Crime

African-American, Top-Ranked Tennis Star Applied To Be First In Family To Go To College -- Except Her Dad Runs A Law Firm, She Doesn't Play Tennis, And She's White

More wild Varsity Blues stuff.

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Perhaps the most bizarre of all the “Varsity Blues” stories is the tale of college consultant Rick Singer’s efforts to enmesh himself in the Buckley School. Singer, the alleged mastermind behind the college admissions scandals that have provided so much glee to those of us watching rich people plead guilty to trying to rig the system to help out their fail kids, locked in on the prestigious school’s board members and took the questionable tactics we’ve read about in other indictments to a whole new level.

Adam Bass, the CEO of the Buchalter firm and a Buckley board member approached the school’s headmaster to push his daughter’s C+ to a B-. That’s mildly sketchy but the difference between the two is often negligible so that’s not so bad. But that’s when Bass says he gave Singer his daughter’s applications password and things took a curious turn. According to a detailed Vanity Fair report:

In December 2017, [Guidance Counselor Julie] Taylor-Vaz found herself in a different curious conversation, this time with Tulane. A Tulane admissions officer said the college would be delighted to offer a spot to one of Buckley’s students, Eliza Bass—an African American tennis whiz, ranked in the Top 10 in California, whose parents had never attended college. But Taylor-Vaz knew this wasn’t true. Eliza was white. She didn’t play tennis competitively. And her father was Adam Bass, a wealthy board member, with a B.A. and law degree from USD. Taylor-Vaz shared the information with her superiors. Puzzled, Buckley made calls to Georgetown and Loyola Marymount. They too wanted to accept Eliza, the African American tennis wonder. Buckley set the colleges straight and promptly got to work trying to determine what on earth was going on.

When pressed, Bass informed the school that he’d handed over his daughter’s applications to Singer but had no idea she had become an unwitting Rachel Dolezal. Now aware of the issue, his daughter contacted all the schools and set the record straight, pleading for an opportunity to submit her real bio for consideration.

It turned out she got into Berkeley on her own merits, so the story ends well for her.

Meanwhile, her dad isn’t facing any penalties for his work with Singer. In some ways, since the scam apparently set up for his daughter was so off-the-wall — one that didn’t involve parents and students colluding with shady proctors to fake test scores like many of the Varsity Blues stories — authorities seem to believe that he was fully out of the loop on all this.

So the lesson, for anyone out there still considering an admissions consultant, is to remember that no matter how much you’re paying them, it’s still your child’s application and under no circumstances should you cede control of the application to anyone else. You wouldn’t let an associate file something with your signature without passing your eyes over it — your kid deserves the same courtesy.

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To Cheat and Lie in L.A.: How the College-Admissions Scandal Ensnared the Richest Families in Southern California [Vanity Fair]

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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