AJ O'Leary

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The Rigged Game of Higher Education: Thoughts from an ex-“Golden Child”

The college admissions scandal opened old personal wounds and still bothers me. Let’s talk it out.

This article was written in May of 2019 and reflects the American political climate of the time period.

I spent my childhood with a target on my back.

It was a “good” target, but a target nonetheless. I wrote a newsletter for kids in my kindergarten class filled with powerful insights like “People who don’t like the snow should move to Florida!” that my teacher would read to us after nap time. From that point on, I was tagged as a “smart kid”. I took a number of fancy aptitude tests and it was decided for me that I’d be the prodigious golden child of my family. I skipped the fourth grade, won a bunch of spelling bees, had poems featured in school district calendars, and planned to attend a decent school with the money my parents made steep sacrifices to save for me. I’d be one of the few college graduates in my blue-collar family tree.

My aspirations hit a brick wall called reality when it became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to attend a quality school without paying down debt for the rest of my days. My parents were never more than working-class to begin with; my father’s two strokes toward the end of my time in high school killed the college fund in service of medical bills. The Great Recession hit as I prepared to graduate and shot a hole in the heart of my native Rust Belt; scholarship money no longer flowed as freely as it had mere years earlier. I was screwed out of higher education by cosmic circumstance. I only managed to carve out an agreeable adult life for myself by being in the right place at the right time several times over.

If only I’d been born wealthy.

The 24-hour news cycle and our President’s constant colorful contributions to discourse might have dampened everyone else’s outrage over the college admissions scandal, but it hasn’t dulled mine. (A refresher, in case you’d forgotten: Aunt Becky, Felicity Huffman, and some other assorted rich people paid college admissions officials and athletic directors off to get their kids into good colleges, bypassing the traditional routes most of us have to take.)

When I decided to forgo college in favor of joining the workforce, I received harsh words from just about everyone I knew at the time. You’re throwing away your future, one teacher I’d remained in touch with after my high school graduation told me. Several others cited unsolicited statistics claiming that it gets harder to go back to college the longer you stay out of academia. Regardless, a certain line of thinking underpinned all these “concerns” shared with me, be they from teachers, relatives, or the lead custodian at the grocery store I worked at in the summer of 2011: College is incredibly important, no matter the cost. That diploma is more crucial than supporting your family. If you don’t get your diploma as soon as humanly possible, you might as well die in a hole.

This thought has stuck in the back of my mind through the years, even though I’ve been lucky enough to put a solid career together at my age despite my lack of a degree. It’s often made me feel worthless. I pride myself on being an ambitious, self-starting hard worker, yet saw my lack of degree as a massive failing on my part.

I used to joke about how people I knew who blew off high school and yet somehow managed to skate into a prestigious university must’ve had wealthy benefactors or great connections. More often than not, the joke would be met with a response along the lines of “Or maybe (name goes here) actually KNOWS THE VALUE of HARD WORK!” My self-deprecating side used to agree, but thinking back on my well-to-do suburb where my working-class self would attend school with children whose last names were plastered onto storefronts and delivery trucks all over town, it’s more obvious than ever to me how those of us born with the wind at our backs inhabit an entirely different reality than those of us who aren’t: one where rules and norms are mere social constructs that can be disregarded if they prove inconvenient.

Perhaps my frustration rests primarily with the delusion of meritocracy in my country, a lie championed by those who can make their kids’ problems go away with the signing of a check, or a phone call to an admissions officer, or an elaborately contrived fake student-athlete career. American identity is built on the notion that if you can dream it, you can do it. In some cases, this is true… if you’re lucky. If you happened to grow up in the right part of the country and found someone to start a world-changing tech company with you in a San Jose-area garage, cool. If you had a wealthy grandpa who believed in you and put his money on the line to support you, great. Don’t discount the role luck played in your good fortune, though. Doing so plays into a malicious myth that hurts the underprivileged most of all.

It isn’t fair to assess the middle and working class as worthless without a degree, either. I may not be financially insolvent anymore, but I was for the first two decades of my life. I can’t begin to count all the times somebody has said something along the lines of “I wouldn’t even KNOW you didn’t have a degree if you hadn’t told me!” in my current plane of existence. Thanks? If anything, this admissions scandal has shown us that there’s a bunch of lightweights out there who do have their degrees from prestigious schools, but okay. Degrees can certainly validate intelligence; they are not guarantors of intelligence.

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