(This is the second installment in an occasional series on books related to college admission. The previous ECA Book Club post is here.)
The first anniversary of COVID 19 shutting down the country on March 11, 2020 obscured another anniversary of an event that took almost a year before to the day. Yes, it’s been two years since March 12, 2019, the day that the Operation Varsity Blues scandal put college admission in the national news cycle spotlight. I was on Spring Break for both of those events, and throughout this year’s Spring Break I hoped that the rule of 3’s would prove to be a fiction.
By coincidence my Spring Break “it’s too cold for the beach” read (or re-read) was Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit, & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal, written by Wall Street Journal reporters Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz. It’s a good read, a fleshing out of the outstanding reporting they did of a scandal that seems too outrageous to be non-fiction.
Melissa Korn agreed to an interview about the book and the scandal, and she turned out to be just as good an interview subject as she is an interviewer. Here is a transcript of our conversation (with minor edits for length):
ECA: Have you watched the Netflix documentary yet?
MK: I watched it the day it came out or the day after. I’m not sure I learned anything new, because I had done a pretty deep dive into it myself, but seeing Matthew Modine playing Rick Singer was entertaining. He does a pretty good job capturing that nervous energy.
ECA: How does the fact that you have spent so much time covering the story influence your viewing? Do you find yourself being a critic—“Boy, they got that wrong”?
MK: I think it’s kind of like when a prosecutor watches Law and Order. They want to nit-pick everything, and even if the bones of it are fine, you can always find something to comment on or disagree with. So it helped that I was messaging with a few people while watching it.
ECA: We just passed the second anniversary of the scandal hitting the news, somewhat lost by the first anniversary of the pandemic. How did you learn about the scandal, and how quickly did you realize that it was a big story?
MK: One of the most remarkable things about the story was that no one broke it. It came out when prosecutors--the Justice Department, the FBI, the IRS--announced that there would be this big press conference and charges would be unveiled against 50 individuals in this enormous college admissions scandal. Before that no one even knew this investigation was happening, and it had been going on for nearly a year. I learned about it the same time the public did. We started getting emails from the press contacts at those agencies and copies of that very juicy 200-page FBI affidavit. Quite frankly, that document could be a book by itself.
So my colleague Jennifer [Levitz}, who is based in Boston, rushed down to the courthouse, and I started reading and drafting and posting the first versions of the story. The first three days were a blur, where you forget to do things like eat lunch. The adrenaline rush is wonderful, but it takes a toll after a day or two of it.
I think we knew it was a big story, but didn’t realize just how big it could get until literary agents reached out and said, “This is going to be a book. Do you want to be the ones to write it?” And once we heard from multiple agents, we knew they must be on to something.
ECA: How fast did that happen after the story broke?
MK: I heard from two agents the first day, the day the story broke, and three more the next day.
ECA: So how was writing a book about the scandal different from covering it in real time?
MK: There are some similarities and some differences. The biggest differences are length and tone. At the [Wall Street] Journal the longest stories I write are 2000, maybe 2200 words. The book is 85,000 to 90,000 words. That’s a whole lot more, which means you have to plan it out very differently, you have to have a different kind of outline than I build for one of my front-page stories. You get to go into more detail and add more color and have a little more of a tone. As a news reporter I’m neutral, presenting facts. I give the information, but I’m not taking sides. And I don’t think we were taking sides in the book, but it has more personality. We can give physical descriptions of people that maybe we wouldn’t in the paper. We can be a little snarkier sometimes. And it was nice to have that freedom.
ECA: What new information did you uncover while researching the book that hadn’t come out in the daily coverage?
MK: We wanted to make sure that the book was more than a re-hashing of headlines or what had come out in court. We had made many of those headlines; the Journal broke a lot of the developments in the case. Even with those stories, there is always information that just doesn’t make it into the article.
We were able to flesh out some of those developments in the book, things like how the whole case came tumbling down, how the Justice Department first learned of Rick Singer. Getting into detail about how that all happened and how accidental it was. Being able to go into depth into who Rick Singer was and what his motivations may have been, what his relationships with families were like and how he knew who might be willing to cross the line. We also provide much more information about how he networked and how he built up his business, whether it was through word of mouth from parents or through financial services firms. We had written a little about that in the paper but could go much deeper.
We also spoke directly to more of the people involved in the case, explaining what happened in each of their cases. We were the first to get an interview with a student (Matteo Sloane), long before Olivia Jade did the “Red Table” thing. We ran an article right after talking to him, but it scratched the surface. There was a lot of information, but there was so much more to say. The book also put everything in context. We could explain that here’s why the system is the way it is and how it allowed something like this to happen.
ECA: Was it hard to interview people who were still engaged in litigation or being advised to “lawyer up”?
MK: Connecting with sources for this project was by far the hardest thing I’ve done in terms of sourcing and getting people to talk to me. I’ve gotten people accused of sexual assault on the phone much easier. These are high-powered individuals with high-powered lawyers. Many of them also hired crisis communications teams. Their goal was to be shielded from people like me.
From day one Jennifer and I put together a spreadsheet of who’s who, who’s their lawyer and who are their comms people, and what are their personal numbers and who is their spouse and their kids. And it worked. We got an interview with John Vandemoer, the Stanford sailing coach, the day before he was actually sentenced, because I had started talking with his lawyer months earlier.
We continued our Wall Street Journal policy of “no surprises journalism,” so we weren’t going to write about anyone at length and not have them know. We were going to be fair, give them a chance to respond or at least know that they were being written about. That meant travelling around the country, leaving notes on people’s doors, in their mailboxes, sliding under a door or taped to a gate, Facebook messages, text messages, cell calls, talking to a sibling or spouse and begging them at least to get our message to them, because we couldn’t be confident that the lawyer or crisis communications team was doing that.
ECA: Was this more complicated than most stories on that front?
MK: It certainly was. At the outset it seemed like they had no incentive to talk to us, like “what good would it do to have my dirty laundry aired even further.” The ones who had pleaded guilty just wanted to be sentenced and leave it at that, and the ones who had pleaded not guilty didn’t want to be discussed in the context of this case at all. So we had to explain to them why it was to their benefit to talk to us. The way we framed it, and it’s really true, was that at the beginning of the case they didn’t look good, because the only information out there was coming from the Justice Department. So help us understand why you did this or why you worked with Rick Singer in the first place or why you didn’t think this was illegal. Help us explain why. In most cases, the more you know about someone, the harder it is to hate them. You can find something relatable in them, or at least something human in them. And once they were able to understand that, more were willing to open up to us.
ECA: So how big was the scandal? How many people are there out there who got away with it?
MK: Singer claims to have worked with hundreds of families on the “side door,” but Singer was known to exaggerate pretty much everything. 700 families? Unlikely. There were certainly more than the upwards of 50 that were charged. We know that there was another proctor who took tests for Rick Singer’s clients who wasn’t charged. We know that Singer worked with a particular psychologist out in California who would approve requests so that kids could get extra time on the SAT or ACT. We know that there other parents he worked with where it was more of a gray area, not so cut-and-dried that they did something wrong. He warned some families off once he flipped. There were some cases where families worked with him a long time ago where there just wasn’t enough evidence. There were certainly more people involved than were charged, but saying that it was in the hundreds was a stretch.
ECA: Why was Felicity Huffman charged and William Macy not?
MK: That is one of the questions we get a lot, because initially it seemed very odd that she got stuck with this and the husband got off scot-free. Essentially she was the one who was in charge. She was the one made the plans, coordinated things, wrote the checks. He was on a few phone calls, responding neutrally, but he wasn’t making the plans, he wasn’t arranging things with Rick Singer. He was in the passenger seat.
ECA: What are the things about the college admissions process that made the scandal possible?
MK: One of the biggest ones is the autonomy that coaches get picking who they are going to flag as recruits or preferred walk-ons. There’s so much trust baked into that system—why would a coach possibly recommend someone who’s not going to help their team? So admissions doesn’t check, admissions doesn’t ask, and quite frankly admissions doesn’t know what makes a good fullback or whatever the position is. At some schools someone else might review it and at some schools it goes straight to admissions. There was great opportunity for corruption there, with Singer or with someone else. And as we have found, there have been some other cases, totally unrelated, where coaches may have been getting special benefits or kickbacks or payments for flagging certain applicants. There have been cases at Penn and Harvard and elsewhere. So the autonomy and trust for coaches was a huge part.
The other part was the very murky world of development and admissions and how they interact. When is it no longer a quid pro quo to make a donation when your kid is applying to college? Is there a date cut-off? How many months before should I do it? If it’s within a year, does that seem too fishy? People have asked these questions for a long time, and people know that money comes with influence and power and perhaps a little extra pull in admissions, but there is no hard dollar amount set. Schools like it that way, because they don’t want to say, “If you give us a million dollars you will get this, or if you give us ten million dollars your kid will get in.” That would be too nakedly a quid pro quo, and that would be illegal. And the defense of some of the parents in the case was, “This is just an extreme version of what everyone else does.”
ECA: Which parts of the scandal do you find most offensive?
MK: There are probably two that I find most astonishing. One is the photoshopping of people’s faces onto other athletes. Singer’s team would take a picture of someone who actually played water polo or was actually a pole vaulter and stick the client’s face on it, to pitch them as that athlete. And these were real people. In the book we found the people whose pictures were used and whose lives were in certain ways stolen for the benefit of Rick Singer’s clients, and I think that was really heartbreaking. There are people behind this. There was so much discussion about who the victims are, and legally speaking the test agencies and the colleges and universities were deemed the victims, but in reality the victims are the people who didn’t get in because Rick Singer worked his magic. And that really helped us put faces to that. These were people who were perfectly good kids, but they weren’t thinking about a school like USC, and USC wasn’t thinking about students like them. They got lost in the system a little bit.
The other thing that’s not necessarily surprising but is horrifying is the abuse of extra time, the ease with which some of these families could get extra time to take standardized tests. And perhaps that’s no longer going to be a concern or an issue or a problem with tests playing less of a role than they did even two years ago. A colleague of mine, Doug Belkin, helmed an article we did in 2019 looking at 504 accommodations and extra time and just how concentrated those are in wealthy areas. If you know the system, you know how to game the system, and you can afford this external evaluation, then you get your kid extra time and you give them an edge. It blows me away, how common that is. And if that happens, you have students with legitimate learning disabilities who get looked at suspiciously.
ECA: Who do you feel most sorry for from all this?
MK: The kids whose pictures were taken and used. The other group I feel sorry for are the students themselves, the supposed beneficiaries. They had to grapple with the idea that their parents didn’t believe in them, that their parents didn’t think they could do it well enough on their own, that their parents lied to them, that they didn’t earn getting into these schools. You think about the psyche of an 18-year-old, and that’s absolutely devastating. The relationships with their families have been frayed, some beyond repair. These are kids who will forever go through life with an asterisk at the end of their accomplishments.
Melissa Korn belongs in the pantheon of reporters covering college admission today, and I appreciate her time and honest insight. Unacceptable is a great overview of a scandal that still stings for our profession and a good addition to any college admission-themed reading list. Here’s the link to the publisher:
