Over fifty people including college coaches, movie stars, and tech executives have been caught in the college scandal nicknamed “Operation Varsity Blues” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
In this scandal, wealthy parents tried to get their kids to get an admission to a good college illegally. Many colleges that were involved in this scandal were Georgetown University, Stanford University, University of California, Los Angeles, University of San Diego, University of Southern California, The University of Texas in Austin, Wake Forest University, and even Yale.
There were two ways of doing this, and the one man who created this scheme oversaw it all: William “Rick” Singer, a former football coach. He began the scheme in 2011, and his two ways of doing the scheme paid him big money. The first way was to cheat on the ACTs and the SATs, two tests for college entrance exams. Parents would have the college know that their child had a learning disability, even if there were no signs of it. This gave the student extra time to take the test. They could change the results drastically by having other people taking the test for them or bribing the proctor, the person who was appointed to keep an eye on students taking tests, for the right answers. Sometimes, the students were legally taking the test had their tests replaced by a proctor who filled in an answer sheet with the correct answers.
127 our experts are availableright now
Both ways were pretty expensive to the average person, but the second way was much more expensive. The second way to get a college admission with this scandal was to create a phony athletic profile created by Singer. The supposed “athlete” would be put in the reserves spot. The coaches were bribed to do this even if the student have absolutely no prior experience with the sport. These two ways helped Singer to earn over six and a half million dollars over the course of seven years. The money he received from parents was donated to his fake foundation, The Key Worldwide Foundation. Singer’s scandal was suspicious to federal authorities in 2018, when a man told them that he had bribed a women’s soccer coach to put his daughter into Yale’s soccer team. Singer was found guilty of his crimes and cooperates with the FBI. As for the students that had already gotten into a college with the fraud, their future with the college is unknown.
It is a shame that this happened to many of the colleges we thought were great, and we cannot forget that for each one of these scandalous students, a student that had legitimately taken the test and got a good score was rejected.
