Rick Singer pleaded guilty in 2019 to selling what he called 'a side door' into top universities.
"We help the wealthiest families in the U.S. get their kids in school," Singer bragged as he pitched one of his clients on a call recorded by the FBI."They want guarantees. They want this thing done."
"I have lost everything," Singer wrote in court filings pleading for leniency. He says he's"woken up every day feeling shame, remorse and regret." "What I told them so far, is that that 650k plus was actually gone to pay to our foundation for underserved kids," Singer said."No," Singer says,"tons of people."
Indeed, prosecutors argue Singer is most culpable"by leaps and bounds" and his sentence must be longer than the longest one to date, which was the two-and-a-half years imposed on former Georgetown University tennis coach Gordon Ernst, who accepted nearly $3.5 million in bribes in cases of at least 22 students.
Authorities have made it clear from day one that they wanted the Varsity Blues prosecutions to send a message to anyone who might consider any similar scheme to game the college admissions system. "To think that the sentences for those crimes by those people should be anywhere near the same, is insane," he says."It makes me want to cry."
Even so, Bello says, that completely misses the systemic — and legal — inequities baked in to the college admissions process that affect far more people than the Varsity Blues scam did. For example, he says schools continue to give a leg up to children of alumni, through legacy admissions, or to children of big donors.
Margie Amott, a college counselor in California who got to know Singer when she was a competitor of his some 20 years ago, says the lack of regulation is why Singer's scam wasn't stopped when she says he first started pushing the envelope.Instead, Amott says she watched Singer become more and more brazen, from padding students' resumes to lying about a student's ethnicity and even trying to hire someone to take a student's course online.
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