An open letter to Felicity Huffman and other anxiety-riddled parents of high school students

Good news! Now you can pay a college counselor a lot of money and it's legal!

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Dear Felicity,

I meant to write this back in December, after your interview about Operation Varsity Blues aired, but then I got distracted with the holidays and, since the internet has a short memory, whatever I had to say didn’t seem that relevant anymore. But then this morning, New York Magazine ran a story called Paying for a Perfect College Application: How the Super-Rich Are Playing to Win When Everyone Else Wants to Level the Playing Field (see what I mean about the short memory?) and I was like, no, this is still a thing. Now parents can pay a 28-year-old Yale graduate $120,000 a year to turn their student into “Ivy bait” (New York Magazine’s words, not mine). And it’s not against the law!

Anyway, your interview. The one where you talked about getting snared in Rick Singer’s scheme to shoehorn children of the rich into prestigious colleges and universities through extralegal means. About being woken up in the middle of the night and handcuffed. About wondering out loud whether the whole thing was a joke. About your shame. About feeling like you had to break the law to give your daughter a chance at a future. “It seemed like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it,” you said.

I remember when the Varsity Blues story broke and how long, how fiercely the firestorm of schadenfreude and hot takes and internet memes burned. I work as a college admissions counselor (though not the fake SAT, photoshopping heads on athletes’ bodies kind), so I paid close attention. Everyone wanted to know why people who seemingly had everything—luxurious homes, high-profile jobs, social standing—would do something so extravagantly stupid. Everyone was absolutely sure that they would never stoop so low, be so short-sighted, so superficial, so cynical.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? You probably thought that about some other parent at some point in your life. We all have. Believe me, I know. In my college counseling practice, parents would sit in the same chair day after day and talk about all the other crazy parents at their kid’s high school. Not them, obviously. But! Everyone else was so insanely competitive and pulling strings on their children’s behalf—you know, an internship with a well-placed family friend here, a research paper with a college professor friend there—while they, that particular parent, were playing by the rules, fair and square, and now their child was going to be fighting an uphill battle in the admissions process. Oh, also? Did I think they should maybe call the development office at their alma mater to ask whether the development office could reach out to admissions at some point?

I live in Palo Alto, California—perhaps you’ve heard of it? My husband and I, like so many others before and after us, moved here because the schools were good. And if you’re looking at test scores and the number of students who go on to attend a four-year college, the schools are indeed good. Great, in fact! The problem is, the schools aren’t good for everyone. When you live in a place where the median house price is $2 million and where over 80 percent of the population holds a bachelor’s degree or higher, the expectations—articulated, unspoken, implied, inferred, assumed—are high. Some students thrive; others, to borrow from Henry David Thoreau, lead lives of quiet desperation; still others throw themselves under trains. We don’t like to talk about the latter two in Palo Alto. What we do talk about, a lot, is college. Who got in where and what they did or didn’t do to deserve it and who is a natural-born genius and who had, like, five tutors, one for each subject, plus a tutor who specialized in executive functioning and organization, and who had parents that terrorized the teachers and the administration at the high school so much that of course they had to write the kid a glowing recommendation when everyone really knows the kid is an arrogant, entitled little snot.

I’m going to take a wild guess that you had similar conversations with other parents of high schoolers. Am I right? Rick Singer, the Varsity  Blues mastermind, bragged that his phone would ring off the hook on Sunday morning, because Saturday night, “Mom and Dad go to a dinner party. They hear about every kid who’s getting into this school, doing this summer program.” And that’s when he would sign parents up—at  the moment they were the most vulnerable, at the moment when the big picture narrows down to a panicked pinpoint: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Georgetown, USC, UCLA. Just not, God forbid, a school with no cachet. “I want to fully understand the game plan and make sure we have a roadmap for success as it relates to [our daughter] and getting her into a school other than ASU,” Mossimo Giannulli wrote in an email to Rick Singer. 

I’m not pointing fingers, Felicity. What parent doesn’t want a roadmap for success? What parent wants their child to flounder, to be disappointed, to be hurt, to be rejected? “I know this sounds crazy,” you told the ABC interviewer, “but it seemed like [Rick Singer] was my only option.”

Boy, did that make the internet mad. The haters came out in droves. You were entitled and oblivious, they said. How could a person with your resources think cheating was your only option? Your daughter’s future is assured no matter what. What the hell is wrong with you?

I’m not saying what you did was great, but I understand where the impulse came from. It’s a pretty simple formula: parenting = love + fear. When fear takes over, parents do stupid things. I suspect that you did not pay to falsify your daughter’s SAT score because you’re a shitty person; I suspect you did it because you were terrified that something bad would happen to your daughter if you didn’t. Sixteen years earlier, you brought this tiny human being home, overwhelmed by love and terror and a cellular need to keep her safe, and that need doesn’t go away, ever. It can become warped, it can become suffocating, but at base, that’s what’s driving  anyone who is a parent: love and fear.

News flash: We’re all being scammed

You said it sounded crazy that you felt like you had no other option than Rick Singer, but you know what’s really crazy, Felicity? The fact that our college admissions system—at least when it comes to Harvard and Yale and Stanford and the rest  of the top 20 colleges—is so deeply flawed, so intrinsically unfair and opaque and maddening and anxiety-provoking, that it makes people like Rick Singer possible. The fact that we live in a world where everyone’s first impulse is to point fingers at the mother instead of asking why so many parents feel like they have to break the law in order to help their child have a future. Again, I’m not condoning what you did, but the truth is that we’re all being scammed—all the parents who lie awake at night worrying that their child won’t get into a college with a single-digit admit rate, all the students whose schedules are packed with AP courses and sports and clubs and nonprofits and internships and enrichment programs and everything except sleep and a social life. Like, there’s this urgent discussion about whether it’s better for a kid to be pointy or rounded or have a passion project or be deeply involved in community service (let’s hazard a guess, shall we, about how many of those projects are abandoned the minute the kid gets into college), but what about the kids themselves? What do they want? Does anyone bother to ask? Or do they just want what their parents and their peers want because that’s all they’ve been exposed to their entire life?

You talked about your undying shame, Felicity, but you know who doesn’t feel shame? The colleges implicated in Operation Varsity Blues. Of course a college can’t feel shame—it’s an institution, and institutions are august and revered and protected by ivy-covered walls. They’re sitting on tax-free endowments in the billions, and their presidents get very flustered when someone asks them why they can’t share half of that endowment with, say, a public university, and when they’re implicated in an admissions scandal, they fire the coaches who took bribes from parents of fake athletic recruits, but their development and alumni affairs offices hum right along. Shamelessly. Donations through the right channels, donations in the tens and hundreds of millions made in full view are welcomed. Your paltry, side-door, bargain-basement tens or hundreds of thousands to a private party? How dare you.

Here’s what else is nuts: the students whose parents can afford Rick Singer—or me, for that matter, or Christopher Rim, or any number of advisors, tutors, or coaches—have choices. So many choices. So many resources. Talk about irony: rich people feeling profoundly deprived. Who’s to blame, then, for the fact that we’ve been collectively brainwashed  to believe that the only colleges worth wanting are the ones we can’t have? Could it be, I dunno, The U.S. News & World Report, which started ranking colleges in 1983? Could it be our collective obsession with prestige and brand names and exclusivity? I mean, Harvard could scale and open a Harvard Southwest in, say, Arizona, but then the brand would be diluted and if more people could get into Harvard it wouldn’t be so special anymore, would it?

Should you have paid Rick Singer to falsify your daughter’s SAT scores? Of course not. Would your daughter have been just fine even without the fake scores? Absolutely. Did you have other choices? You betcha. But those questions are not the point. The real question, if you ask me, is why we have a college admissions system that has resulted in an unprecedented mental health crisis in teenagers and young adults and adult adults old enough to know better. I mean, how else do you explain why an otherwise intelligent grown-up would look down a narrow tunnel with a shiny college at the far end and call it a roadmap for success?