Operation Varsity Blues: All You Need To Know

A recent documentary released on Netflix tells a more in-depth story of the College Admissions Scandal that occurred in 2019 and the still ongoing investigation. 

In case you don’t know what the college admissions scandal is, it was an incident when famous and wealthy families paid Rick Singer, a college advisor on paper, to help their kids get into top and elite schools by passing them off as athletes as well as giving  families resources to cheat on the ACT and SAT in order to get admitted. 

Famous names such as Lori Loughlin (former full house actress), as well as her daughter Olivia Jade are involved,  as well as other millionaire families. They would pay Rick Singer, the mastermind in “donations”, to his charity where he would then take the money and make bribes to other colleges to let these certain kids in. 

Now any person would ask, how could this ever happen? Well the documentary explains that Singer developed a long list of connections in the athletics and admissions department of many top schools, and would simply offer bribes to coaches of smaller sports to guarantee those students spots on sports teams where most students didn’t even play. They would photoshop photos of the kids heads onto people who played the sport, to look more believable. 

As for getting around the ACT and SAT, Singer had the kids act “dumber” during the test in order to claim they had a learning disability to gain extended time to take the test. With this extended time, Singer would fly in a smart man to take the test for the kids to manipulate their scores in the extended time they were granted. 

What is even crazier is that most kids didn’t even know their scores were being manipulated, because their parents wanted them to believe they got in all on their own, and not because they made a $300,000-$7000,000 check straight to Singer. 

Although there are only 53 parents and people involved accused, the documentary, which used real phone calls all throughout, said that he gave 730 students what he called “the side door” to get into schools. 

After Singer was caught, he had his phone wired and worked with the FBI to incriminate more people he was working with to lighten his sentence. Singer still awaits trial.