Last night I wanted to watch the fourth and last in the Lifetime “Ripped from the Headlines!” movie series, and while the previous week’s entry had been something ripped off from yellowing headlines since it was based on a case from 1980, this time it was from fresh newsprint: The College Admissions Scandal, a film directed by Adam Salky from a script by Stephen Tolkin (I’d never heard of Salky before but Tolkin is an old Lifetime hand, responsible for New York Prison Break and many other Lifetime movies, including quite a few previous ones based on true stories), which despite its rather clinical title (the FBI sting operation against the parents of the kids involved in the real college admissions scandal was called “Operation Varsity Blues,” and that might have been a better title for the film) managed to be genuinely insightful and moving drama. The film has one deep flaw, which I’ll get into later because it was also implicit in a lot of the news coverage of the real case. The central characters are three parents, financial services manager Bethany Slade (Mia Kershner) — who’s been raising her daughter Emma (Sarah Dugdale) as a single parent since dumping Emma’s dad years earlier because instead of seeking a corporate job he was trying to be a writer and was doing drugs and drinking — and a still-intact couple, corporate attorney Jackson Deviers (Robert Moloney) and his wife, interior designer Caroline Deviers (Penelope Ann Miller), who are concerned because, though he has a high I.Q., their son Danny (Sam Duke) — incidentally on the cast list for this film on imdb.com his last name is spelled “Devere,” which suggests that the character finds his parents’ spelling of the name pretentious and has simplified it — is more interested in playing in a band and pursuing a musical career than in attending a prestigious college the way his parents want him to.
So they hook up with college consultant William “Rick” Singer (oddly the actor
playing this part is not credited on imdb.com, though the script uses the
character’s real name and casts him as a heavy-set wrestler type — the real
Singer, helpfully shown in a Behind the Headlines documentary that followed the film, was a former
swimming coach and still was surprisingly lean for his age), who according to
the documentary began as a legitimate “college coach,” obtaining SAT and other
“prep tests” that aren’t identical to the real ones but are close enough they
can be used to practice, and arranging for special tutoring for the children of
the rich and/or famous. Then his operation shaded off into pursuing what he
called the “side door” to college admissions; as the documentary explained,
Singer explained to his clients that there’s a “front door” for a kid to get
into college (good grades, hard work and high admission test scores), a “back
door” for especially well-heeled people (paying for new buildings on a campus
or making major donations to the endowment) and a “side door” for the folks whom
he was targeting as his market, who seem to have been what might be called the
2 to 10 percent — not outright members of the 1 percent but folks with enough
money (and enough of the sense of entitlement that comes with it) to afford
him.
Among his tricks were putting the kids of his clients through psychiatric
exams with his own hired-gun “therapists” to claim they needed more time to
take the tests, giving the tests at his own proctoring centers (and either
correcting errors the students made or actually having “ringers” take the tests
for them), and faking athletic backgrounds for the would-be admittees — usually
in recherché sports like squash
and crew, though Emma gets to fake being a soccer player (let’s face it, it’s
easy enough to photograph someone kicking a ball around a field) while Danny is
passed off as a crew coxswain (though the fake photograph we see of him shows
him leaning off the deck of a sailing yacht adjusting a sail). The FBI stumbles
across the scheme when their agents interrogate a man they’ve nailed on an
unrelated case of financial fraud, and when he makes them an offer to turn in
Singer’s scheme in exchange for leniency on his own case, they bite. The FBI
arrests Singer, who almost immediately turns state’s evidence and rats out his
own clients (as well as the high-school and college athletic coaches who took
bribes from him to say they played sports they really didn’t), agreeing to call
them and get them on tape admitting to their involvement in his criminal
schemes by telling them his non-profit “charitable” foundation, The Key
International (ostensibly set up to help Cambodians and other low-income
students attend college, actually a device for Singer to launder his ill-gotten
gains and give his clients the side benefit of being able to write off their
payments to him from their own taxes), is being audited by the Internal Revenue
Service and they need to get their stories straight as to what they will tell
the IRS investigators. (One line on one of the actual tapes from a real Singer
client played on the documentary was even more chilling than anything in
Tolkin’s script: “After all, it’s only the IRS. It’s not USC!”)
There are
certain people in the movie — including a Black counselor at Emma’s school who
notices the abrupt jump in her SAT scores when she retests and gets suspicious
— but the scheme rolls on until Singer rats on all his clients (though the
documentary claims he helped up to 800 families and only 35 have been busted so
far) and ultimately everyone comes to grief. Bethany is fired from her firm —
they invoke the morals clause in her contract to seize her 10 percent equity
share in her company — and when her attorney says she still owns her property,
including at least two houses (one in the L.A. area and one in Aspen), she
tells him she mortgaged them all to fund Singer’s campaign to get Emma into
Yale. Emma loses her coveted admission slot to Yale and also gets dumped by her
boyfriend Bryan (Sebastian Greaves), whom she wanted to go to Yale in the first
place because he was already a freshman there, while her younger sister’s
future also gets screwed because she’s part of the same family even though her
own grades were so good mom didn’t buy her Singer’s services because she
figured she didn’t need them. Jackson Deviers finds himself faced not only with
a prison sentence but near-certain disbarment, his wife loses all her interior
design clients (including the ones that were in foreign countries, which she
can no longer visit because as a condition of bail she had to surrender her
passport) and Danny, who in a way is the most tragic character, loses the
legitimate opportunity his musical talents had earned him when the major
manager who was interested in representing him suddenly decides he’s a hot
potato and drops him. (We’re told in the script he’s the next Bob Dylan, David
Bowie or Bruce Springsteen — all of whom Danny cites as examples of music
superstars who never went to college[1]
— but when we finally hear a song ostensibly by him at the end of the show it’s
a pretentiously sappy acoustic ballad that led me to joke, “He could always get
a job writing songs for Lifetime movies.”)
Just what Danny or Emma were
supposed to be studying once they won their credentials to prestigious
universities (Yale in her case and Stanford in his) is never made clear —
though Emma makes some noises about wanting to do something to help the
homeless — but what is made clear
is how incredibly stratified America has become, and for members of the 10
percent who want their kids to make it into the 1 percent a degree from a
high-prestige school has become all-important. The one aspect I didn’t like
about this movie is that it assumes that college admissions are part of a
genuine “meritocracy” and Singer and his clients were screwing that up for
everyone else by gaming the system. The insanity of well-heeled parents using
their money to get their children legs-up in America’s relentlessly competitive
career market and economy reaches far lower than college: we’ve heard stories
of parents bribing their kids’ ways into prep schools, private grade schools
and even private pre-schools on
the assumption that even when you’re all of three years old your whole future
can be determined by whether you get into the “right” schools and thereby win
the all-important bragging points (“I went to … !”) that will ensure your
ability to advance. The whole idea that grades and test scores measure
something called “aptitude” for success in college is a monstrous myth (all
test scores measure is your ability to take tests, and as standardized testing
has filtered lower and lower in the education system and is now hailed as the
ultimate test of how well the schools are teaching our kids, the built-in
prejudices of those tests — which were designed in the first place in the late
19th and early 20th centuries by racists seeking “proof”
that whites were smarter, and hence more fitted to rule, than anyone else —
have once again become institutionalized in our education system).
Grades
measure what you’ve already learned, and that’s dependent not only on how well
the schools have taught you (and how much money they have for books, small
classes, equipment and other factors that give kids from affluent neighborhoods
a built-in advantage) but what your home life is like and how much your parents know and encourage you to learn instead of just
making it through school as a chore. As America has basically wiped out its
middle class and become far more class-stratified than it was through most of
the 20th century (where you could still hold down a job if you
hadn’t gone to college, and you could make a fair amount of money — enough for
a middle-class lifestyle — once workers organized into unions and won better
wages, benefits and on-the-job safety protections), a college education has
changed from something helpful to something virtually necessary if you don’t want to be stuck in ultra-low-wage jobs
all your life. At the same time the number of seats open in colleges has been
deliberately kept low, partly because America has never put the kind of public money into education most
other advanced countries have (in most of Europe college is available free of
charge to just about anyone who can benefit from it; in the U.S. that’s
considered a dangerously radical and unaffordable idea) and partly because
historically college in the U.S. was one of the ways the rich and privileged
retained their money and privileges across the generations. Through much of the
19th and 20th century it was just accepted that colleges were something rich kids went to in
order to prepare to keep their families in the ruling class since America had
never had an hereditary aristocracy, or at least one that called itself that),
and though college became democratized somewhat in the mid-20th
century (as a lot of those working-class families who had good union jobs and
used some of that money to send their kids there), the current American ruling
class regards that as a threat and has used various tactics to once again
restrict college to the rich and powerful.
Among those techniques are insanely
restrictive admissions criteria (the parts of the system Rick Singer and his
clients were trying to game), increases in the actual costs of going to college
that have risen faster than overall inflation, a system of student loans (i.e.,
forcing would-be students from less affluent backgrounds to borrow huge amounts
of money that leave them essentially as debt peons for life, especially since
student loans are one of only two categories of debt, the other being taxes,
that cannot be discharged in
bankruptcy) and other techniques to keep the number of college graduates low
(and the number of graduates from the high-prestige institutions Singer was
aiming his clients’ kids to especially low) in order to increase their value in the job market, since as
anyone who took Economics 101 will remember, reducing the supply of something
automatically increases its price. The idea that certain people have (including
an Asian-American mother named Toy who’s profiled on the documentary, who filed
a $500 billion lawsuit against Singer and his clients, claiming that because of
their actions her son was denied the place at a prestige university to which
his grades, test scores and hard work should have entitled him) that America’s
college system, and the admissions policies that are its gateway, is a genuine
meritocracy is nonsense. America’s college system was set up by the rich and
privileged to maintain their wealth and privileges across the generations, and
by and large it’s done an excellent job of doing that. Rick Singer’s clients
were rich people who wanted to get their kids into the elite precincts of the
super-rich (as I put it above, 10-percenters who wanted their kids to be
1-percenters). As University of Oklahoma history professor Wilfred McClay wrote
in a Newsweek article quoted on
the Wikipedia page about the scandal, “The thing driving the current scandal
seems to be that ultimately parents were willing to do anything to game the
system to get their kids these advantages, not because the education was better
but because the legitimation of social position would be better.”
[1] — Actually, I think Dylan briefly attended the
University of Minnesota — the earliest extant recordings of him are from that
campus — though he didn’t graduate.
