—Sylvester Loving, B1Daily

America spent years fighting over affirmative action, “merit,” and whether Black students were receiving some unfair advantage in college admissions. Then Operation Varsity Blues ripped the curtain off an entirely different admissions system, one where wealthy families could simply reach for their checkbooks and purchase a crooked side entrance.

The 2019 college admissions scandal exposed parents paying William “Rick” Singer to manipulate standardized tests and manufacture athletic credentials so their children could gain admission to universities including Yale, Stanford, USC, Georgetown and UCLA. Federal prosecutors initially charged dozens of people, including more than 30 wealthy parents.

The scandal should be remembered whenever somebody casually suggests that Black students are the people undermining “merit” in American higher education.

Because Varsity Blues showed America something considerably uglier:

Privilege had its own cheat code.

This Wasn’t Affirmative Action. It Was Affirmative Fraud.

The mechanics of the scheme were breathtaking.

Prosecutors said parents paid to have SAT and ACT administrators facilitate cheating, including allowing another person to take tests for students or correcting answers afterward. Other parents paid to have their children presented to universities as athletic recruits even when they lacked the corresponding athletic credentials.

Singer reportedly collected roughly $25 million from parents between 2011 and 2018 while promising access to what he called a “side door” into elite higher education.

This wasn’t a disadvantaged teenager getting an extra admissions consideration because she attended an underfunded high school.

These were families with money and extraordinary advantages who nevertheless decided that ordinary privilege wasn’t enough.

Some wanted the finish line moved directly in front of their children.

The Faces of Varsity Blues Complicated America’s Favorite Admissions Narrative

The most famous defendants became actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, but the parent defendants also included CEOs, investors, entrepreneurs, real-estate figures and other affluent professionals. Contemporary reporting repeatedly characterized the defendants as wealthy parents and business elites.

And yes, many of the most prominent parents implicated in the scandal were white.

That matters because of the political environment surrounding college admissions.

Black students have routinely been forced to defend their presence at selective universities against insinuations that they were admitted because standards were lowered for them. The phrase “affirmative action” became political shorthand for supposedly undeserving minorities taking opportunities from more qualified applicants.

Meanwhile, Varsity Blues uncovered wealthy parents doing something infinitely less ambiguous:

They were actually cheating.

Not receiving consideration because of historical discrimination.

Not attending through a diversity program.

Not overcoming poverty or poorly funded schools.

Cheating.

The Justice Department described a conspiracy involving fraudulent test scores, bribery and bogus athletic recruitment.

The irony could power a small city.

But Don’t Replace One Racial Stereotype With Another

There is an important distinction worth preserving.

The evidence strongly supports saying that Varsity Blues was overwhelmingly a scandal of wealth and privilege, and many of its best-known participants were white. It does not establish that Black students as a racial group “largely don’t cheat.”

Academic dishonesty exists across racial groups, and turning “white students cheat, Black students don’t” into a racial generalization would commit the same intellectual mistake this column is criticizing.

The stronger point is devastating enough without embellishment:

Black students were not the group exposed as beneficiaries of the Varsity Blues conspiracy.

The scandal’s defining characteristic was wealth, not disadvantaged minority status.

And that makes the decades-long obsession with Black beneficiaries of affirmative action look particularly selective.

America Scrutinized the Front Door While Money Was Crawling Through the Window

This is the larger scandal.

Elite college admissions have never operated solely as a pristine meritocracy where the highest test scores march obediently into the best universities.

Athletic recruitment, donor relationships, legacy preferences and access to expensive tutoring can all advantage particular applicants through legal means. Varsity Blues went dramatically further by crossing into outright fraud and bribery.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli paid $500,000 in connection with getting their daughters into USC as crew recruits even though neither had competed in the sport.

Think about that the next time somebody looks suspiciously at a Black student walking across an Ivy League campus and wonders whether that student “really earned” the seat.

Where was that presumption of incompetence when wealthy families were purchasing elaborate admissions schemes?

Where was the national panic about standards?

Where were the lectures about people taking seats from “more deserving” applicants?

Suddenly the supposedly sacred temple of meritocracy had a VIP entrance around the back.

Black Students Have Had to Prove They Belong

This is why Varsity Blues deserves to remain part of the affirmative-action conversation even years later.

Black students frequently enter selective institutions carrying an invisible burden: the suspicion that racial preferences, rather than talent, explain their presence.

That suspicion can follow students who earned excellent grades, survived disadvantaged schools, worked jobs while studying, became first-generation college students or simply competed successfully under whatever admissions system existed at the time.

Yet the Varsity Blues parents demonstrated what actual manipulation of merit looks like.

Fake athletic credentials.

Manipulated examinations.

Bribed insiders.

Fraudulent representations.

That’s not an argument about whether universities should consider race alongside dozens of other characteristics.

That’s cheating with a concierge service.

Wealth Was the Real Superpower

The deeper lesson of Varsity Blues is therefore not that every wealthy white applicant is undeserving. That would be nonsense.

It’s that American conversations about educational fairness have often focused intensely on race while treating class privilege as background furniture.

A wealthy family can purchase elite tutoring, private schooling, admissions consultants, extracurricular opportunities and other perfectly legal advantages long before an application reaches an admissions office.

Varsity Blues showed what happened when some parents decided even those advantages weren’t sufficient.

They bought something else.

Singer’s “side door.”

And federal agents eventually kicked it down.

Remember Varsity Blues the Next Time Someone Blames Black Students

The scandal should permanently complicate simplistic stories about who receives unearned advantages in American education.

Black students did not invent legacy admissions.

Black students did not invent donor influence.

Black students did not create expensive private-school pipelines.

And Black students weren’t the defining beneficiaries of Operation Varsity Blues.

Wealthy parents were.

That is why the scandal remains so politically revealing.

America spent an extraordinary amount of time debating whether considering race gave Black applicants an unfair boost while some extraordinarily privileged families were apparently operating under another philosophy entirely:

Why compete for the seat when you can rig the competition?

Operation Varsity Blues wasn’t merely a celebrity scandal.

It was a spectacular crack in the mythology of American meritocracy.

And through that crack, the country got an unusually clear look at something Black Americans had been saying for a very long time:

Sometimes the people screaming loudest about “merit” aren’t competing on a level playing field either.

—Sylvester Loving, B1Daily