https://www.city-journal.org/college-admissions-scandal-meritocracy
If, like me, you’re an avid observer of human affairs at their most vain and status-crazed, you have been studying the College Cheating Scandal, or what investigators called Operation Varsity Blues, with all the intensity of a rabbinical scholar poring over Leviticus. Each reading yields delicious new details of greed, ambition, hypocrisy, and decadence. “Ah! Vanitas, Vanitatum!” as the author of the classic nineteenth-century novel Vanity Fair sighed. But eventually the mordant fun gives way to the recognition that what we have here is evidence of a serious sickness in the American meritocracy.
The story is well known by now, but before it disappears into the overflowing landfill of tawdry contemporary Americana, some of its more obscure gems deserve a farewell salute. Let’s begin with the master of ceremonies, William “Rick” Singer, owner of a Newport Beach, California college-consulting company. Singer bribed college coaches and staged mockups of his clients’ slacker children at athletic events, sometimes photoshopping their faces onto a picture of actual soccer players or rowers, or, weirdly, pole-vaulters. A 36-year-old Harvard grad, Mark Riddell, could take a standardized test and get an agreed-upon, specific score with the precision of an expert archer. Singer hired him to take or to correct tests for clients whose preliminary scores would put them on the reject pile: Riddell is now Cooperating Witness #2. My favorite bit of chicanery was Singer’s money-laundering operation. To hide the eye-catching sums that he was earning for his ploys—and to give his clients the extra perk of a (legal) tax deduction for their (illegal) contributions—Singer set up the Key Worldwide Foundation, which he advertised as “provid[ing] guidance, encouragement and opportunity to disadvantaged students around the world.” The IRS estimates that Singer earned $25 million for his good works.
