Just in time for the nervous weeks of March and April when college rejections and acceptances go out to America’s high-school seniors, Netflix released “Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal,” a documentary that tells how the admissions maestro Rick Singer helped rich people, including the actors Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, cheat their kids into highly selective colleges and universities, and how they got caught.
The film is both gripping and, in its docudrama format, weirdly well put together. The dialogue is taken from F.B.I. transcripts, and, unlike more experienced criminal suspects, the wealthy moms and dads who are the film’s dramatic villains are so garrulous on wiretaps that the movie makes a joke of it. A former prosecutor tells the camera, “Historically, white-collar defendants have almost no filter on the phone,” and then the film cuts to a mom crossing the sculptured lawn of a huge mansion, flirting guilelessly on a call with Singer, her co-conspirator. “My husband and I laugh every day,” she tells him, “about how great your work was. We’re, like, ‘It was worth every cent.’ ” When Singer starts coöperating with the F.B.I. on phone taps and wants his clients to hurry up and incriminate themselves already, he gives them crude, obvious prompts that would earn any wiseguy a death sentence. “What I’m going to tell them is that you made a 50K donation to my foundation,” Singer tells a maker of fine Napa Cabernets, referring to the I.R.S., “not that Mark took the test for your daughter. . . .”
For the filmmakers, these rich, bumbling perps are too deliciously hateable not to dwell on, and most of the movie’s talking heads take this dramatic emphasis as the story’s moral point: wealthy dimwits getting what they deserve. One independent college counsellor says that she only wished the Feds had “hit them hard,” had taken away more of their money and then “put that money to work for underprivileged kids.” But several times near the end of the film, it seems like the filmmakers are trying to divert our attention to a different story, in which the rich cheaters are really bit players in a much bigger scam. One lawyer, in a case involving bribes to Stanford’s athletic department, drily points us to the true mastermind. He remarks that he does not know of “any [other] case where the victim of a racketeering conspiracy”—Stanford—“ended up seven hundred and seventy thousand dollars richer than they were at the beginning of the conspiracy.”
But it’s the reporter Daniel Golden, author of “The Price of Admission,” who delivers the punch line: he chooses, he says, to focus his criticism “on the colleges and universities that created this system,” instead of the parents. The élite schools actually like a good scandal, he suggests, because “it makes the colleges seem more exclusive and desirable than ever.” After such fun pursuit of stock villains so easily caught, this is a jarring coda. So it wasn’t Lori Loughlin. It was the colleges. Whoa. This, in turn, makes “Operation Varsity Blues” feel like one of those movies with a twist ending, featuring a penultimate shot of a hapless chump in a prison cell and then a final shot of the real mastermind at a beachside bar on a tropical island, nudging aside a tiny umbrella as he raises a mai tai to his smiling lips.
To the extent that “Operation Varsity Blues” tries to tell a more serious story about the college “system,” it can’t escape the dilemma that Golden identifies. Like most other commentary on the college-admissions process, the film laments how “loopholes”—special breaks for legacy students, grandchildren of generous donors, “recruited athletes” in posh sports like sailing and fencing—unfairly benefit the wealthy and perpetuate inequality. But, like the scandal story, this just makes the colleges look more prestigious by showing how far moneyed people will go to improve their chances. Whatever the film’s critical gestures toward social injustice, the message that a nervous parent with a sense of agency could take away from its shots of undeserving fencers is: fencing! We have to get Cody into fencing!
But there’s an even more serious moral hazard in bewailing the unfairness of these loopholes, which is that the discourse of “fairness” in college admissions ratifies the weird American assumption that a transcendent right is in play when these decisions are made. Yes, the colleges dispense tainted benefits to unworthy jocks and legacies, but they also bestow their priceless gifts on kids who really deserve it. Every earnest complaint about unfairness in college admissions implies that the venal colleges are also sacred bodies from which issue these holy gifts, and true and righteous judgments of who is worthy to receive them.
Our fixation on rich people exploiting loopholes in the admissions process gives implicit sanction to the regular admissions process, which is terrible, too, but on a larger scale, with worse effects on more people. The most disturbing scenes in “Operation Varsity Blues” feature contemporary high-school seniors, captured in grievous closeup by their laptop cameras, writhing in agony as they await their admissions decisions, then weeping bitterly after being rejected, or exploding in triumph when they get the big acceptance (to Brown, one assumes). These students are not only being cheated by scammers like Lori Loughlin, the movie tells us. They’re under pressure—from themselves, from their parents, from the general message that success in America requires a prestigious degree—and the colleges do their cruel part in ratcheting up the pressure when they gloat about their tiny acceptance rates.
Yet those tortured high-school faces tell a deeper story. This process wouldn’t visit such personal torment on the students if they didn’t, on a personal level, identify with it. And they wouldn’t identify with it, or buy into the insidious notion that their real worthiness is being judged through a stupid process, if admissions personnel didn’t cultivate this identification. The personnel do this by augmenting the extreme academic competition they stage—the race for good grades and high test scores—with a more “holistic” side of the college application, in which students display their distinct personalities and compete over whose is better.
In this competition, élite schools no longer want “well-rounded” grinders, cynically padding their résumés. They want “well-lopsided” kids, whose individuality stands out. They want one or two stellar activities that are “heartfelt” and “passionate.” They want quirky and likable admissions essays, not braggy ones. They want applicants to speak in their “true voice,” to be “vulnerable,” indeed, to reveal their “imperfections.” They want them to get to “know themselves” through their essays. They make their process sound like a branch of adolescent psychology, with admissions deans as gentle therapists conducting a careful search for “authentic” insight into “the real person behind the application.” It is hard to overstate how often admissions staff from the more selective schools say forms of the word “authentic.”
The idea that anxious kids who are competing with one another in a high-stakes contest to appear virtuous and likable to total strangers are going to speak in “true” rather than carefully practiced voices, present “authentic” rather than nervously curated selves, is obviously absurd. When college Web sites give examples of “essays that worked,” the writerly voices are so fussy and ingratiating that they make your teeth hurt. The lead essay on Hamilton College’s “Essays That Worked” page begins, “On the day my first novel was rejected, I was baking pies.” (Worry not, dear reader. By the end of the essay, the novelist has found a publisher, of course, and future applicants can soothe their nerves with the insight that one thing they can do to make their essays “stand out” is to be a published novelist.) Those essays are the result of weeks and months of calculation and revision, not to mention the editorial input of parents, high-school counsellors, and paid essay coaches, all of them straining to see these works in progress through the eyes of admissions deans.
But the young are impressionable. Their “true selves” are malleable and incomplete. When the stakes are high, and an earnest student is dead serious about college, and she’s been honing her application persona for years, the distinction between what’s contrived and what’s authentic will often collapse. What “holistic admissions” means is that colleges give a boost to the applicants they like more, as people. From the Internet and their essay coaches, high schoolers learn in more specific terms the traits and attitudes, the moral commitments and performative tics, that prestigious colleges are rewarding these days. Given the stakes, kids have a potent incentive not just to affect but to adopt the preferred traits, to perform the latest tics so sincerely it’s as if they’re not performing at all.
In the nineties, a rapidly growing population of eager, highly qualified, competitively savvy applicants created a headache for colleges, overwhelming their selection tools. But this headache was also an opportunity. The importance of admissions departments increased within schools, giving them a greater and more specific say in what campus life would look like. More important for American society as a whole, it gave them immense influence over the inner and outer lives of America’s teen-agers. With so many applicants and so few open slots, and such a sought-after benefit to hand out, admissions deans realized they could literally tell their teen-age applicants how to be a person.
The admissions process is bathed in a language of therapeutic concern, but its basic logic is bureaucratic. The best explanation for why colleges started disdaining the well-rounded generalist strivers whom they used to reward is that, in trying to outdo one another in their crude quantities of extracurricular activities, applicants began to look too much alike. The administrative problem that the redundant joining of clubs and indiscreet bragging over accomplishments once solved has only become worse. The cycle continues, on ever-tighter timescales. Thanks to social media, teen-agers learn as a cohort about the latest preference, such as starting a nonprofit, then scramble to satisfy it, and once again they look too much alike. (If you’re a parent with college-age children, you should probably know that this novel admissions hack is already losing its value.)
So admissions departments employ more intimate and mysterious standards for kids to authentically satisfy. They invite their unformed teen-age applicants to form themselves before their eyes, indeed for them, via ever more idiosyncratic and heroically virtuous extracurriculars and, especially, the quirky, confessional essays they require. It may sound like overstatement that admissions personnel consciously view their selection protocols as guiding—in a totally healthy and defensible way—the profound evolution by which human identities take shape during adolescence, but they say it themselves. They draw this link—“selection procedure” and “self-formation”—like it’s the most natural thing in the world. “Turning the Tide,” a 2016 reform document generated at Harvard by admissions deans from around the country, speaks with conviction about why colleges should use their leverage as gatekeepers to mold kids’ characters into shapes that match the moral preferences of admissions departments. The 2019 update, “Turning the Tide II,” doubles down on this emphasis. Admissions deans seem to believe that the way for them to reform their process is to make themselves more powerful, and the process they run more invasive.
The assumption that admissions officers should have this intimate influence over teen-age selves clearly informs the design of the Coalition Application, introduced, in 2015, by a consortium of eighty colleges and universities comprising the most prestigious schools in the country, including every member of the Ivy League. The Coalition App is supposed to serve as an alternative to the widely used Common Application, but where students typically fill out the Common App at the beginning of their senior year, the Coalition App allows them to open an account and start building an admissions “portfolio” in ninth grade, so they can spend the entirety of their high-school years as college applicants, watching themselves through the eyes of the admissions office. In an article that describes the process, a dean at the University of Chicago, modelling the ideal applicant who has embraced this extended timeline, distills the extreme presumption that suffuses the world of selective admissions: “Let’s think long term,” she says, “about my identity and what my application will look like.”
This blurred understanding of college applications and teen-age identities should help explain why the tormented seniors crying into their laptop cameras in “Operation Varsity Blues” have what seems like an existential investment in the process. The people who run this operation require such an investment as a condition of acceptance. What’s worse is that our default way of complaining about the system—that it’s fraught with injustices and irregularities that favor the rich—is shallow, self-defeating, and wrong in its moral assumptions. The system isn’t partially tainted; it’s entirely rotten. The colleges that it serves aren’t merely compromised. We, the parents who make the queasy bargain with them, are compromised, offering parts of our children’s souls for a marginally better chance that a college will grant us its big prize.
