A Fictional Look at the Scandal, From the Student's Point of View

Chloe Wynn Berringer tells the story in Julie Buxbaum's new novel, Admission. She is a senior at an exclusive high school. She really pushed hard on the SATs and surprised even herself with her score of 1440. She's been admitted to Southern California College.

The novel opens with an early-morning visit to her home by seven armed men from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "Coming," she shouts at them. "Relax, dude." She imagines that they are strippers, hired by her aunt for her mother's upcoming 50th birthday.

Of course, they are not strippers. They have come to arrest her mother, Joy Fields, the star of Blood Moon, the CW's latest royal vampire show.

What Buxbaum has attempted is a fictional look at the admissions scandal, from the perspective of one of the students who was helped inappropriately and illegally by a parent.

Much of the writing about the scandal has focused on the (alleged) adults who paid for their children's test scores to be faked and who fictionalized their children into star athletes. Buxbaum's novel includes plenty of examples of the adults' behavior. But the focus is solidly on Chloe. Chapters alternate between "Then," from before the scandal broke, and "Now." Chloe has typical worries for a high school student. There's a boyfriend (who breaks up with her after the scandal surfaces, via text). Her best friend is a star student. And of course she wants to get into college. But she worries about her scholarly skills; hence all the work on the SATs.

In an author's note to the novel, Buxbaum writes that, when the scandal broke, she became "obsessed" with it. "The material was endlessly juicy. The greed. The entitlement. And of course: the nerve. Yet that wasn't the part of the picture (or the only part) that fascinated me," she writes. "Underneath, I felt that the scandal was a story about teenagers and their parents, about families, about how the expectations of one generation shape the next. In other words, the stuff of novels."

Most of the plot of Admission takes place in the immediate aftermath of Fields's arrest. Lawyers invade her home, and the legal team tries to get their client on board with what in their view is the best plan (to plead guilty and hope for a short sentence). Then there is Berringer's own lawyer, who cautions her not to tell him any details of what her mother did (Berringer actually knows close to nothing).

While the novel is sympathetic to Chloe, it is not blind to what her mother did. Nor is the novel blind to the moral issues involved for Chloe.

She is aware that her application claimed that she was a pole vaulter, which was highly unlikely given "that I still have a scar under my chin from when I tripped with a pair of scissors in kindergarten. Had to get seven stiches."

The process was explained to Chloe by Dr. Wilson, the stand-in for Rick Singer, the mastermind of the scandal.

"This scheme, falsely identifying me as an athlete, was what Dr. Wilson called the side door to admissions. The front door is the way Levi [Chloe's boyfriend] got into Harvard: blood, sweat and tears. The back door is the way Xander got into Princeton: His parents donated a library wing. The side door was the only way in for people like me: not smart enough to get in on their own, not quite gilded enough to buy their way in legally."

But on her SAT cheating, Chloe is oblivious. The novel describes the day she found out that she had a 1440, her surprise at the score (to the point of asking if it could be a mistake) and her mother's reassurance that it was all of her hard work in preparing for the test that earned the points.

The novel does touch on the obvious (to those not benefiting from the scheme) social justice issues. Isla, Chloe's younger sister, is watching television when the screen says, "Joy Fields Faces Up to 40 Years Behind Bars."

On some talk show, someone says, "First of all, in this country, it's supposed to be a fact that if you break the law, you suffer the consequences. But because Joy Fields is a white actress with a pretty smile, she doesn't have to serve time? No, literally hundreds of thousands of people of color have been put away for so much longer for so much less."

Chloe does learn some lessons from the scandal (as does her mother), but we won't spoil the results for any readers.

A Real Person

For those who want to know what a real person with parents charged with helping her inappropriately get into the University of Southern California thinks, we now have Olivia Jade Giannulli. She is the daughter of the actress Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli (both of whom admitted guilt in the scandal, eventually). And she appeared last month on Facebook's show Red Table Talk.

She said she is "super close" to her mother but hadn't talked to her in prison because of COVID-19 limits on communication.

Giannulli said her father has "attachment issues" and very much wanted her to go to college is Los Angeles.

But she took (some) responsibility for the mess her family is in. Referring to USC, which she left when the scandal broke, she said that she "shouldn't have been there in the first place, clearly."