Many of us likely forgot one of the most striking things about the last great college sports scandal - I'm not referring to the illegal early recruiting stings, the under-the-table payments to incoming athletes and their parents, or even the many perverts caught in the locker and training rooms. It was a revelation from the Varsity Blues scandal, where fancy, famous, and affluent parents bribed coaches and other admissions officers and used fake resumes to get their mediocre offspring admitted to prestigious colleges through the locker room door by claiming that they were serious jocks.
As the stories slowly unfolded, what became apparent is that some of the kids involved didn't even want to go to college. In each case, the main driving force was a clever con artist named Rick Singer, who combined his mastery of the college admissions process with his ability to manipulate and stroke the pathetic parents' egos, their competitive social concerns, and their desperate need for bragging rights. These folks may have gone to inferior schools or none at all, but their kids were going to the moon, and they'd tell the whole world about it. Talk about living vicariously through your kids. Of course, this isn't exactly unexpected or difficult to understand. No one associates famous TV or film stars with healthy and happy childhoods or with being great parents. In truth, though, you don't know what you're capable of until you have children.
But that's all yesterday's news. There's a major new storm on the horizon that suggests bad news for millions of late-Millennial parents with high school aged kids, even though their own aspirations are far more modest than those of the bi-coastal cheats. From here on down, it's all uphill. These aren't people seriously looking to get their kids into Harvard or Yale; they'd be pleased as punch just to be sure that their kids got into a "good" school - one like they attended themselves. Ideally, one that was at least as well regarded as their own alma maters. But their kids most likely won't be headed anywhere near their folks' old stomping grounds.The sad realities that will be playing out over the next several years for millions of families are: (a) as the parents often sarcastically say, they themselves would no longer be accepted and admitted to the colleges and universities they attended since the entrance criteria have been radically raised; (b) the upper middle range of schools (not Ivy League, but certainly Big 10), which would have been largely "socially" acceptable for their kids to attend, are now so selective and difficult to get into that their offspring will have to "settle" for schools in the next tier down -- not necessarily in academic terms, but certainly in the media and reputational sense