No, the Westside isn’t haunted or experiencing a sudden uptick in its already significant rat population. Those shrieks of horror you hear across the community are the sounds of parents, who having staked their family’s entire emotional well-being and sense of self-worth on getting a child into the Ivy League, just had those dreams destroyed as the rejection emails rolled in from the Northeast, or comparable schools in Palo Alto and beyond. While the fate of Paramount twists in the wind, many parents among us are staring in the face a future of spending $80,000-a-year to send their children to a protest encampment from their safety list.
In the past decade or so, across the industry (and kind of everywhere with affluence), entertainment professionals have become obsessed with the notion that only an Ivy League education can validate a family’s existence. L.A.’s Harvard-Westlake (so desperate for an Ivy League halo that it named itself after a university it had no relationship with) saw 51 percent of its kids apply to the same 14 colleges in the early decision process.
But after all the SAT prep courses, interview drills, weekends traveling the country with the lacrosse team, late nights supervising the rewrite of that essay — it was very likely all for naught, as competition for those few Ivy League slots have reached the breaking point in American education.
Before thousands of industry parents write off their children’s lives like a $100 million franchise spinoff made for streaming, consigning them to a future emptying ashtrays at a riverboat casino, maybe it’s worth a look at what really matters in this world today. Particularly in this very industry that we’ve made a life in. How much does a young person’s future depend on having that crucial Harvard diploma to open doors?
I started at the top: the people who run this business, the super-achievers, the masters of our universe, the hyper-success stories. Lo and behold, not only is an Ivy League diploma not required to scale the very heights of Hollywood, but from the looks of things, it might even be an obstacle.
Let’s have a look first at the people at the very pinnacle of showbiz — the top bosses or owners, or the owners of the parent company. So let’s ask the question: To get to the very tip-top heights of Hollywood, if you’re looking to rule it all, what kind of diploma does it pay to have today?
