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The Heroine of the Piece…

… and there’s finally a heroine! – is Olivia Jade Giannulli, who has been honest from the start about the pointlessness of college for a subset of Americans. Have you ever bothered checking how many successful actors and actresses have even attended college? These are people who start auditioning while they’re young and just keep going, and it’s clear that Olivia – a product of Hollywood – is one of them. Sans blague, UD finds this tweet of hers incredibly to the point, canny, and worthy of immortality.

it’s so hard to try in school when you don’t care about anything you’re learning

She is absolutely correct. The reason Olivia’s folks are doing the perp walk right now is that you don’t get to raise people who don’t care about what colleges teach and then desperately try to get them to commit years of their life to colleges. That way lies admissions-fraud. People who attack Olivia as ignorant for writing things like this are quite mistaken.

Do you think that because UD runs a blog about universities she thinks everyone should go to one? Just the opposite. As Olivia says of her wildly successful parents: “Mostly my parents really wanted me to go because both of them didn’t go to college… I think they did fine.” Virtually no one in her world goes to college – check it out if you don’t believe me — check out your favorite star’s bio — and though maybe some of them might in theory get something out of it, that’s just the way it is. Hollywood is otherwise engaged, and in fact it’s pretty common for likely screen stars to drop out of high school. Big-time athletes and actors are on fast tracks; athletes forced by silly rules to be in college for a year or two are, many of them, joke students. College is kind of an absurdity for lots of types of people.

Olivia is acutely aware that her Hollywood ma and pa forced her to go to college for social and sentimental, rather than intellectual, reasons. She rightly resents having to cool her jets for four years (or more! if she really intends to graduate) as she gets older while barely pubescent competitors strut their stuff.

So don’t give Olivia a hard time for being spoiled and taking up some striving brilliant first-generation immigrant’s place at USC; she’s been quite clear that she doesn’t want to be there and that the striving immigrant is more than welcome to help her engineer her escape (it can’t come soon enough!).

Margaret Soltan, March 13, 2019 4:39PM
Posted in: STUDENTS

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6 Responses to “The Heroine of the Piece…”

  1. Ravi Narasimhan Says:

    All that effort to get into a directional school?

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Some of those directional names – Northwestern University comes to mind – can be pretty chi-chi.

  3. Ravi Narasimhan Says:

    Yes, NU is at the top of that list but USC has over 2x the students in the same footprint with half the endowment.

  4. Margaret Soltan Says:

    USC is less chi-chi than NU, but it has definite cachet among many young Californians.

  5. john Says:

    the same holds for actor/professors…

    https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanschocket2/professor-franco

  6. Margaret Soltan Says:

    john: Funny!

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