‘The Epitome of Sleaze’

As a pitcher on the Niles West High School freshman team in 1975, Rick Singer was decidedly average. In 26 innings, he allowed 17 walks, 35 hits, and 35 runs. Yet Marv Klebba, who coached the team, remembers the “chunky kid who pitched a little bit” more vividly than he does many better players.

Singer was unforgettable for reasons other than baseball skills. When he wasn’t playing, he would stand on the bench, cheering so loudly that “it was almost an embarrassment,” the coach recalled. “It was annoying to the other team.” Klebba, who also taught English, likened Singer to a loquacious Shakespearean character whose conniving led to his undoing. He was “sort of a future Falstaff with harmless puffery,” Klebba said. “A guy that was fun to be with but who you knew eventually would get into some trouble.”

Almost two decades later, Singer embarked on the career that would ultimately lead him into deep trouble. Since his graduation from Trinity University in San Antonio, he’d bounced around as a high-school and college-basketball coach, most recently at Sacramento State. But when the team lost 24 of 28 games in 1991-92, the coaching staff was dismissed. Married and jobless, Singer made ends meet by substitute teaching in Sacramento schools. But he had his eye on a new profession that seemed to suit him. It would be a gamble, but he would be his own boss and a pioneer in an emerging and potentially lucrative specialty: independent counseling for affluent families seeking to send their children to increasingly selective universities.

He earned a master’s degree in school counseling from the University of La Verne and, by 1994, was the first independent counselor in Sacramento. Singer called his enterprise Future Stars. Soon, well-off parents were clamoring, and paying, for his advice. What he lacked in expertise, he made up for in chutzpah. His vision and ambition were on a grand scale, swelling until they culminated in the massive scam finally exposed by Operation Varsity Blues.

In the wake of his guilty plea this year, media reports portrayed Singer as a criminal mastermind who deftly hid his activities. But Singer didn’t fool everyone. Long before 2011, when court documents indicate that his bribing of coaches and test administrators began, he was notorious among other counselors and college advisers for boosting students’ chances by pretending that they were racial minorities or by burnishing their extracurricular resumes. Many of Singer’s associates — fellow independent counselors, high school guidance counselors, his own employees — suspected him of cheating. At least one prep school banned him from its campus. It didn’t matter.

The ultimate rogue operator, Singer didn’t need the blessing of anyone else. He did just fine ignoring everyone’s rules in favor of his own. He knew how to appeal to the panic of wealthy parents who fear that their children will not get into exclusive universities. He promised the certainty they craved, and at a bargain price compared with the legal donation needed to improve their chances. “What we do is we help the wealthiest families in the U.S. get their kids into school,” he explained to one parent, according to court documents. “They want guarantees, they want this thing done … There is a front door, which means you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement, which is ten times as much money. And I’ve created this side door in.”

Singer and the other independent counselors who followed in his wake upended the college admissions process, widening the advantage for the affluent. Unlike traditional high-school guidance counselors, independents are accountable only to the families that have hired them. The booming field remains unregulated and unlicensed; anyone can hang out a shingle, and income depends largely on salesmanship and self-promotion.

Singer’s 2014 how-to manual, Getting In: Gaining Admission to Your College of Choice, exemplified the cynical commercialism of some of these hired guns. “Getting into college is a lot like selling iPads or cans of Coca-Cola,” he wrote. “It’s all about branding … If you don’t know what your personal brand is yet, it’s time to name it and claim it. Because you need a strong brand.”

Since 2005, the number of full-time independent counselors has quadrupled to as many as 10,000, with another 12,000 to 15,000 part-timers, according to Mark Sklarow, chief executive officer of the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA). Today, in what has evolved into a two-tier system, independents act as enablers for the rich and powerful, while poor and middle-class families rely on overburdened high-school guidance counselors. California has 945 pupils for every school guidance counselor, according to the state’s Department of Education, about double the national ratio. At Horace Mann, the elite prep school in the Bronx, about 20 percent of seniors have an independent counselor, a survey by the student newspaper found in 2016.

About 2,500 independent counselors belong to professional groups, such as IECA, which requires education and experience in counseling, as well as 50 campus visits and an online ethics course. Among its principles: Members should “assess, make recommendations for, and represent each student accurately and fairly.” They should not “write application essays or any portion of an essay for students,” and should neither “guarantee placement nor outcomes.” Another group, the Higher Education Consultants Association, also mandates campus visits, plus professional development training and attendance at a conference.

But at least 5,000 other counselors don’t join professional associations and aren’t bound by these standards, according to Sklarow. He told me that IECA rejects about 35 percent of applicants for membership, mainly because they lack credentials or violate its rules.

In 2015, a 16-year-old girl complained to him about Ivy Coach, a college counseling outfit founded by Bev Taylor, who joined IECA in 2011. The teenager told Sklarow that she had been wait-listed at Duke University. Hoping to be plucked from the list, she had written a supplemental essay and called Ivy Coach for feedback. Taylor’s son, Brian, told her that he would evaluate it for $5,000 an hour. The student, Sklarow wrote to Bev Taylor, “felt scammed and pressured.” At Sklarow’s recommendation, IECA expelled Ivy Coach.

Brian Taylor said that he did nothing wrong, and that Ivy Coach’s fees were none of IECA’s business. “Membership in that organization is not worth the paper it’s written on,” he said.

In the mid-90s, Singer gained a following among middle-class and upper-middle-class families who paid $1,200 to $1,500. His reputation for results — and, among the cognoscenti, for padding applications — spread quickly. “Every consultant is faced with an ethical dilemma within the first year,” IECA’s Sklarow told me. “A parent who says, ‘Let’s claim my child is Native American.’ ‘Let’s claim he’s always cared about the poor.’ Singer’s reputation was as a guy who’s willing to do what it takes. Let’s build up a student’s resume. ‘You were in the ecology club this past year. Let’s say you were an officer for the past three years.’ Word was, he was willing to use experts to rewrite essays much more than anybody would think was appropriate. His descent to illegality was a decade or more in the making.”

By 2002, Singer aspired to a wealthier clientele. He started a business called the CollegeSource (rechristened The Edge College & Career Network in 2007) and began attracting A-list clients such as football star Joe Montana, golfer Phil Mickelson, and venture capitalist John Doerr. (All three have said that their families received standard consulting services from Singer and no fraud was involved.) By 2011, when Singer was divorced, his annual income was $366,000, according to court documents.

“He went from charging $1,800 to work with a family to 10 grand, then five grand a year and seven grand in senior year,” a former business associate said. He ramped up not only his fees, but also his exaggerations — about students, his company, and himself. Unlike the old paper applications, the new online forms didn’t require a handwritten signature, so Singer asked students for their passwords and submitted the applications himself, adding hyperbole.

Another independent counselor in Sacramento said that she knew a parent who hired Singer. The mother was astonished when Singer revamped her son’s college application, claiming that he had organized a fantasy football league, marketed an international blog on social responsibility, written several short films for television, spoken Spanish at home, ranked as a top-fifty junior tennis player, and coordinated the basketball program at Helen Keller Park. None of it was true, and there was no such park in Sacramento. The mother paid Singer’s bill, stopped working with him, and had her son fill out the application accurately.

Singer claimed in marketing materials to have a Ph.D., although he dropped out of a management program at Capella University without finishing his doctorate. Based on an interview with him, Sacramento Magazine reported in 2009 that he “reads applications and essays for some of the top schools in the country, which keeps him up to speed on how admissions boards think and work.” In a 2016 court deposition, according to the Los Angeles Times, he said he had reviewed applications for UC Davis, UCLA, and the University of Miami. They all denied it.

“I had someone tell me once that he said he sat on the board of Starbucks,” the former business associate told me. “The more audacious the lie, the more believable.”

Singer’s website boasted of a vast clientele and worldwide scope. In postings in 2007 and 2008, he claimed to have “coached, counseled and mentored” more than 25,000 college applicants, and to have provided “Life Coaching and Consulting services to over 40,000 clients in 21 foreign countries and 39 states.” His international outreach, according to the site, started in 2002 in “the five largest cities in India … Within a year, operations were launched in Singapore, Bangkok, Philippines, China, Japan and Korea.”

Singer burnished his credibility around 2004 by assembling an advisory board for CollegeSource. It consisted of five higher-education heavyweights: Bill Bowen, Donald Kennedy, and Ted Mitchell — the former presidents of Princeton, Stanford, and Occidental College, respectively — former UCLA chancellor Charles Young, and former Princeton dean of admission Fred Hargadon. It’s a testament to Singer’s persuasiveness that he was able to hoodwink these honchos — and to keep their allegiance even after a well-regarded admissions insider tried to warn them.

In January 2008, Jonathan Reider, then director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School and a former senior admissions officer at Stanford, rebuked three of the advisory board members. “Do you want to be associated with this guy? He is the epitome of sleaze in the private counseling business,” Reider emailed Kennedy, Hargadon, and Mitchell. “How did he get your names onto his website? There are some decent independent counselors, but he isn’t one of them … We can’t stop this guy, but we can slow him down a bit.”

Mitchell had known Singer since the late 1990s, when both were on the board of the company that made Hooked on Phonics, a popular reading program. “Guilty as charged,” Mitchell responded to Reider. “I AM, indeed, working with Rick. I strongly disagree that Rick is the ‘epitome of sleaze.’ Don and I got involved with Rick when he was trying to get college access info to poor kids and ‘break the code’ for kids who didn’t have access to private counseling … Do you know Rick? He is a decent guy, Jon, and I’d love to find time to introduce the two of you.”

Reider stood his ground. “There are ways to go about the business in an ethical way, so that you do not earn the disapproval of the professionals. I am the tip of the iceberg.” For Singer to have helped as many students as he claimed, Reider continued, “he would have to have a staff of 20 working full-time every year. I find that unbelievable … Ted, this is very shoddy stuff.”

In 2017, Mitchell became president of the American Council on Education, a higher-education lobbying group. In a 2019 statement after the scandal broke, he downplayed his ties to Singer, saying he “served briefly nearly 15 years ago in an unpaid role on an advisory board of one of his previous ventures.” Mitchell said he was “shocked, sad, and angry that someone I thought I knew could perpetrate these crimes.”

In the fallout from Operation Varsity Blues, the colleges have portrayed themselves as helpless victims. In reality, they have no one to blame but themselves. They created the conditions for Singer’s scheme, from the admissions preferences he exploited for athletes in rich people’s sports, to the ever-increasing selectivity that ratcheted up parents’ desperation. They’ve sold admissions slots for decades, yet professed shock that their coaches would too.

They can’t say they weren’t warned, either. My 2006 book, The Price of Admission, documented the outsized influence of wealth and parentage on elite-college admissions, and suggested six reforms. Among them were eliminating preferences for athletes in upper-crust sports and for children of alumni and donors, and establishing a firewall between fundraising and admissions.

Since then, several studies have confirmed my mostly anecdotal evidence that what I called the “preferences of privilege” have far more sway in admissions decisions than universities like to acknowledge. For instance, a 2013 study by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research found that alumni parentage bestowed an admissions boost equivalent to that for African Americans, and larger than those for Hispanics and Native Americans. Among applicants with the strongest academic credentials, Harvard accepted 55 percent of legacies, compared with 15 percent of non-legacies.

Periodic scandals have also highlighted inequities. In 2009, the University of Illinois’s president resigned after the Chicago Tribune reported that the university, overruling its own admissions officers, was accepting subpar applicants recommended by trustees and state lawmakers. In 2018, the same university’s admissions office stumbled on a scheme, hatched by an independent counselor, to enable applicants from well-off families to receive need-based financial aid. Dozens of parents in the Chicago suburbs gave up their college-bound children for guardianship to relatives or friends, making the candidates financially independent under U.S. Department of Education rules.

After The Price of Admission was published, I learned about an instance of a U.S. president seeking to influence an admissions decision. In 1993, Guido Calabresi, then dean of Yale Law School, received a call from the White House. Yale Law’s most powerful alumnus, President Bill Clinton, asked him to let in a Georgetown University graduate named Hunter Biden, according to two people familiar with the incident. Hunter was the younger son of Joe Biden, then chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and now a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Calabresi, who had walled off the dean’s office from the admissions process at Yale Law to avoid just such pressure, told Clinton that he would not intercede. The admissions office then rejected Hunter.

Calabresi did meet with Hunter, however, and encouraged him to go to another law school and reapply to Yale as a transfer student. Hunter took his advice. After a year at Georgetown’s law school, Hunter was admitted to Yale in the summer of 1994, soon after Calabresi stepped down as dean.

A person close to Hunter Biden said that he had strong credentials, including an LSAT score around Yale Law’s median. At Yale, he earned editing positions on two law journals before receiving his degree in 1996. “The notion that his admission was a favor, or wasn’t merited, it’s just offensive to him,” this person said.

Despite their prevalence, admissions boosts for the rich remain unpopular both among students and the public at large. In a 2016 Gallup poll, 52 percent of respondents said colleges should not consider whether an applicant’s parent is a graduate, and only 11 percent said it should be a major factor. Brown University students voted overwhelmingly in 2018 to establish a committee to reexamine the use of legacy status in admissions. Rather than implement this recommendation, the administration shifted the focus from legacy preference to expanding access for disadvantaged applicants, Brown spokesman Brian Clark told me. “It was important to work to correct a misperception among students that there is any trade-off between admitting first-generation and low-income students and legacies,” he said in an email.

Brown’s sidestep was typical. In the more than a dozen years since The Price of Admission was published, most colleges have not adopted its proposals, nor have they otherwise restricted the preferences of privilege. Occasional initiatives in Congress to tax either donations intended to secure college admissions or the money saved by faculty and staff when the college that employs them waives or reduces their children’s tuition have also come to naught. Instead, the bulk of changes have tilted the balance even more in favor of the wealthy and well-connected.

The resurgence of binding early decision reflects this pattern. In the 2000s, the practice fell into disfavor because it prevents students from poor families from shopping around for the best financial-aid package. Early applicants, who are often alumni children, tend to be affluent and savvy about the college admissions game. Tulane went to binding early decision in 2016, and Villanova followed in 2018. Boston College adopted early decision in 2019, as did the University of Virginia, which had dropped it in 2006 in an effort to attract more low-income applicants.

About half of the top-40 national universities now offer early decision, including the University of Pennsylvania, which enrolled about 53 percent of its class that way in 2019. Penn admitted 18 percent of its early applicants, compared with 5.5 percent of its regular-decision pool. Since the students admitted early were locked into attending Penn, they boosted the university’s yield rate, or proportion of accepted students who enroll, which is often regarded as a barometer of a school’s standing. Penn’s website, like Villanova’s, encourages alumni children to apply early to be “given the most consideration.”

Public universities have also tilted toward the rich. As state funding to higher education has lagged, they have become increasingly dependent on private donors, who often seek admissions perks in return. The University of Virginia’s fundraising office flagged applicants from wealthy alumni and donor families for special treatment, the Washington Post reported in 2017. Entries on a “watch list” urged that one such candidate, initially rejected, “must be” wait-listed and “if at all possible” accepted. The terse explanation: “500k.”

A broader social trend, the rise in income inequality, has fostered a similar disparity in college admissions. The $2.5-million pledge in 1998 by real-estate developer Charles Kushner, first reported in my book, that induced Harvard to take his underachieving son, Jared, seems like a pittance today. Jared, of course, later married Ivanka Trump, and is now a senior adviser to the president of the United States. Shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 election, a Kushner Companies spokeswoman assured me by email that “the allegation” that Charles Kushner’s gift to Harvard was related to Jared’s admission “is and always has been false,” and that Jared “was an excellent student in high school and graduated from Harvard with honors.” Ninety-one percent of Jared’s 2003 class at Harvard also graduated with honors, according to a university spokeswoman.

Also driving up the price of admission — and the anxiety level of even the richest parents — is the increasing selectivity of elite universities, which haven’t expanded enrollment to keep pace with population growth. Harvard, where the freshman class has stayed the same size for decades, admits less than 5 percent of its applicants. So does Stanford. The University of Southern California, the goal of more than a dozen parents charged in Operation Varsity Blues, sliced its admission rate to 13 percent in 2018 from 24.3 percent in 2010, 34.1 percent in 2000, and 71.9 percent in 1996. Tufts University has more than halved its admission rate in 20 years, from 32.1 percent in 1999 to 15 percent in 2019, while its undergraduate enrollment increased by 13 percent from 1999 to 2018. This pattern has created a vicious circle. As elite universities become harder to get into, students (at least those who don’t make an early commitment) respond by applying to more schools, multiplying the number of applications — and rejections.

Facing such daunting odds, some rich parents worry that a big gift to one school may no longer be enough. From 2011 through 2017, the latest year for which public filings are available, Wall Street tycoon David Shaw hedged his bets by ponying up $1 million a year to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, at least $500,000 a year to Columbia and Brown, and (starting in 2013) $200,000 a year to MIT, for a grand total of $37.3 million. His two older children both enrolled at Yale; the youngest is still in high school.

Singer exploited the hysteria. “Getting into college today is far more difficult, competitive and expensive than ever before,” his website warned in 2016. “Even a small oversight or mistake in the college admissions process can make all the difference in your son or daughter gaining admission to the school of their dreams or receiving a valuable scholarship. Less than 10 percent of students get into their first choice college.”

When prosecutors disclosed Singer’s conspiracy, its scope and audacity staggered the country, suggesting there was no limit to the entitlement of the ultra-wealthy, the venality of independent counselors and college coaches, and the deference of college admissions to the rich and powerful.

Ron McKenna, a friend of Singer’s since they coached basketball together at Sacramento State, was devastated. One Sunday, he called Singer. “I told him I’d just got home from Mass,” McKenna recalled. “I wanted to let him know I said a prayer for him. I wanted to let him know I’m still in his corner.”

Singer cut the conversation short. “Don’t ask me any questions,” he warned McKenna. After a lifetime of lying, he wasn’t ready to tell his old friend the truth.

Daniel Golden is a senior editor at ProPublica. This article is adapted from his book The Price of Admission, just out in a new edition from Broadway Books.