Rick Singer knows what extreme lengths parents will go to for their children's success. He was jailed in 2023 for masterminding the biggest US college admissions fraud in history - a $25 million web of bribes and cheating on exams to secure coveted spots at Ivy League universities for the offspring of the rich and famous. Clients of what became known as the 'Varsity Blues' scam, including the actors Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, paid small fortunes to the gatekeepers of America's top schools to facilitate the fraudulent admissions. Speaking to the Daily Mail, Singer, 64, said he'd gone straight after getting 'out of camp last summer'. He claimed that his new, legitimate academic consultancy, ID Future Stars, boasted a 90% acceptance rate for his clients. Singer insisted that he wouldn't go back to the 'gray areas' of graft and lies. But, maintaining that the college admissions system was unfair and broken, he said there were still legal ways to tilt the odds to help youngsters achieve their dreams. Here, he shares his six 'side doors' to the country's finest schools that don't cross the line. Find the 'special talent' loophole When Singer orchestrated the Varsity Blues scheme, one of his most sure-fire techniques involved fabricating students' sports credentials and bribing college athletics staff. Recommendations from college coaches all but guarantee candidates a spot. In one jaw-dropping example, the women's soccer coach at Yale accepted a $450,000 payoff to admit a student with fake achievements. Singer stressed that the 'special talent' route - from sports to visual or performing arts - remained one of the best legal paths to a top college. The trick, he said, was to understand the playing field. Some 8 million teens compete in high school athletics but only about 6% go on to participate in National College Athletic Association (NCAA) events. Fewer - about 2% - qualify for sports scholarships. To make the cut, Singer said high school athletes should seek an appraisal from a professional. Pros were a better gauge of talent than most parents and coaches, he said, and they could help manage expectations. Such an evaluation could guide students toward colleges with sports programs that matched their skills - a Division I athletic program isn't for everyone. 'I've seen families spend $40,000 a year traveling the country to tournaments every weekend - and they could never work out why they weren't getting a scholarship,' said Singer. 'Often, it's just because nobody told them the kid wasn't good enough.' Avoid the 'big fish' trap During the height of his fraud in the 2010s, Singer got hundreds of teens accepted to elite schools by helping them cheat their way through entrance exams. He paid accomplished scholars to pose as students who then took his clients' tests, or arranged for fake diagnoses of learning disabilities to secure them extra time. The cold, hard truth, Singer said, was that Ivy League schools cherry-pick the smartest students, accepting just 3 to 8% of applicants - and high schoolers with a GPA of below 4.0 may not even get a sniff at the top tier. His simple advice: push yourself. Ambitious students should choose the most rigorous classes and seek outside help from private tutors or by forming study groups with smart classmates. 'You might be number one in your class and getting straight As, but nobody is pointing out your weaknesses, and you'll struggle to compete at the next level,' he said. 'You're a big fish in a small pond.' Don't be too good to be true Varsity Blues showed the extreme lengths that parents and teens will go to get into college. But even when applicants don't bribe or cheat, plenty use gentler tricks - from embellishing resumes to fudging parts of their backgrounds - to get ahead. That often backfires in a major way, Singer warned. He has seen applications listing accomplishments so impressive that it was 'not humanly possibly' for a high schooler to achieve them. He recalled a teen who claimed to have completed five academic research projects with college professors. 'There's no f*****g way she did it. Admissions coaches just assumed that she'd lied,' said Singer. The problem is widespread. A survey in 2023 by education website Intelligent.com found that 61% of recent graduates admitted to lying on their applications. Most exaggerated how much time they had spent volunteering - but a staggering 30% owned up to faking letters of recommendation. Less is more Not every blank space on a college application has to be filled, Singer said. This is true for the 10 slots ordinarily left for applicants to list their extracurricular activities. High schoolers often felt the need to cite every single part-time job, internship, academic club, sports team or hobby that came to mind, Singer said. 'Everybody thinks they have to have more. If you're doing 10 things, you're not doing any of them well. 'Better to focus on one activity that you're passionate about and where you learned something. Then you'll knock it out of the park.' Become a brand An excellent GPA is no longer enough to get into a top school, Singer said. Successful high schoolers should look at creating their own brand to sell themselves, but it has to be '100% authentic' and reflect an applicant's sincere interests. Then, it needed to be reiterated across the application - from the personal statement to letters of recommendation and the extracurriculars. Singer recalled a student with an interest in fashion who had noticed that her classmates weren't attending prom because they couldn't afford a dress. She turned her passion into a project by encouraging local girls to donate their used gowns to poorer students to wear on that special night. Scores of high schoolers enjoyed prom thanks to the dress-sharing idea, and the organizer branded herself a charitable fashionista on her college application, Singer explained. 'Yale eats that s**t up. The University of Chicago eats that s**t up,' he said. 'They'd rather have somebody who makes an impact than someone who gets perfect grades.' Pierce the 'paper ceiling' Families increasingly balk at spending $250,000 on a college education that might offer poor returns in the job market. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, Singer said. He urges more and more clients to dodge college debt and 'bust through the paper ceiling' by forgoing a degree and heading straight into the workforce. Fortune 500 companies increasingly hired people on six-figure salaries without four-year degrees if they were good communicators, problem solvers, highly intelligent or emotionally perceptive, he said. Google, Microsoft, IBM, Apple and Deloitte have in recent years eliminated their long-held degree requirements for jobs. And teens are taking notice. In 2023, just 61.4% of high school graduates went on to college, federal government data shows - the lowest enrollment rate in three decades. 'Everybody thought they needed that piece of paper to get a job,' Singer said, 'but it's not the case any more.