OPERATION VARSITY BLUES

Operation Varsity Blues Netflix

Everything has a price — including admission to top US colleges. The “back door” to an Ivy League school comes via a donation with a price tag in the tens of millions, independent college counsellor Rick Singer told wealthy parents. His “side door” was a bargain by comparison — usually somewhere more in the region of a million.

Singer was the mastermind behind the US college admissions bribery scandal that made headlines in 2019. It was big news mainly because of the large number of high-powered CEOs and funny minor celebrities (Becky from Full House; a woman whose family invented Hot Pockets) who were implicated and sentenced to jail. But the real story behind it all was the intricate web of corruption and fraud Rick Singer successfully oversaw for years.

That’s the story told by Operation Varsity Blues, the new Netflix documentary from the makers of the Fyre Festival documentary. It’s built around reconstructions of real phone conversations between Singer and his clients, taken from wiretap transcripts released by the US government. Singer is played by Matthew Modine (the villainous doctor in Stranger Things), who takes the art of the dramatic reconstruction to artistic heights seldom seen before.

Singer’s job as a college counsellor was meant to involve coaching high school students through the application process — helping them draft their letters of application and prepare for their SATs. Instead, he helped an estimated 730 students a year get into their dream colleges through the side door of the schools’ athletics programmes — by photoshopping them into high-school water polo teams and bribing various coaches.

Like the Fyre Festival documentary, watching Singer’s web of deceit come crashing down and some of his wealthy clients go to jail offers unrivalled schadenfreude. By the end, though, you mostly just feel sorry for the kids, unknowing pawns in their parents’ vanity games.