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Living Dreams

Watching Operation Varsity Blues was an illuminating experience. Much of the material surfaces in the news cycles at the time but the little details were fascinating - how rich parents can have their kids medically certified as needing accommodations to take the SAT/ACT. So they get unlimited time over multiple days to complete. Similarly check the wrong option for race (become Latino instead of White) and get a boost. The whole game is about finding loopholes to maximize the chances of admission to an elite college. As one of the test prep experts put it college admission is about the parent getting to go to the college of their dreams which the child being their vehicle to do so. He is right on the money. 

So when the said parent has access to a lot of resources, they will deploy it to achieve their goal - the second chance at life, living vicariously through their child's college experience. The burden on the kid is two-fold. First they have to jump through these insane hoops, have the flawless resume and story to get in. Second, they have to live the college dream in the manner that their parent imagined it to be. It is not enough to deliver on the first goal by just getting in. Once they are in, they are puppets on a string experiencing college by proxy for the parent. At the end of it all, the child (now in their early twenties) is left with nothing  meaningfully theirs to own. The happiest, most well-rounded people pursue their own dreams, tumble along way, make wrong turns and course correct until they reach where they want to. I have been fortunate to know a few such people over the years and not one of them went to a school so fancy that a parent would take jail time to get their child in. 


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