Felicity Huffman Speaks Out!

According to Wikipedia, Felicity Huffman

is best known for her role as Lynette Scavo in the ABC comedy-drama Desperate Housewives (2004–2012.

But more recently, she's been better known for her role in the Varsity Blues scandal. At the link,

Huffman was among dozens charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office on March 12, 2019, in a nationwide college entrance exam cheating scandal. Prosecutors alleged that Huffman's $15,000 donation to the Key Worldwide Foundation, ostensibly a charitable contribution, was in fact payment to someone who posed as Huffman's daughter Sophia to take the SAT, receiving a score that showed significant improvement over Sophia's score on the Preliminary SAT (PSAT). Huffman was arrested at her California home on March 12 by FBI agents and IRS agents and charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services fraud.

According to Breitbart News,

Actress Felicity Huffman, who spent 11 days in jail after bribing college officials $15,000 to fudge her daughter’s SAT scores in what was part of the infamous college admissions scandal, said she felt she had “no option” but to break the law in order to give her daughter “a future.”

“People assume that I went into this looking for a way to cheat the system in making proverbial criminals [sic] deals in back alleys, but that was not the case,” Huffman insisted in a recent interview with ABC, breaking her silence on the matter for the first time since the scandal unfolded.

Nevertheless, the story she tells is muddled.

“I worked with a highly recommended college counselor named Rick Singer,” the Transamerica star continued. “I worked with him for a year and trusted him implicitly. He recommended programs and tutors, and he was the expert.”

“And after a year, he started to say, ‘Your daughter is not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to,’ and I believed him,” she added.

Here's the first problem. Her daughter was starting the college application rigamarole, so she must have been in her first years in high school, maybe 15 years old. How could she possibly have known what college she wanted to attend? She lived in Hollywood, so maybe USC or UCLA might have come first to mind, but she'd probably be a day student at those schools, or at least home pretty frequently. Might she want to go to college farther from home to become more independent? Was anyone asking her basic questions like that?

We just don't know what schools were on Rick Singer's list, but we do know that none was a school she could get into, because that was what Rick Singer, a convicted con artist, told Felicity Huffman. I'll be that an ordinary guidance counselor at whatever high school Ms Huffman was sending her daughter to could have come up with a list of schools that would indeed accept her daughter. A quick web search shows colleges with good reputations in California alone that will accept just about anyone, including

• Sonoma State University
• Marymount California University
• Mills College
• California State University Stanislaus
• Saint Mary's College
• Mount Saint Mary's College

As it turned out, once the scandal blew over and her daughter actually took the SATs under her own name, she got into Carnegie Mellon University. This says to me that what almost certainly should have happened was that Ms Huffman should have had a serious sitdown with a real school guidance counselor who would tell her that trying to get into Stanford wasn't realistic, but she could certainly consider many second-level schools lilke CMU, which has a perfectly acceptable acceptance rate of 11%.

But beyond that, a real guidance counselor would have put together a list of maybe half a dozen schools, ranging from an aspirational first choice, down through schools where there might be better odds, and ending up with a "safety school" that could assure almost certain admittance. College visits to each of them during the application process would probably make both the applicant and the parents comfortable with any outcome on the list.

So basically Rick Singer was scamming Ms Huffman and putting her into a panic because her daughter wouldn't get into any of the schools she "wanted", even though there doesn't seem to have been a serious effort to identify which those might be. Thus:

“And so, when he slowly started to present the criminal scheme, it seemed like — and I know this seems crazy — that that was my only option to give my daughter a future,” Huffman said. “And I know hindsight is 20/20, but it felt like I would be a mad mother if I didn’t do it.”

Desperate housewife indeed. I've already posted here about Dr Callahan, the principal of my junior high school, who was insightful enough to trace some of my adolescent behavior problems to my parents' panic to get me into the "college of my choice", which of course was the college of their choice -- at age 14 or 15, how could I possibly know anything about college at all, much less which one I wanted to attend? From what I recall, some time around my early adolescence about 1960, there was the first great media frenzy that the Ivies -- "the college of your choice" -- had become selective, and getting in would now be an arduous process.

My parents were among the first to buy into that mass hysteria, which seems to have gripped many levels of society, including even the Hollywood elite, ever since. What puzzles me is that Ms Huffman bought into the idea that her daughter would have "no future" without a highly prestigious degree, and she would somehow be a bad mother if she didn't bribe someone to get her in, when there are dozens of perfectly acceptable upper-middle-level schools that apparently would have accepted her daughter with the SAT scores she had.

In fact, an intensive SAT prep course like the Princeton Review costs $2100, a bargain compared to the $15,000 Ms Huffman gave Rick Singer. I think what this all boils down to is that the Ivies have certainly allowed the impression to continue, if they haven't enabled it, that admission into an entering class is an unsurpassed indication of merit, reflecting as much if not more on the parents as on the applicant. Thus con artists can play on the insecurity and thwarted aspirations of the Felicity Huffman style parents of the world, as well as inflating the value of their own decidedly inferior product.