to a particular school isn’t a prize to be won or a badge showing one kid’s parents are somehow better than another’s.

Marco A. Treviño is an intern on NPR’s Education Desk.

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What Makes a Fair College Admissions Process?

In the wake of the college admissions scandal, scholars go back to the drawing board to answer this most central question.

The college admissions scandal exposed criminal and unethical actions that undermine the promise of the American university system. To get to the root of the crisis, this roundtable discussion—curated by Public Books and JSTOR Daily—asks scholars to go back to the drawing board and answer the most basic of questions: What would constitute a fair college admissions process?

• Julie J. Park: What’s Really Unfair? Race-Neutral College Admissions • Christine R. Yano: What Constitutes a Fair Admissions Process? • Nadirah Farah Foley: Move Away from Meritocracy

For further reading, please see our annotated biblioraphy  Affirmative Action: Foundations and Key Concepts .

What’s Really Unfair? Race-Neutral College Admissions

Julie J. Park

Recently news broke that dozens of individuals, including celebrities Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, paid thousands of dollars to buy admission to some of the nation’s elite universities. This spectacularly terrible scandal raises questions about how to build a more fair system. On top of the scandal, other troubling practices such as legacy admissions and donor preferences remind us that admissions is biased toward the wealthy. Some might also think that getting rid of any recognition of an applicant’s race/ethnicity, so-called “race-neutral” admissions, is a step in the right direction.

At face value, the concept of race-neutrality may seem fair. What could be more fair than something that is supposedly neutral? However, I can confidently say that any system that does not address the contexts of racial and economic inequality is deeply unfair. Given the state of educational inequality in our country, solely relying on race-neutral policies does not eliminate discrimination; it reinforces it.

Ironically, admissions systems that do not pay attention to the nuances of race and class oftentimes defend themselves under the guise of “fairness” or “meritocracy.” These systems, such as the process used for decades to determine admission to New York City’s most elite public high schools, are based solely on standardized metrics of achievement, in many cases on a single test score cutoff. Supporters of such systems argue that nothing is fairer than a “race-neutral” admissions system based on a single test that everyone has the chance to study for and take. Isn’t a test objective, and even better, easily evaluated, insofar as a higher number is clearly better than even a slightly lower number?

However, the highest test scores are often bought at a literal price—the price of enrollment in SAT prep courses. As I explain in my book Race on Campus: Debunking Myths with Data , East Asian American students are much more likely than other groups to take these courses, and other research indicates that they are actually the only group that demonstrates statistically significant gains from taking such courses. Of course, there are many, many incredibly talented East Asian American students. However, this research highlights how colleges should consider that so-called neutral test scores are anything but neutral. The playing field is far from equal. The same goes for privileges in college preparation enjoyed largely by affluent White families. As I explain in Race on Campus , the solution is not just to throw SAT prep at low-income students. The roots of inequality go much deeper.

While test-based and/or so-called neutral (i.e., “race-neutral” or “class-neutral”) admissions seem fair, they are deeply flawed, because they fail to take into account the student’s context for educational opportunity. I’ll tell you what’s really unfair. Stanford University Professor Sean Reardon identified a gap of over four grade levels in academic performance between America’s most affluent and least affluent students. Further: “On average white students score one and [a] half or more grade levels higher than black and Hispanic students enrolled in socioeconomically similar school districts.” How is this fair?

Now, to some people, race-conscious holistic admissions—the general mode of operation at selective institutions of higher education—smacks of unfairness. In holistic admissions, test scores and GPAs are looked at alongside other relevant pieces of information—not just the number of extracurricular activities, but how students describe what they got out of their experiences. Essays that provide more insight into who a student is beyond the numbers. Teacher and guidance counselor recommendations, the quality of the high school, life hardships that a student may have overcome, the likelihood of them being able to take SAT prep, special talents, career aspirations, and, among many other factors, consideration of race and social class.

In holistic admissions, race cannot be the sole or even primary determinant of admission. It cannot work in a formulaic way that guarantees anyone admission or denial to an institution. As noted in Fisher II v. University of Texas at Austin , race operates as “factor of a factor of a factor.” White plaintiff Abigail Fisher was denied admission from UT Austin, but hundreds of Black and Brown students with stronger academic records than hers were also rejected.

Under holistic admissions, there is no guarantee that the highest-scoring students will gain admission, in part because the number of students with such accomplishments can outnumber the number of spots available in a first-year class. Furthermore, top universities are generally interested in pulling together a class with a greater range of traits and talents than the ability to get the absolute highest test score, which makes sense given the pervasiveness of SAT prep among the upper middle class and some ethnic groups. Being the valedictorian may reflect well on a student, but it is no guarantee of admission. As Karen Arnold shows in her research on the long-term outcomes for such students, valedictorians tend not to garner exceptional achievements later in life. The type of extreme conscientiousness associated with being No. 1 in high school, while undeniably a talent, doesn’t usually translate into the student becoming a risk-taking visionary later in life. Thus, nuance and discernment are needed to examine a student’s achievements—for instance, does a top class rank say more about whether a student is a rule follower than whether they possess passion and innovation?

These are some of the issues at stake in the pending lawsuit Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard , and in other affirmative action cases around the country. In SFFA v. Harvard , the complaint is filled with narratives of high-achieving Asian American students who did not gain admission. For example, one was a National Merit Semifinalist with a perfect ACT score and the top possible marks on two SAT II subject tests. But as I discuss here , Harvard’s applicant pool had almost 1,000 students who scored a perfect score on the ACT or SAT, and its freshman class is around 1,600 students. Nineteen percent of students who take the Math II test get a perfect 800. There are over 16,000 National Merit Semifinalists. Top marks do not make someone a standout. Is that unfair?

Let’s remember what’s even more unfair: That low-income students and so many students of color are denied access to high-quality public schools. That many affluent, White, and East Asian American students experience tremendous advantage in college preparation. And of course, that there exist policies and practices that overtly favor the wealthy, from donor preferences to the incredible admissions scandal of recent months. These things are much, much more unfair than someone with a perfect SAT score—one of thousands of similar applicants in the pool—getting turned down by Harvard and then being able to attend some other fantastic college.

Opponents of race-conscious admissions argue that such policies are unsuccessful because the vast majority of students of color at our nation’s elite colleges are wealthy, or “rich minorities.” However, as found in the groundbreaking work of William Bowen and Derek Bok , Black students at elite colleges are much more likely than White students to come from low-income families. Furthermore, White students attending such institutions are far more likely to come from the most affluent families. Research by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford documents how colleges give considerable preference to low-income students of color, showing how both race and class are addressed in tandem.

Race-conscious holistic admissions is imperfect, because the broader K–12 system remains highly unequal. However, the answer is not to ignore race in the name of so-called fairness, but to take it into consideration. Race- and class-conscious admissions cannot fix everything that is wrong with our education system, but it is a far improvement over the alternatives, making a blatantly unfair world perhaps a little more fair.

Jump to: Julie J. Park , Christine R. Yano , Nadirah Farah Foley

What Constitutes a Fair Admissions Process?

Christine R. Yano

When Public Books invited me, back in early February, to contribute thoughts on fair admissions to elite colleges, I wrote the essay that follows from the most theoretical and idealistic perspective possible, questioning the very terms of fairness and college admissions. Today, however, in light of the college scam controversy swirling around William Singer and his celebrity clients, any talk of college admissions must be prefaced by analysis of the fraught nature of the playing field.

That nature is composed of several factors: (1) the high desirability of placement in elite colleges, not necessarily for learning so much as for prestige; (2) the increasingly ultra-competitive undertaking that is securing that placement; (3) the long-standing unevenness of admissions, highlighting the role of class privilege; and (4) the inevitable mix of commerce (e.g., branding) and education, making college admissions subject to the same capitalist imperatives shaping other aspects of college life. Singer’s company represents an industry built on the anxieties of parents who, lacking the personal connections to facilitate admissions for their offspring, must rely on an external business to do so. In short, what in other circumstances may have taken a personal phone call from Daddy or Uncle to someone within the inner sanctum of an elite institution is here replaced by a company that offers a surefire “side door” (Singer’s expression) to success. What family with economic means but without the historic cultural capital of “connections” could resist?

That Singer’s company crossed the line into illegality and got caught is not the morality tale that it might seem. Rather, the real lesson of this criminal episode lies in our own reimagining of the pedestal upon which higher education may impossibly reside. The pedestal includes the human frailties of greed and corruption, along with the ideals of education itself. If we are to uphold the values of critical thinking that higher education espouses, then we must integrate ethical development into instruction. Herein lies the cautionary tale of the Singer fiasco—that higher education and its admissions process should not only identify and prepare “the best and brightest” among the next generation of leaders, but also cultivate its moral foundation.

Whoever thought that admissions to a university should be fair? The idea seems peculiarly American and builds on 1960s-era social justice movements that assume elite institutions should be made available to a broad spectrum of individuals. It presumes the vitality of its intellectual, social, and political body rests in a diversity of opinions, backgrounds, experiences, and expectations within a particular range of ability. The “best and brightest”—yes. But those deserving the epithet may not be so easy to identify when one broadens what “best and brightest” might look, sound, and feel like. Fairness within this context requires admissions officers to look beyond numbers and conduct the screening process not as science, but as art. This is the art of human assessment, predicting the future from the past. Adding up test scores does not necessarily guarantee success within this ideal of a vibrant, richly diverse educational institution. Nor is GPA a pure predictor, if the successful life of a campus is also measured by unquantifiable elements such as leadership and creativity, both broadly conceived.

What admissions officers must do first, then, is understand their own institution; second, get to know the applicant; and third, assess the fit between campus and applicant. This process requires what I call “flexible fairness,” which involves the moving parts by which an institution may constantly grow and become a better version of itself. Flexible fairness privileges certain aspects—intellectual capacity, willingness to work, maturity, integrity, personal drive—while not predefining or insisting on any of these. Flexible fairness precludes any single vision of equitable admissions.

The question of “fairness” must always be addressed to the particularities of its constituencies. Thus the question is not, What practices constitute fairness in an admissions process? It must, rather, be reformulated to emphasize the issue of fairness as it pertains to specific purposes in the context of specific institutional histories. So if the institution sets a vision of itself as a particularly dynamic learning environment, then the “fairness” required to fulfill that vision builds on diversity within the pursuit of critical thinking, creativity, and productivity.

I come to these thoughts having compiled student stories while a visiting professor of anthropology at Harvard University in 2014–2015, which resulted in a coedited book, Straight A’s: Asian American College Students in Their Own Words (2018). My time at Harvard, and in particular my conversations with the Asian American students whom I taught in a class geared to their experiences, brought these issues home. These students were certainly impressive in their lists of accomplishments. But they were equally impressive for their energy, initiative, drive, and industry. They knew what it took to conceptualize and complete a task. Although they may have shared similar numbers (SAT and AP Exam scores, GPAs), their contributions went well beyond those superficial achievements. These contributions surfaced not merely in examinations and term papers, but in extracurricular projects, community commitments, fierce debates, and creative endeavors. Our book, Straight A’s , was one of these—begun as a classroom exercise, it blossomed into a collection of searingly honest stories through the networking energy and follow-through of the students. The experience left me highly hopeful for what the art of admissions might produce.

Let me return to the topic of this essay and strip down my response to the questions the editors of Public Books ask.

Definition of fairness: broad access to human and intellectual resources that supports institutional goals. Note that I have not used the words “equal” or “equitable,” mainly because those words tend to reinforce a one-size-fits-all approach to human potential, worthiness, and success. I strongly believe that this is not the case.

Implementation of fairness in admissions processes: acknowledging the inexact art of assessing student potential, I support qualitative, holistic review of applicants that takes a number of factors into consideration. Colleges must select judiciously, keeping in mind “whole person” concerns that include family background—of which race is undeniably a part. They must also consider the entering class that they are creating, striving for some kind of balance among gendered, regional, racialized, and classed factors. This balance, too, goes beyond strict numbers or quotas, reflecting a composite picture of idealized diversity.

Finally, let us consider the folly of “race-blind” admissions . To ignore race would be to take a foundational chunk of a student’s background life out of the reckoning. How to assess the whole person without regard for an abiding feature of their personal history? How to deny the weight of that history, an individual’s family background, and very real cultural context? The fact is, all of these elements matter in understanding just who the candidate is and how they might fit in with the institution. Holistic admissions understands this well, as it embraces the scope of the educated guess.

I write this as we await the judge’s decision on affirmative action at Harvard. Organizations such as the Harvard Asian American Alumni Alliance are paying close attention. Indeed, “fairness” in admissions is on the line, but not in the way that the anti-affirmative action activist Edward Blum—who created the group misleadingly called “Students for Fair Admissions,” with recruited Asian Americans as their public face—would have us believe. “Fairness” includes race-conscious admissions processes that build on Harvard’s and other institutions’ goal of building strength through diversity itself. This vision conceives of diversity as a fundamental part of excellence, not as a sideshow, and requires the “fairness” of admissions procedures that will assure it.

Move Away from Meritocracy

Nadirah Farah Foley

Especially in the wake of the recent news of a coordinated bribery scheme, many people seem to agree our selective college admissions process is broken. There is far less consensus, however, about why we think it’s broken, and what a better, fairer admissions process would look like. Some think that the process would be fair if it were conducted without special considerations for legacy students, development cases, or athletic recruitment. Others go further, focusing on the myriad mundane ways—aside from bribery and donations—that the system allows privileged people to leverage their resources to secure and perpetuate their advantages. But I contend the process is inherently unfair because it is based on meritocratic principles designed to produce unequal outcomes. A truly fair system would reject meritocratic logics and instead operate on the principle that high-quality education is not a reward for the few, but a right of the many.

Our current process, in which applicants are stratified into a hierarchical higher education landscape, takes a meritocratic ideology as its foundational premise. Meritocracy, the term popularized by British sociologist Michael Young’s 1958 The Rise of the Meritocracy , is typically imagined as a system in which all have equal opportunity to compete on a “level playing field” on the basis of “talent” and “ability,” and all are rewarded equitably based on their “merit.” While this system sounds fair at first blush, a meritocratic ideology poses two problems, either of which should be sufficient cause to critically question it, and perhaps abandon it entirely.

First, upholding meritocracy necessarily entails accepting and upholding inequality. In the case of college admissions, we currently have a system in which some schools have more resources, are more prestigious, and are deemed “better” than others, and those schools have limited seats. We try to allocate those seats “fairly,” on the basis of demonstrated past success and evaluations of future potential. It’s far from a perfect system, but we can rationalize it as ideologically consistent with a meritocratic ideal of equal opportunity and reward for individual talent, effort, and ability. But perhaps, rather than focusing on who “deserves” the “best” schooling, our societal commitment should be to making a high-quality education available to all. Such a commitment would require a rejection of the stratification and inequality presupposed by a meritocratic system and lead us to question whether a stratified society—and assignment to places in an unequal education system—could ever be just.

Second, even if one were inclined to find inequality and stratification acceptable, the reality is that we are so far from the ideals of equal opportunity and a level playing field that the unfairness is glaringly obvious. As sociologist Jonathan Mijs argues, opportunities for demonstrating merit are far from equally distributed. In the United States, where racial residential segregation and local control of schools combine to disproportionately relegate nonwhite ( especially black ) students to underfunded schools , the claim that anything approaching equal opportunity exists is laughable . Our emphasis on standardized tests, which have roots in racist, ableist, eugenicist science , evinces a narrow understanding of what intelligence is or could be. Holistic admissions evaluations, which provide necessary latitude to consider students’ contexts and lived experiences, also provide privileged applicants another opportunity to show off well-filled extracurricular profiles and essays carefully coached and edited by counselors and consultants. In sum, our current admissions process is—top to bottom—built to misrecognize privilege as “merit,” and thus advantage the already advantaged. To say wealthy white applicants are gaming the system belies the fact that they’re really just playing the game—a game in which only they have full access to the equipment. Perhaps the way to fix this is not to try to change the rules, but to stop playing the meritocratic game entirely.

If that seems a drastic proposal, let me try to convince you it’s a necessary one. We could try to work within the current system, striking the policies that are most obviously and egregiously unfair: legacy, donor admissions, early decision, recruitment of athletes in country club sports. While an improvement, this does nothing to address the fact that even with those components stripped out, the process still falls far short of fairness, because our very metrics of merit are skewed toward privilege. We could try to calibrate for disadvantage, but that’s essentially what holistic evaluation tries to do now—and it’s not enough. Meritocracy is an arms race, one in which the privileged are always better equipped.

We could, as many scholars have proposed , move toward a lottery, which would go a long way toward making explicit the role of luck in college admissions. But I’m concerned by the way some thinkers discuss a potential admissions lottery. Proponents of a lottery often suggest that there should be some baseline level of “merit” in order to enter the lottery. Such a formulation of the lottery doesn’t entail a rejection of our metrics of merit, meaning it would likely reproduce existing inequalities. To avoid that, a lottery would need to not use simple random selection, but instead be carefully calibrated to ensure the resulting class is not just representative of the pool (in which wealthy white students are overrepresented ), but of graduating high school students. That could be achieved by assigning different weights to students depending on their background, or by using a form of stratified random selection, in which the applicant pool would be divided into smaller pools based on, for example, demographic factors, and a certain number of students would be accepted at random from each pool.

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The lottery is an exciting idea, but one likely to run into legal challenges . And beyond that, it doesn’t do enough to address the unfairness inherent in our unequal education system. I think we need to go a step further than asking what constitutes a fair admissions process , and instead ask what constitutes a fair society . We should recognize that our college admissions process is merely holding a mirror up to our society, reflecting how competitive, individualistic, unequal, and unfair the United States is. A truly radical solution would require the reorganization of our entire class structure and the redistribution of resources, thus obviating the need for such a high-stakes college application process.

It seems that we cling to meritocracy as a way of clinging to some hope of a better life in an increasingly unequal world . But rather than investing our hope in a fairer admissions system, I think we should dream bigger, and invest our hope in a more just society—one in which we live in community rather than competition. That might look like taking up Harvard professor Lani Guinier’s call to emphasize “democratic merit,” or it might look like dispensing with merit—and its attendant acceptance of deserved inequality—entirely.

Everyone deserves access to education. A fair admissions system would have that as a core premise and reject ostensibly just, “meritocratic” inequalities.

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The Unseen Student Victims of the “Varsity Blues” College-Admissions Scandal

This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica .

On a Monday morning in April, 2017, students at Sage Hill School gathered in its artificial-turf quadrangle, known as the Town Square, to celebrate seniors who were heading to college as recruited athletes. The ten honorees lined up behind an archway adorned with balloons. One by one, they stepped forward as their sports and destinations were announced. Patricia Merz, the head of the private high school in Newport Coast, California, placed a lei in the appropriate college’s colors around each student’s neck.

Most of the students were recruits to low-profile Division III programs. Only three had committed to play Division I college sports. Two were the captains of Sage Hill’s girls’ volleyball and girls’ soccer teams, bound for Columbia University and the University of Denver, respectively. The other, Grant Janavs, played tennis. As his shirt and blue-and-gray lei both showed, he would attend Georgetown, the élite Catholic university in Washington, D.C.

The Town Square is framed on three sides by Sage Hill’s gym, library, and administration building. As Adam Langevin watched the ceremony with other seniors, sitting on four rows of steps at the quadrangle’s open end, across from the archway, he was stunned. Adam had been Sage Hill’s top tennis player for four years, and he had lost only three singles matches as a senior. He had trained long hours with renowned coaches, hit with college stars and budding pros, and acquitted himself well in regional and national tournaments. Although his two-handed backhand needed work, Adam had developed a solid serve and a forehand that one of his coaches, the former college and professional player Ross Duncan, described as “pro potential, tour level.” Between tennis and classes, he’d had little time left for other extracurricular activities or a social life. In four years, he’d attended only two school dances and had no romantic relationships or even casual lunches with friends. He’d sacrificed it all for his goal of playing for the best Division I college-tennis team he could.

And yet his dream had narrowly eluded him. Although he would likely have played for a weaker Division I program, such as Georgetown, he had his heart set on California Polytechnic State University, which matched his academic interests and is a perennial contender in the Big West Conference. Unlike Georgetown, California Poly typically ranks among the top seventy-five of the more than two hundred and fifty Division I men’s college-tennis teams in the country. Earlier that month, Adam held back tears when a coach at Cal Poly phoned him in calculus class and said that there was no spot left on its team for him. He had been beaten out by players of similar ability whom the coaches had identified as prospects earlier. Desperate to hide his shame and embarrassment from classmates, he immediately fled school. That afternoon, when his father, Rick Langevin, came home, he found Adam sitting on the hood of his car in the driveway, disconsolate.

Now Grant was being celebrated as a future Division I Georgetown tennis player. When Grant had mentioned that he would be playing for Georgetown, Adam had privately thought that Grant was deluding himself. In their freshman year, Grant had played doubles regularly for Sage Hill, but, as the team improved, he lost his starting position. As a senior, Grant wasn’t even on the team. He hit the ball hard but sprayed his shots outside the lines; he couldn’t stay in a rally for more than three or four strokes. Grant had a private coach who went to his matches and practices, but he still didn’t get better. Adam sometimes wondered if Grant would prefer playing for fun rather than competing.

“I must admit it. I was jealous,” Adam recalled in June, as he sprawled on a couch in the living room of his family’s home, part of a residential development on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Five feet ten and a sturdy hundred and fifty-five pounds, Adam wore white socks without sneakers because he was recovering from surgery for an ingrown toenail, a common tennis malady. “He was living my dream after I worked for so many years,” Adam told me. “I was known as the tennis kid. That’s what I did. Grant gets up there, and I felt people looking over. ‘Why aren’t you up there?’ The whole team was, like, ‘What?’ It was really, really frustrating.”

A. G. Longoria, who served as Sage Hill’s tennis coach from the school’s founding, in 2000, to his retirement, in 2015, coached both players. Adam “was the better athlete and devoted much more time to tennis as this was his number one passion—he was in an elite tennis academy, had high performance coaches and played USTA tournaments almost every week,” Longoria told me in an e-mail. “He got good in a hurry” and “could have played at Georgetown.” By contrast, “Grant was limited by his form (strokes) which all his coaches tried to correct but either he could not or would not change them. I am guessing that Adam was surprised, as many were, that Grant was going to play for Georgetown.”

When Adam told his parents that Grant was a Georgetown tennis recruit, his father speculated that Grant’s billionaire family had endowed a building at the university. Grant’s mother, Michelle Janavs, is the daughter of Paul Merage, who, with his brother, co-founded Chef America Inc., which created the Hot Pockets microwavable snack. Universities frequently reward donors by giving their children or grandchildren an edge in admissions.

Nearly two years later, in March, 2019, the actual explanation emerged. An independent college-admissions counsellor named William (Rick) Singer pleaded guilty in a federal court in Boston to fraud, racketeering, money laundering, and obstruction of justice in a case known as Operation Varsity Blues. Singer’s clients had paid him more than twenty-five million dollars to help their children enter an array of selective colleges with bogus credentials. He bribed college coaches and athletic officials to misrepresent students as recruited athletes, and he paid proctors at testing sites to improve their scores on the SAT or ACT by secretly correcting wrong answers.

One billionaire family paid Singer $6.5 million for their daughter’s admission to Stanford. Her application to Stanford was embellished with false credentials for the sailing team, according to a court filing by prosecutors. The university expelled the student, according to news reports, but she and her parents have not been charged in the case. Stanford’s sailing coach, who pleaded guilty, admitted to taking bribes to help some of Singer’s clients, but he spent the money on the sailing program rather than himself. The thirty-three parents who were charged included the television actresses Lori Loughlin, who pleaded not guilty, and Felicity Huffman, who apologized and was sentenced to fourteen days in prison.There were also two Sage Hill trustees: Douglas Hodge, the former chief executive of Pacific Investment Management Company, or PIMCO , one of the world’s largest bond managers, and Grant’s mother, Michelle Janavs.

In May, 2017, after Georgetown admitted Grant, a foundation controlled by his grandfather had wired four hundred thousand dollars to a California nonprofit that Singer had set up—the Key Worldwide Foundation, according to court documents. Prosecutors said that Singer, through that foundation, paid Georgetown tennis coach Gordon Ernst more than $2.7 million in “consulting” fees to designate at least a dozen applicants, including Grant, as tennis recruits. Ernst, who declined to comment through his lawyer, pleaded not guilty to racketeering conspiracy. Grant was not charged in the case, and no evidence has emerged that he knew or suspected anything inappropriate regarding his recruitment. His mother and Singer appear to have engineered his acceptance to Georgetown without him being aware of their alleged scheme.

Michelle Janavs’s alleged bribes continued after Georgetown admitted Grant. She paid two hundred thousand dollars for her older daughter to get into the University of Southern California for beach volleyball, according to prosecutors. (The daughter had been on Sage Hill’s junior-varsity team.) She paid another hundred thousand dollars to rig both of her daughters’ standardized-test scores: a proctor on Singer’s payroll corrected their answers so that their scores would be within a preselected range. Janavs pleaded not guilty to conspiring to commit mail and wire fraud and money laundering. (Her lawyers declined to comment. Grant did not respond to requests for comment.)

Media coverage of Operation Varsity Blues has highlighted the accused celebrities, tycoons, and coaches. The culpability of the students who gained admission has also been widely debated: Did they know of the bribery, or were they deceived by their own parents, like Grant? The élite colleges involved have portrayed themselves as helpless victims. In reality, they created the conditions for Singer’s scheme, from the lower admissions standards for athletes to the ever-increasing selectivity that ratchets up parents’ desperation. They’ve tacitly sold admissions slots for decades to major donors, yet professed shock that their coaches would as well.

Less understood is that the repercussions extended beyond the families and colleges entangled in the scandal. The true victims were other, and perhaps more deserving, high-school students and athletes, like Adam. For every student like Grant who benefitted from Singer’s crimes, there was a student who aspired to attend premier schools and sports programs. Despite their stronger credentials, some were rejected. To students like Adam, the scandal shows that the college-admissions game offers shortcuts, but only for the wealthy and well-connected. “Grant is a nice person, but he’s a god-awful tennis player,” Adam told me. “I knew he wouldn’t see a day on court. He would never play a match for Georgetown.”

In the wake of Rick Singer’s guilty plea, media reports portrayed him as a criminal mastermind who deftly hid his activities. He shrewdly exploited procedures that were vulnerable to abuse—such as college-admissions committees taking a coach’s word for an applicant’s athletic prowess. But Singer didn’t fool everyone. Long before 2011, when court documents indicate that his bribing of coaches and test administrators began, he was notorious among some guidance counsellors and college advisers for boosting students’ chances by pretending that they were racial minorities or by burnishing their extracurricular activities. Singer had a white applicant identify himself as Hispanic to qualify for affirmative action, a former business associate told me. “It blew up,” this person said, after “the college questioned it because he didn’t put it on the SATs,” which ask about ethnicity. Many of Singer’s associates—other independent counsellors, high-school guidance counsellors, his own employees—suspected him of cheating. At least one prep school banned him from its campus.

It didn’t matter. Singer knew how to appeal to the panic of wealthy parents who fear that their children will not get into exclusive universities. He promised the certainty they craved, and at a bargain price compared with the legal donation needed to improve their chances. In 1994, Singer, a former high-school and college basketball coach, established Sacramento’s first independent college-counsellor business. A pioneer in the high-priced field of coaching college applicants, Singer helped upend the admissions process by increasing the advantage enjoyed by the affluent. Soon well-off parents—doctors, lawyers, businesspeople—were clamoring, and paying, for his advice. What he lacked in expertise, he made up for in chutzpah. “I did see him tell a kid, ‘You mind if I put in your application you were in the Key Club?’ ” the former associate recalled. When Singer requested brochures from colleges, he told them that he was working with more than five hundred students; the actual number was about fifty. “He did embellish, even back then,” the former associate said.

Margie Amott, another independent counsellor in Sacramento, said that she knew a parent who hired Singer. The mother was astonished when Singer revamped her son’s college application, claiming that he had organized a fantasy football league, marketed an international blog on social responsibility, written several short films for television, spoken Spanish at home, ranked as a top-fifty junior tennis player, and coördinated the basketball program at Helen Keller Park. None of it was true, and there was no such park in Sacramento. The mother paid Singer’s bill, stopped working with him, and had her son fill out the application accurately.

In 2004, Singer burnished his credibility by assembling an advisory board for his counselling firm, CollegeSource. The board included five higher-education heavyweights: William Bowen, Donald Kennedy, and Ted Mitchell—the former presidents of Princeton, Stanford, and Occidental College, respectively—as well as the former U.C.L.A. chancellor Charles Young, and the former Princeton dean of admission Fred Hargadon. In January, 2008, more than a decade before Singer’s guilty plea, Jon Reider, then the director of college counselling at San Francisco University High School and a former senior admissions officer at Stanford, e-mailed Kennedy, Hargadon, and Mitchell and urged them to stop working with Singer.

“Do you want to be associated with this guy? He is the epitome of sleaze in the private counseling business,” Reider wrote. “How did he get your names onto his website? There are some decent independent counselors, but he isn’t one of them . . . . .We can’t stop this guy, but we can slow him down a bit.”

Reider knew all three of the prominent administrators from his time at Stanford. Hargadon had been Stanford’s dean of admission before moving to Princeton, and Mitchell had earned three Stanford degrees and been Kennedy’s deputy. Mitchell’s response disappointed him. “I strongly disagree that Rick is the ‘epitome of sleaze,’ ” Mitchell replied to Reider. “Don and I got involved with Rick when he was trying to get college access info to poor kids and ‘break the code,’ for kids who didn’t have access to private counseling. . . Do you know Rick? He’s a decent guy, Jon, and I’d love to find a time to introduce the two of you.” Reider pushed back. “There are ways to go about this business in an ethical way, so that you do not earn the disapproval of other professionals. I am the tip of the iceberg.”

Mitchell went on to serve as the U.S. Under-Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration and the president of the American Council on Education, a higher-education lobbying group. When asked for comment after Singer pleaded guilty, Mitchell downplayed his ties to the disgraced counsellor, saying that he “served briefly nearly fifteen years ago in an unpaid role in an advisory board of one of his previous ventures.” Mitchell also expressed surprise, saying that he was “shocked, sad, and angry that someone I thought I knew could perpetrate these crimes.”

In 2012, as he was carrying out what would become the biggest college-admissions scandal in the country, Singer relocated from Sacramento to Newport Beach, where the Langevins lived. Adam Langevin was then a middle-school student striving to become a tennis star. At the age of four, he had taken his first tennis lesson. By the time he turned eight, the court was the only place he wanted to be. He trained four to five hours every other day at an academy run by Phil, Taylor, and Jenny Dent—a father, son, and daughter-in-law who had all been ranked among the top sixty players in the world. In 2010, Taylor Dent had blasted the fastest serve ever at Wimbledon—a hundred and forty-eight miles per hour. The Dents’ academy practiced at the same club where the Sage Hill varsity tennis team trained. Adam sometimes hit with high-school players who were four to five years older than him, which improved his game. When Adam began playing tournaments, he found that he also loved competing. “I just enjoyed being out there,” he said.

Adam’s father, Rick, a realtor and recreational tennis player, and his mother, Alisa, a homemaker, encouraged his passion for the game. Unlike some tennis parents, they prioritized education as well. Neither Rick nor Alisa had graduated from college, and they hoped that Adam would do so. “He’s extremely academic,” Alisa told me. “I felt that also needed to be nourished.” Until Adam entered ninth grade, they didn’t let him have a cell phone and limited his television viewing to an hour a day. He listened to audiobooks about world history and Greek mythology. As a seventh grader, Adam startled one of Rick’s real-estate clients, who was purchasing a seventeen-thousand-square-foot home with outdoor pools and a movie theatre, by identifying a painting on the ceiling as a copy of Raphael’s “The School of Athens” and the figures in a back-yard sculpture as Pygmalion and Galatea.

As a child, Adam dreamed of turning pro, but, as that began to seem unrealistic, he switched his sights to playing Division I college tennis. Players with such lofty goals are often homeschooled so they have more time to practice and travel to national tournaments. When Adam asked his parents if they would consider homeschooling, they pointed out that he also loved science and might make a career of it. Sage Hill, which opened a science center with seven labs and four classrooms, in 2014, offered a far superior academic program to anything available online.

After Adam enrolled at Sage Hill, he initially balked at joining its tennis team. College coaches, he knew, pay scant attention to high-school matches. They notice tournament results and the Universal Tennis Rating, or U.T.R., which enables them to compare U.S. and international prospects. But his father told him that, as Sage Hill’s top player, he had to support his school. For the next four years, high-school and tournament practices and matches consumed Adam’s time.

In the 2017 Sage Hill yearbook, seniors were asked what they would like to say to their future selves. The responses from Grant and Adam were strikingly different. “Nothing because the future is going to be great,” Grant wrote. “You worked so impossibly hard to get where you are,” Adam wrote. “Remember that.” Their divergent attitudes were also reflected in their approach to academics and athletics. William Dupuis, who taught chemistry at Sage Hill and had both young men in class, said that Grant scraped by with B’s in first-year chemistry. Adam was “very good, very hard-working.”

Longoria, the former Sage Hill coach, used a startling expression to convey how much Adam sacrificed for the sport. He “suicided” tennis, Longoria said. “He was all in.” Already the team’s best player as a freshman, Adam steadily improved, and his skill and drive set an example for his teammates. As a junior, he damaged a tendon in his left wrist, rendering him unable to hit his normal two-handed backhand. Instead of sitting out matches, he donned a brace and played doubles for Sage Hill, protecting his wrist by serving and volleying, and slicing the few backhands he couldn’t avoid. Adam enjoyed encouraging others. “My intensity for the sport got a lot of guys playing tournaments,” he told me. Rival coaches noticed. “He was a top-notch player and a great kid,” said T. J. Reynolds, the coach of Crean Lutheran High School, in nearby Irvine. “He stood out as a freshman to me. He was relentless, he would never give up. He played with a lot of intensity. As he got older, he started adding offense to his game.” A junior tennis Web site assessed Adam as a three-star recruit (out of five stars) and ranked him a hundred and thirty-fifth nationally in 2017.

Grant was less single-minded about tennis. He enjoyed other pastimes, like surfing. His response to a yearbook question about his bucket list suggested a thirst for adventure. Grant said that he hoped to skydive, ride an elephant, and send a message in a bottle. Longoria said that Grant couldn’t or wouldn’t change his unorthodox tennis strokes. He “hit a wall” and was replaced in the starting lineup. Longoria credited Grant for being “very ethical” and a “great competitor.” Once, Sage Hill’s hopes of defeating another school rested on a tiebreaker in Grant’s match. In the key rally, Grant made a correct line call in favor of his opponent on a close shot, depriving Sage Hill of victory. “Ninety per cent of kids” would have called it the other way, Longoria, who is now a consultant to Sage Hill’s tennis program, said.

Grant’s mother supported the team and appeared to respect boundaries. “She opened up her beach house for team barbecues,” Longoria said. Like other parents, “she bought a lot of things for the team. But she never said, ‘I want my son to start.’ ” It didn’t occur to the coach that she might find another way to burnish Grant’s tennis résumé.

In 2000, a group of Orange County parents and community leaders opened Sage Hill, the first nondenominational, nonprofit private high school on the Southern California coast between Irvine and San Juan Capistrano. Nestled in the hills above the Pacific Ocean, with a clock tower and low-slung concrete buildings painted to look like terra-cotta, Sage Hill quickly gained a reputation for academic excellence. It also thrived financially. As of June, 2017, its net assets were $76.3 million. Depending on market conditions, its endowment fluctuates between $18 million and $20 million. The former Major League Baseball commissioner and U.S. Olympic Committee chairman Peter Ueberroth was integral to the school’s founding. The Sage Hill gym, known as the Ube, is named after him, and his daughter served as the chair of the school’s board. Current Sage Hill parents include the former Los Angeles Lakers standout Kobe Bryant, whose daughter Natalia plays volleyball for the school. “Most of the billionaires in Newport have a child or grandchild at Sage,” Adam’s father, Rick Langevin, told me.

At first, Sage Hill was strict with donors. It didn’t let them dictate how their money would be spent. When Bryant offered to fund a gym if he could practice there at night, the school turned him down, according to Longoria, the former tennis coach. Over time, financial pressures caused the school to loosen its approach. Today, buildings, classrooms, locker rooms, and sports facilities are named for donors—with exceptions, such as the A. G. Longoria Center Court, which honors the ex-coach’s service. The exterior wall of the Sage Hill Athletic Complex displays sixty disks of varying sizes, with donors’ names printed on them. One of the largest is labelled “Merage Family Janavs Family.” In 2014, the year after Grant enrolled in Sage Hill, a foundation operated by his mother, Michelle Janavs, donated $82,500 to Sage Hill, and she became a trustee. After her two daughters also enrolled at Sage Hill, Janavs gave the school another $190,000. Torrey Olins, the school’s spokesperson, declined to comment on “rumors about who may or may not have considered making donations for our facilities.” She said that the school has “always recognized those who donate money, time, or talents to our community.”

Ninety per cent of Sage Hill’s almost five hundred and fifty students pay the school’s roughly forty-thousand-dollar-a-year tuition. Ten per cent receive financial aid. A former student who received financial aid told me that many classmates donned expensive brand-name clothes and a few wore a different outfit every day. A May, 2018, article in the student newspaper accused the school of grade inflation. The story, headlined “Inflated Grades, Inflated Egos, Inflated Futures,” reported that seventy to seventy-five per cent of all grades given in the previous semester were A’s or A-minuses. There were few C’s, and no D’s or F’s. Teachers told the newspaper that the school initially had rigorous academic standards, and that the soaring grades were a response to parental pressure and diminished enrollment caused by the 2008-9 financial crisis. “I remember when I got my first B, I was so surprised,” a 2017 graduate, Andrea Flores, told me in an interview. “I didn’t know they gave B’s.”

No evidence has publicly surfaced that Sage Hill participated in or was aware of Singer’s bribery of college coaches and test docents. The school says that its “consistent practice has been to not communicate directly with independent college counselors” and to recommend against their use. One prep-school consultant, though, estimated that up to a fourth of Sage Hill parents may rely on independent counsellors to help their children get into top colleges. One of them was Michelle Janavs, who hired an independent counsellor for Grant. The counsellor was well-respected and certified in both college counselling and educational planning. (The counsellor asked not to be named and did not acknowledge that Grant was her client until I had identified him by other means.)

The counsellor told me that she worked with Grant for three years, guiding him toward academic programs in sports management. She felt that it was a field that suited both his personal interests and his family connections; through a holding company, his aunt, Lisa Merage, co-owns the Sacramento Kings, a National Basketball Association franchise, as well as the Golden 1 Center, the team’s home arena. The counsellor didn’t see tennis as a realistic route to college, given that Grant couldn’t start for his high school.

Apparently, Grant’s mother thought differently. Early in Grant’s senior year, Michelle Janavs asked Longoria to recommend Grant to the coach at either the University of Southern California (her alma mater) or U.C.L.A. (Longoria initially said that it was U.S.C., then later said that it was U.C.L.A.) “I was sort of surprised,” Longoria recalled. Janavs’s request put him in an awkward position. Longoria believed in taking care of his players, and he never refused to write recommendations for them. But, he also valued his professional reputation, and “we all knew Grant couldn’t play” at either university, he said.

To protect himself, Longoria developed a code for recommendation letters that would please the parent and send the correct signal to college coaches. His letters always contained four paragraphs—one each about tennis, academics, family, and outside interests. Longoria put tennis first if the player could start for the college team; second if he could be a backup; third if he couldn’t make the team but was responsible enough to be a student manager and handle equipment, laundry, and other duties; and fourth if the candidate couldn’t help in any way and Longoria was simply pacifying the family. For Grant’s recommendation, the first two paragraphs were about his grades and his family. Tennis was third. “He could maybe be a manager,” Longoria told me. Apparently grasping his message, coaches declined to recruit Grant. His mother then insisted that Grant apply to Georgetown, which doesn’t offer an undergraduate degree in sports management and had not been on his initial college list. After the family visited Georgetown, Janavs fired the counsellor and told her that they were going to work with a second counsellor they had hired. His name was Rick Singer.

Federal prosecutors later found that Singer had a connection at Georgetown: Gordon Ernst, who had coached both men’s and women’s tennis there since 2006. Ernst had also given lessons to Michelle, Sasha, and Malia Obama. College coaches, especially in sports played by the wealthy, often supplement their modest salaries by taking outside pupils. Not long after Michelle Janavs hired Singer, he e-mailed her that he had spoken to Ernst: “I just spoke to Gordie and let him know” that Grant had applied to Georgetown.

Grant’s first college counsellor, surprised by her sudden dismissal, checked out Singer’s Web site and found it to be “strictly a sales pitch.” Although Singer lived five blocks from her house, and eight miles by car from Sage Hill School, she had never met him. Though she joined professional associations and visited college campuses to stay up to date, Singer didn’t appear to do either. “It seemed like he was gaining a big following, but I didn’t see him at any conferences or any college tours,” the counsellor said. “He wasn’t part of that professional-counselling landscape. It’s baffling to me that no one was vetting him.”

A few months later, when Sage Hill announced that Grant would play tennis for Georgetown, the counsellor immediately sensed Singer’s handiwork. Because they had both worked with the same student, she worried about damage to her own reputation. She wanted her clients and colleagues to know that his methods were not hers. She warned fellow counsellors about Singer and added a sentence to her standard contract with parents: “I do not pay coaches, administrators or others in the admission process.” Michelle Janavs called to let her know—for the counsellor’s records, Janavs said—that, in addition to Georgetown, Grant had been admitted to a prestigious university that did have an undergraduate sports-management program, one that he and the counsellor had selected as a fit for him. When the news of Operation Varsity Blues broke, the counsellor felt vindicated. “Although I never met Rick Singer, I suspected that he engaged in unethical behavior,” she wrote in an e-mail to her clients. “Students should not be thinking about manipulating the system but instead focusing on their own personal growth and journey. I believe in your student and you should too.”

Georgetown University’s admissions office has long maintained a strict policy against dealing with independent counsellors. Its official contact is with high-school counsellors, and it won’t talk to independent counsellors or accept recommendations or other materials about a candidate from them. But Singer didn’t need to approach the admissions office; he could approach Ernst, the tennis coach. Ernst may have initially classified applicants as tennis recruits as a favor to friends and not taken bribes, according to a person familiar with the situation. Court documents say that Georgetown accepted the older daughter of Douglas Hodge, the former PIMCO C.E.O., as a tennis recruit in 2008 but do not mention any money changing hands. “I spoke to my connection at Georgetown and he will work with us,” Singer wrote in an e-mail to Hodge. “He helped me get two girls in last week.”

Singer told Hodge that his daughter’s chance of getting into Georgetown based on academics was fifty per cent “at best,” but that “there may be an Olympic Sports angle we can use.” The application she submitted included fabricated victories in multiple United States Tennis Association tournaments. She didn’t play tennis at Georgetown and graduated in 2013. Hodge, who pleaded not guilty to fraud and money-laundering charges, declined to comment through his lawyer. (His daughter did not respond to requests for comment.)

Ernst was able to shepherd a dozen applicants incapable of playing Division I tennis into Georgetown without drawing attention in part because recruits aren’t always chosen for their athletic skills. Though athletic scholarships are generally allotted to the most promising recruits, who are counted on to be key contributors to the team’s success, an array of other factors can affect selection of non-scholarship players. A marginal athlete with a high G.P.A. or SAT score may be chosen to offset the lesser academic records of top recruits.

Universities also often favor major donors’ children to fill out the last spot or two on a roster. In 2013, according to the Los Angeles Times , U.C.L.A.’s athletic department ushered in a track-and-field recruit, even though her personal best times weren’t fast enough for her to make the team, after her parents pledged a hundred-thousand-dollar gift. A university investigation concluded that families of tennis walk-ons at U.C.L.A. “made substantial donations to the program under circumstances that might suggest the donations were expected at the time the student was admitted.” Several families endowed coaching positions at Yale shortly before their children enrolled there, and Harvard’s fencing coach sold his home for almost double what it was worth to the father of a prospective recruit, the Boston Globe reported. In July, 2019, Harvard fired the coach for violating its conflict-of-interest policy.

Longoria, who spent fifteen years as a college coach, told me that administrators sometimes asked him to make room on his roster for the child of a donor. “You’d get a call from a dean, ‘Can you help us out?’ ” he said. “ ‘This family is very important to the school.’ ” If the student could play at all and wasn’t disruptive, Longoria would go along with it. Tennis aficionados who saw the Sage Hill announcement that Grant would be playing tennis at Georgetown assumed that he had some edge. “He would not have been recruited to play in the top six at Georgetown,” one said. “He certainly could have been a guy who could have hit with the team.” He added, “A lot of great tennis players who could play college tennis never get the opportunity, and a lot of mediocre players end up on the team.”

Ernst, the Georgetown coach, exploited the wide latitude that coaches enjoy in the admission of recruited athletes. Every year, universities designate their total number of admissions slots for preference—at Georgetown, it is usually a hundred and fifty-eight—and the athletic director divvies them up by sport. Each coach then vets prospects with the admissions coördinator for athletics, develops a prioritized list of recruits who are academically acceptable, and submits the list to the admissions committee for formal approval. Crucially, the admissions committee takes the coach’s word regarding the candidates’ athletic prowess. Admissions officers then review their academic credentials. Many universities bend academic standards more for recruited athletes, especially those at or near the top of the coach’s priority list, than for any other applicant group, according to a landmark 2001 study, “ The Game of Life ,” by James Shulman and William Bowen (the same former Princeton president who served on Singer’s advisory board). From 2010 through 2015, Harvard admitted eighty-six per cent of recruited athletes, compared to six per cent of non-athletes, according to a filing in the recent lawsuit challenging affirmative action there.

Typically, athletic directors also trust the coaches, and they don’t vet recruits or closely monitor admissions files. “He deceived everybody,” a person familiar with the situation said, referring to Ernst. “It’s not that hard to do. There’s no coördination between athletics and admissions. These are minor sports, low on visibility, beneath the radar screen.”

Ernst was undone not by his own actions but by Singer’s decades-old habit of misrepresenting white clients as minorities to qualify them for affirmative action. The person familiar with the situation told me that another university had contacted a high-school counselling office about a student whom it was eager to enroll. Her application to that university portrayed her as African-American and the first in her family to attend college, qualifying her for two admissions preferences. Startled, the high school replied that the student was white and her parents were college graduates. The high-school counselling office then called Georgetown, where she had also applied, to find out how she was portrayed on that application. Georgetown records showed her as a tennis recruit. When the high school said that she didn’t play tennis, Georgetown began investigating. As it identified and talked with bogus tennis recruits, it uncovered a common thread; Singer had been their private college counsellor. Georgetown placed Ernst on leave in December, 2017, and fired him, in 2018, for violating university policies.

The case broke open when a suspect in a securities-fraud case sought leniency by admitting to authorities that he had agreed to pay Yale’s longtime women’s soccer coach to designate one of his daughters as a recruit. The coach led investigators to Singer, who became a government informant. His calls with parents were recorded, including conversations with Janavs about getting her older daughter into U.S.C. as a beach-volleyball recruit and fixing her younger daughter’s ACT score. Janavs worried that her younger daughter would suspect something was amiss. “She’s not stupid,” she told Singer. “How do you do this without telling the kids what you’re doing?” Singer replied, “Oh, in most cases, Michelle, none of the kids know.”

Adam Langevin could have been a top player at a Division II or Division III college. Several Division III colleges courted him avidly, including the University of Redlands, in Redlands, California. Although schools in that division don’t give athletic scholarships, Redlands offered academic merit aid to reduce his tuition. “We followed and recruited him for the better part of a year,” Geoff Roche, the tennis coach at Redlands, said. “He had a very complete game. He was very focussed, very mature, extremely competitive. We felt he had all the ambition and the drive to take his game to the next level. His best tennis was still ahead of him.”

Adam could also have made some Division I teams. The U.S. Naval Academy, a Division I program, contacted him, but it requires a five-year service commitment, for which his peanut allergy could have disqualified him. After years of training, practice, and sacrifice, Adam had no desire to be the best player on a lesser team. He wanted to continue to push himself. “I want to compete, to learn, to get better,” he told me. Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, was his choice. It was the right distance from home. It had a strong chemistry department and a combined program that would allow him to earn a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in five years. And Adam’s Universal Tennis Rating was similar to that of the varsity’s bottom rung. He had a fighting chance.

Nick Carless, a Cal Poly coach, told me that Adam is “at the Division I level. He’s pretty close to some of the lower guys on my team.” The difficulty, he said, was timing. Most college coaches sign up players a year in advance, so his roster was already set when he learned of Adam, he said. “Adam got in touch with me relatively late. It’s really bad timing for a really great kid who loves the sport, is passionate about it, and put in the hours.” Carless said that four of Cal Poly’s twelve players are foreigners, who increasingly compete with American players for roster spots in college sports like tennis. Over all, more than a third of Division I tennis players today are international students, reducing the roster spots available for U.S. players. Carless also acknowledged that “hands-on” majors like chemistry pose a scheduling challenge. “If you’re travelling as an athlete and you have a major that requires a lot of labs, you have to be there in person,” he said. “Other majors have online work or video conferencing. Many of our athletes at Cal Poly tend to be business majors because of the flexibility.”

Even after being passed over, Adam didn’t give up. He enrolled at Cal Poly with a new plan. He would be more motivated than ever, practice harder than ever, take lessons from the coaches, play club tennis, and dedicate himself to improving his game until a spot opened up and he would be worthy of joining the team. “The greatest feeling is proving someone wrong and being successful,” he said.

Sage Hill administrators are sensitive about the school’s connection to a scandal that has made headlines. They instructed their faculty and staff not to speak to me and to notify the school’s director of communications if I contacted them. When I tried to visit, security personnel escorted me off campus, even though I was the guest of an alumna. Then they escorted her out, too.

The school’s board, administration, and faculty were “shocked and felt betrayed” by the allegations against Janavs and Hodge, Olins, the school’s spokesperson, told me. “The alleged actions are contrary to everything the school has stood for since its founding.” A review by its outside counsel concluded in June that no Sage Hill administrators or college counsellors knew of “dishonest activities by students or parents in the college admission process” and that “no current trustee engaged in dishonest conduct.” The modifier “current” referred to the fact that both Hodge and Michelle Janavs have stepped down as trustees. Janavs’s sister-in-law, Lisa Merage, remains on the Sage Hill board.

Singer’s lawyer, Donald Heller, declined to comment. When I reached Singer directly, he politely thanked me for the opportunity but declined as well. “Nobody will talk to you until after sentencing,” he said.

As Adam predicted, Grant has not played tennis for Georgetown, nor even been listed on its roster. Though Georgetown has expelled two students involved in the scandal, Grant remains enrolled and appears to be majoring in computer science. “Our review focussed on whether students knowingly provided false information to the University during the admissions process,” a Georgetown spokeswoman said.

The Cal Poly coach, Carless, encouraged Adam to transfer to another university where he would make the tennis team. “I just kind of felt bad I didn’t have a spot for him,” Carless told me. “I said, ‘You can play. I see your work ethic, I see your love for the game. You could reach out to schools that are lower in the rankings or losing a lot of seniors.’ ” Adam considered transferring, but he stayed at Cal Poly and is glad he did. His life has expanded to include a girlfriend, a fraternity, and chemistry research guided by a professor. He’s playing No. 1 singles on Cal Poly’s club team—and still trying to walk onto the varsity squad. For his twenty-first birthday, in June, his parents paid for a ninety-minute off-season lesson with Carless.

Ross Duncan, one of Adam’s former private coaches, regrets that his dream of playing on a strong Division I team hasn’t panned out. “I think what stood out with him—and why I feel bad he never got the opportunity—is that his game still had a lot of room to grow,” Duncan said. “His style of play was aggressive. His game would have translated well to college tennis.”

Before leaving the Langevins’ home, I asked Adam a hypothetical question: How would he have felt if he had been recruited, like Grant, by a Division I team, only to find out that it was because someone had bribed the coach? “It wouldn’t feel right,” he told me. “My goal is to earn it. It’s not about being on the team. It’s about proving to yourself who the best player is. That’s how you become a legend. That’s what makes the best the best.”

This piece was drawn from “ The Price of Admission ,” which Broadway Books, an imprint of Random House, reissued this month.

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Admissions scandal highlights ‘disconnect’ between colleges’ message and action.

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/admissions-scandal-highlights-disconnect-between-colleges-message-and-action

The college admissions scandal that engulfed several Hollywood figures this year has essentially delivered a public indictment of some elite institutions. It has also sparked a larger conversation about admissions, access and inequity throughout American higher education. Paul Tough has written a book about this very topic, titled “The Years that Matter Most,” and he joins Amna Nawaz to discuss.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Judy Woodruff:

We return now to the college admissions scandal.

Amna Nawaz takes a look beyond today's sentencing of a prominent actress.

Amna Nawaz:

This college admissions scandal, which includes Felicity Huffman and other wealthy parents, has essentially turned into a public indictment of some elite institutions.

But it's also spurred a larger conversation about admissions, access and inequality throughout our system of higher education.

Paul Tough's new book focuses on these very questions. It's called "The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us."

And Paul Tough joins me now.

Welcome to the "NewsHour."

So, tell us, these high-profile cases like the one involving Felicity Huffman, in the larger world of college admissions, are these the exceptions or the rule?

Paul Tough:

Well, I think they are the most extreme expression of the kind of inequality, the extra advantages that affluent parents have.

Certainly, the — Felicity Huffman and the other parents who were caught up in the scandal went a little crazier than other affluent parents. But the competition, the pressure around college admissions makes a lot of affluent parents behave a little crazy.

But the message we get from colleges, from higher education institutions is, look, we're here to reward academic excellence. We want to build diverse communities. That's what we're looking for in the college admissions process.

Is that actually the case?

In some cases, it is, but there is a real disconnect between the way that colleges and the institutions that are part of the college system talk about equity and merit, and what you actually see when you look at the populations of American colleges and universities.

At the most highly selective institutions, the student bodies are almost entirely made up of students from the top income quintile, and students from the bottom income quintile are almost entirely absent.

So these colleges aren't in any way a reflection of the breadth of the American population. They're really dominated by the affluent.

And is that story true regardless of the type of institution, whether you're looking at elite institutions, like the Harvards and the Stanfords, or state schools? Is that the same story everywhere?

No, there's a real variation.

So the most highly selective institutions, which are mostly private institutions, are dominated by the affluent. But when you look at the less selective institutions, including community colleges, those are the institutions where low-income students are more likely to go, and those are the institutions where we spend the least on our students.

I mean, I feel like the flip side of the college admissions scandal is the scandal of how little we are now spending on public higher education. Over the last couple of decades, we have cut our public funding on higher education by 16 percent per student.

And that means that the kind of public universities where most low-income students go are not only raising tuition; they're also having to cut corners. And that really affects the education that the students are getting.

Help me understand from the college admissions perspective, though. Is this just about them admitting the students who've had access to better education and therefore have a leg up when it comes to the admissions process? Or are they making a different decision based on who can pay and what they can pay?

It depends on the institution.

So there are some institutions, a handful of institutions, where the endowment is so huge that they don't really depend on tuition revenue at all. So the reason why they are admitting so many high-income students, I think, has more to do with their culture than anything else.

But for a large number of highly selective private institutions, there are real financial pressures. About a quarter of those institutions are now running a deficit, and many more are really close to that line.

And so when they're selecting students to admit, they have got to think, more than anything else, about tuition. They're really looking for customers. And that means they're looking for affluent students.

And for admissions officers, that leads to this real sort of cognitive dissonance, because they know that they're looking for customers who can pay, but the communications department and the president's office at their colleges often talk about merit and diversity and fairness instead.

So, Paul, help us understand how college admissions officers are making these decisions.

You focused on one institution in particular. What did you find there?

Yes, I spent some time at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

And the admissions director there, a man named Angel Perez, was and is trying to change the way that Trinity does its admissions to become more diverse in both socioeconomics and race.

And, in some ways, he's succeeding. He's making some definite strides. But what I understood spending time with him is all of the pressures that exist for him and other admissions officers, the pressure of early admissions, the pressure of sports, and the pressure of SAT scores.

All of these factors are weighing on admissions directors like Angel, and they are almost all pointing in the opposite direction. The pressure that you get when you're in the admissions office is, admit more rich kids. And if you want to push back against that, it's often quite difficult.

You have argued in your book that parts of the admissions process, things like the SAT, right, that even those give an unfair advantage in many ways to wealthy students or students from a wealthy background, that they can get tutors, that they can get their SAT scores pumped up.

That helps to justify their admission in many cases. The College Board, I should mention, has pushed back on that. They say that the more information they can provide to college admissions members, the better, that SATs are just one of the factors that should be considered as a holistic admissions process.

What do you say to that?

Well, there's a longstanding debate in higher education and particularly in admissions on the value of the SAT.

And most people agree that your high school grades are the best predictor of how well you will do in college. And then, if you add the SAT to that factor, you get a slightly better prediction of how well a student will do.

What people who are opposed to the use of the SAT in college admissions say is that that slight statistical benefit that you get from adding the SAT is outweighed by the fact that the SAT — that SAT scores correlate so closely with family income.

So when you use SAT scores in admissions, it's hard not to admit a lot of rich kids and admit very few poor kids. And so that — that's the pushback against the College Board's case.

Paul, the story we have been told is that college can be the place where there's the engine of opportunity, right? Regardless of where you came from, college can be the place where you can change the trajectory of your life.

What you're telling us is, there are some tilts in the system, some inequalities that are institutionalized based on the wealth that you grew up in.

So can it be fixed? What could be done right now to make it more equal?

Well, I would say that both — both things are true.

So, absolutely. For individual students who I followed in the reporting for my book, higher education is still a fantastic engine of social mobility. If they are the lucky ones who are admitted to the institutions that give them the biggest boost, their lives change, absolutely.

But there is no question that the system as a whole is tilted. There are advantages at — on all levels that favor the affluent over everybody else.

So I think there's two things that need to change. On the private, highly selective side, it is really an admissions question more than anything else. And those admissions departments need to make different decisions and use different criteria in the way they're selecting students.

But on the — in the system as a whole, what really needs to change is the way that we fund public higher education. I think part of the reason that families are so competitive about those most highly selective private institutions is, we don't have a robust enough public system to compete with that private system.

If we go back to funding our public institutions, they will become the real engines of social mobility.

Paul Tough, he is the author of "The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us."

Thank you very much.

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There Is No Way to Prevent the Next Cheating Scandal

Admissions officers are in no position to evaluate the truthfulness of the applications they review.

The college-admissions scandal that led to federal bribery charges against dozens of parents last week unfolded at selective universities that pride themselves on “holistic” evaluations of their applicants. This process typically means that several admissions officers review a file and consider factors beyond grades and test scores , often intangible qualities that aren’t quantifiable and are usually gleaned from an applicant’s extracurricular activities, essays, and recommendations. This approach is nearly ubiquitous among selective schools.

Given this scrutiny of applications, among the questions raised following the Justice Department probe is how the actions of a few rogue coaches and SAT proctors could go totally undetected in these admissions offices. How did the alleged cheater not get caught?

Over the past four months, I have sat with admissions readers and committees at three selective colleges as they chose this fall’s freshman class, as part of research for a book I am writing about the inner workings of the admissions business. (None of the three schools I’m following for the book was named in the investigation.) While readers—as the people who review applications are called—would sometimes raise questions about absent pieces of information or other inconsistencies, the issues were usually minor: unfamiliar acronyms, missing scores for AP tests, or a recommendation that mentioned a school club not listed elsewhere in the file. Even in those cases, the readers usually didn’t have time to search the internet for additional information, so they moved on, assuming, perhaps, that these were oversights and nothing more.

Read more: Why the college admissions scandal is so absurd

Admissions counselors are not hired to be detectives. An ever-increasing number of applications have swamped admissions offices in recent years, resulting in faster reading of files . Whereas once readers could spend 16 to 20 minutes on a given applicant, the average is now around eight minutes . The high volume of applications and small number of staff leave the process vulnerable to embellishment or outright lying, especially at selective colleges where the competition for a scarce number of seats is fierce. Selective colleges—those that accept fewer than half of applicants—accounted for about a third of all college applications in 2017 , but for only 20 percent of undergraduates enrolled in American higher education.

“The entire admissions process is built on trust,” says Michael Steidel, the dean of admission at Carnegie Mellon University. “There is a fear, as application pools grow and as time spent on a review is reduced, [that] there is opportunity for problems.” Moreover, even if deans suspect fraud, federal antitrust laws prohibit universities from exchanging information about applicants.

Admissions deans I spoke with say fraud like that at the center of Operation Varsity Blues—the FBI’s nickname for the investigation—is likely rare, but they readily admit that it’s difficult to track. Some recent incidents give admissions officials cause for concern .

Last year, The New York Times found that a private high school in Louisiana , T.M. Landry College Preparatory School, forged transcripts and fabricated stories for application essays so that students would get accepted into selective colleges, including Yale, Brown, and Princeton. Two years ago, Technolutions , a company that operates a popular database system used by nearly 1,000 universities to organize applications, found that more than a quarter of recommendations provided for applicants to a graduate business school were all written on the same computer. But Alexander Clark, the CEO of Technolutions, told me his company’s system, called Slate, is unable to similarly track the so-called metadata of undergraduate applications because they are transmitted to colleges on platforms operated by the Common Application or its competitor, the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success .

Since the scandal broke last week, one element of the scheme troubling admissions deans is that a few of the schools named in the affidavit were allegedly betrayed by their own athletic coaches. Coaches had allegedly classified applicants as recruited athletes even though they had no experience playing the sport.

How colleges recruit athletes varies widely by school. In general, coaches recruit athletes well before their applications are submitted to the admissions office. At some schools, a specific number of slots are reserved for athletes. (Georgetown, for example, allocates about 158 slots a year to its coaches, according to the affidavit.) Typically, admissions officers “pre-read” the applications of highly rated athletes to see if they can make the cut academically, and most are officially accepted during the early-decision round of admissions in the fall.

Read more: College sports are affirmative action for rich, white kids

“When coaches say that this is a five-rated kid, we trust that,” says Chris Gruber, the vice president and dean of admission and financial aid at Davidson College in North Carolina, which competes at the Division I level. “At the same time, we have processes in place of checks and balances.”

When reviewing applications, Gruber and his staff keep an eye out for inconsistencies. For instance, if a student writes about the illness or death of a parent in the essay, that event is often reflected elsewhere in the application, perhaps in a recommendation. If not, “then you’re left wondering why no one else is talking about these things,” Gruber says.

Short of outright lying, high-school counselors I interviewed say the pressure on applicants to present a perfect picture in their application forces students to at times overstate their accomplishments or stretch stories in their essays. “Every student thinks they need a hook,” says Hannah Wolff, the college and career-center specialist at Langley High School in Virginia, who is also a part-time admissions reader at UC Berkeley. “They have an impression that being in the honor society, doing community service, getting all A’s in AP courses is not enough.”

All this has left admissions officers wondering if the overall application—test scores, grades, recommendations, extracurricular activities, and essays—remains an accurate portrayal of the student who is applying. “The concern I have is not fraud, but the overall fidelity of the correspondence they send us,” says one admission dean at a prominent university, who asked to remain anonymous to talk freely about the scandal. “Grades are inflated, activities are embellished, recommendations lack negative comments, and the standard now is test prep and multiple editors for essays.”

As a result, some admissions deans want to ask for different evidence of an applicant’s potential beyond the usual polished checklist. The coalition application, for instance, gives students a private virtual “locker” to upload materials, such as documents, photos, and videos, that they can later add to their application. For the past three years, students applying to Yale University have taken the option to use the coalition application to submit a document, image, audio file, or video instead of responding to two short essay prompts on the Common Application.

Meanwhile, a group of deans from selective colleges, including Bucknell University, MIT, and Swarthmore College, are examining the use of assessment tools to measure an applicant’s character attributes . “We are not saying throw out testing and replace it with noncognitive measures,” says William T. Conley, the vice president for enrollment management at Bucknell. “But we know that things like persistence and teamwork are important to success in college and afterwards, and they should be part of holistic admissions.”

Inevitably, whenever colleges shift what they want in their application, students change their own behavior in response, or new industries sprout up to assist them. As long as applications to elite schools are abundant and seats scarce, applicants will look for ways—even sometimes those that push up against ethical lines—to stand out. And because admissions officers tend to trust applicants and have neither the time nor the resources of the FBI to check out anything they might question, the only safeguard built into any admissions system (now or in the future) is cultural norms about honesty.

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The College-Admissions Process Is Completely Broken

The SAT and the ACT Will Probably Survive the Pandemic—Thanks to Students

College Admissions Scandal: Article Wording Personal Essay

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“I don’t think we should be super surprised,” said Bari Norman, the co-founder, and director of counseling at Expert Admissions, a Manhattan-based firm that helps teens around the world prepare for the exams and college applications that will determine the next four years of their lives.

“It speaks to the desperation of parents and just how high stakes college admissions have become,” Norman added. “And unfortunately, it speaks to a lot of the messages we’re sending to kids, which is the most concerning part of this story.”

Nowadays, people enjoy an opportunity to speak and write freely and share their thoughts about each other, different events, and situations. They find it normal to break the rules to meet their needs and support interests. In his article, Wallace (2001) said that “the whole point of norms is to help us evaluate our actions” (p. 48). Modern people usually neglect standards to create strong analyses and ideas. After reading the article by Richards (2019), I was confused by a number of diverse and controversial terms. Special attention should be paid to the meaning of such words as “college”, “desperation”, and “parents” because, despite recent improvements and fashion, this combination still sounds awkward and unnatural.

Although today it is normal to read such phrases that college is a “status symbol” or that “education has its price”, it is still hard to understand the meaning of the word “desperation” along with “college” and “parents”. Wallace (2001) underlined possible disagreements with English grammar or style, but never with a meaning. In this case, Richards (2019) does not break any grammar or stylistic rule but challenges human attitude towards education.

College can improve the status of a person or provide parents with more reasons for pride for their children. However, when a person becomes desperate while choosing or applying to college, the whole system may be called into question.

In general, I like the idea to combine such terms as “college” and parents” in one sentence or a text. Still, it is high time to do something to remove the idea of “desperation” from the same context. The chosen article is interesting in a variety of ways, and human emotions and attitudes towards challenges and controversies in education remain a burning issue for discussion.

Richards, E. (2019). The college admissions scandal involving Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin was a long time coming. Here’s how the system got so rigged . USA Today. Web.

Wallace, D. F. (2001). Tense present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage . Harper’s Magazine, 39-58. Web.

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California Couple in College Admissions Case Agrees to Plead Guilty

BOSTON – Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli have agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy charges in connection with securing the fraudulent admission of their two children to the University of Southern California as purported athletic recruits.

Loughlin, 55, and Giannulli, 56, both of Los Angeles, Calif., will plead guilty before U.S. District Court Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton on a date to be specified by the Court. Loughlin will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, while Giannulli will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and honest services wire and mail fraud.

Under the terms of Loughlin’s plea agreement, the parties have agreed to a sentence, subject to the Court’s approval, of two months in prison, a $150,000 fine and two years of supervised release with 100 hours of community service. Under the terms of Giannulli’s plea agreement, the parties have agreed to a sentence, subject to the Court’s approval, of five months in prison, a $250,000 fine and two years of supervised release with 250 hours of community service. 

Loughlin and Giannulli are the 23 rd and 24 th parents to plead guilty in the college admissions case. 

“Under the plea agreements filed today, these defendants will serve prison terms reflecting their respective roles in a conspiracy to corrupt the college admissions process and which are consistent with prior sentences in this case. We will continue to pursue accountability for undermining the integrity of college admissions,” said United States Attorney Andrew E. Lelling.

Case information, including the status of each defendant, charging documents and plea agreements are available here: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/investigations-college-admissions-and-testing-bribery-scheme .

The charge of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and honest services mail and wire fraud provides for a sentence of up 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss, whichever is greater. Sentences are imposed by a federal district court judge based upon the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors. 

U.S. Attorney Lelling; Joseph R. Bonavolonta, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston Field Division; and Kristina O’Connell, Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigations in Boston, made the announcement today. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Eric S. Rosen, Justin D. O’Connell, Leslie A. Wright, Kristen A. Kearney, Karin M. Bell and Stephen E. Frank of Lelling’s Criminal Division are prosecuting the case.

The details contained in the charging documents are allegations. The remaining defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

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College Admissions: Vulnerable, Exploitable, and to Many Americans, Broken

By Anemona Hartocollis

• March 15, 2019

Standardized test scores are manufactured. Transcripts are made up. High-stakes admissions decisions are issued based on fabricated extracurricular activities, ghostwritten personal essays and the size of the check written by the parents of the applicant.

[ The college admissions scandal has raised a lot of questions. We’ve answered them here. ]

American universities are often cast as the envy of the world, august institutions that select the best and the brightest young people after an objective and rigorous selection process.

But the bribery scandal unveiled by the Justice Department this week — and a number of other high-profile cases that have captured the headlines in recent months — has shown the admissions system to be something else entirely: exploitable, arbitrary, broken.

At the heart of the scandal is a persistent adulation of highly selective universities. “Elite colleges have become a status symbol with the legitimacy of meritocracy attached to them, because getting in sanctifies you as meritorious,” said Jerome Karabel, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a historian of college admissions.

The case, in which dozens of parents are accused of buying spots at elite universities for their teenagers, comes amid already heightened scrutiny of college admissions.

[ Learn more about how families who have legally hired college admissions consultants view the ethics of their choices. ]

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