Who Is William Singer, the Man Behind The College Admissions Scandal?
On March 12, 2019 news broke that numerous individuals, including celebrities like actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, were being charged in the largest college cheating scam ever ever prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Codenamed "Operation Varsity Blues" the investigation reportedly determined that wealthy parents, Huffman and Loughlin included, had paid millions of dollars to get their children into top colleges, including Yale, Stanford, Georgetown and USC, by falsifying their records, having them erroneously marked as recruits for college sports teams, and using bribed officials to alter the children's answers on college entrance exams.
As more information about the investigation came to light, it quickly became clear that William Singer—also known as Rick Singer—was a central figure in the scam. Now a new Netflix documentary, Operation Varsity Blues, starring Matthew Modine in reenactments of Singer and directed by Chris Smith of Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened fame, is delving into his role in the fraud. Here's everything we know about the man at the heart of the scandal.
Singer pleaded guilty to four charges in federal court on March 12, 2019.
As a result of the FBI investigation, Singer was charged with one count each of racketeering conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and obstruction of justice, according to the New York Times. He pleaded guilt to all counts, saying, "Everything that [the prosecutor] stated is exactly true—all of those things, plus many more things I did.”
Singer was released on bail on the date of his plea and could reportedly face up to 65 years in prison as well as a $1.25 million fine, says CNN, however almost a year later, sentencing has yet to take place.
He owned a for-profit college counseling service known as the Key.
Singer's company, Edge College & Career Network, publicly known as the Key, operated in 81 US cities and six countries. Both entities now appear to be defunct, but at the time of the indictments in 2019, the Key touted itself on its website as a referral-based college counseling and life coaching service for "the world’s most respected families." He also, according to the Times, ran the Key Worldwide Foundation (now, likewise, defunct) which was set up as a non-profit foundation and was reportedly used to disguise payments made to Singer from his wealthy clients, totalling as much as $25 million.
He offered wealthy parents a "side door" to get their children into top colleges.
“If I can make the comparison, there is a front door of getting in, where a student just does it on their own,” Singer stated as part of his guilty plea. “There’s a back door, where people go to institutional advancement and make large donations, but they’re not guaranteed in. And then I created a side door that guaranteed families to get in. So that was what made it very attractive to so many families, is I created a guarantee."
According to the investigation, he created this "guarantee" through a series of methods, including arranging for students to do their ACT and SAT testing in specific sites where Singer had bribed proctors to correct some of the students answers after the testing; bribing coaches to assert that the students were recruits for the school's sports teams, regardless of the student's athletic performance (Loughlin's daughter, Olivia Jade Giannulli and her sister, Isabella, were both reportedly listed as recruits for their university’s crew team, though neither had participated in the sport); as well as lying about their biographical details, including their ethnicity, on admissions applications to take advantage of affirmative action.
The children involved were apparently unaware of these deceptions and the Justice Department emphasized that they were not the target of the investigation.
He started his career as a basketball coach.
Singer evidently began his career as boys basketball coach of Encina High School, from which he was fired in 1988 for what the Sacramento Bee reported at the time to be "an abusive nature toward referees." He later served as assistant coach for Sacramento State’s men’s basketball team.
The Key wasn't his first college counseling venture.
In 1992 Singer opened Future Stars College & Career Counseling in Sacramento, according to a 2005 profile on him from the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as a similar company called the CollegeSource in 2004. The since-deleted the Key website also originally stated that he helped create the nation's first fully-online high school, the University of Miami Online High School, which he sold to Kaplan College Preparatory in 2007.
In 2014 he wrote a book titled, Getting In: Gaining Admission to the College of Your Choice.
Singer is a former call center executive.
Between his counseling ventures, according to Singer's biography from the Key, he also worked managing call centers for the Money Store/First Union Bank, West Corporation, and became "the CEO of one of India’s largest call center companies."
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