The college admissions scandal offers much fuel for collective outrage: How dare these hyper-wealthy parents exploit a system already skewed in favor of the privilege?? Exchanging a new building for your undeserving kid’s admission is bad enough, but paying millions of dollars for someone to paste your child’s face onto a stock photo of a soccer player — I mean who does that?? Who even thinks about doing that, who has that idea in the first place, and what kind of child is so tangentially involved in their own application process that they fail to notice a bizarre human collage included included in their submission?? And good God, am I actually enjoying these hours and hours poured into reviewing scammer spawn Olivia Jade’s beauty vlogs?? And sorry, but did said YouTuber, who “didn’t really care about school” in the first place, snag my child’s spot?? FOR SHAME.
According to Deadline, that last possibility prompted solo parent and former Oakland public school teacher Jennifer Kay Toy to file a $500 billion lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court on Wednesday, suing the indicted parents and corrupt school officials busted in “Operation Varsity Blues.” Toy’s argument: The elaborate scheme to buy prime spots at highly selective institutions came at the expense of qualified, hard-working kids — or, more exactly, her son, Joshua. Despite his 4.2 GPA, Joshua was not granted entry to the schools involved in this scam, an oversight Toy blames squarely on the parents who allegedly “conspired with people in positions of power and authority.”
“I’m now outraged and hurt because I feel that my son, my only child, was denied access to a college not because he failed to work and study hard enough but because wealthy individuals felt that it was OK to lie, cheat, steal and bribe their children’s way into a good college,” the lawsuit reads. The defendants’ actions, it continues, stole “a fair chance” from kids like her son.
To be clear, the college admission process has been engineered to prioritize rich white kids, accelerating their inherited upward trajectory while kids who can’t afford SAT tutors or hired help on their milquetoast essays — kids who don’t benefit from a generations-long educational legacy — get shunted to the back of the line. And Toy’s lawsuit does name “all others similarly situated” as potential plaintiffs, which would theoretically cut her share of all those billions considerably, if she wins her case. It’s a bold move — does this count as scamming the scammer?
