I saw something yesterday which caused one reaction – – and then another.
My first reaction was an eye-roll, which I suspect was the same reaction had by virtually everyone who saw this page. I have been following the college admissions scandal obsessively (for reasons I have written about at length already), so these articles tend to pop up a lot for me.
But then, on second thought, I decided that I pretty much agree with her. Her point of view, according to sources, is that she didn’t even want to go to college, but her parents insisted.
Now, if you’re a couple of ordinary middle class parents, I can understand the need to prod your kid into going to college. After all, most parents want the best for their kids, and shrugging your shoulders and letting them enter the world with a high school diploma is probably not a great choice. So I understand the normal point-of-view. My parents were the same way.
But this isn’t an ordinary situation. This kid already had an Instagram account with two million followers (literally 100 times the number I have on Twitter) and big endorsement deals with companies like Sephora. She’s very pretty and had a decent amount of D-list celebrity power.
If, after she graduated from whatever fine high school institution she attended, she ventured off on her own, she probably would have been just fine. I mean, hell, Kendall Jenner is as uneducated as they come, and she’s a freakin’ billionaire in her early 20s. In this day and age, if you can appeal to a large enough (and vain enough) audience, you’ve got it made.
So demanding this girl, Olivia, go to classes about gender studies, French literature, and God knows what else, truly was a waste of time. She is, I suspect, intellectually incurious (to put it kindly), and in a few years she probably would have had a lavish wedding with some rich young man, and they could have a kid or two before they found divorce lawyers of their own. Such is the way of fame.
What I’m trying to say is that this lovely young lady was actually wiser than her parents were about what was best for her life. She had a successful business on her hands as a teenager, and now she’s been kicked out of school, she’s internationally disgraced, and all her endorsement deals are destroyed.
I suspect Thanksgiving dinners are going to be very quiet for a while.
