I’m not now nor have I ever been a rich person. But I’ve spent enough of my life rich person adjacent to know that the whole College Admissions scam is only surprising in that someone actually got busted for it. The whole story is hilarious–almost hilarious enough that we forget about the still-acceptable legacies, the “here’s this new wing for the library” beneficiaries, or (more modestly) the kids (and I knew many of them) whose parents would shell out thousands and thousands to pay for expensive extracurriculars and high school internships, purchase plane tickets for international service work, or hire tutors to push almost-perfect SAT scores to perfect SAT scores, so already smart, rich kids can secure academic scholarships (for the prestige, not because they need the money). Sometimes this self-corrects (I knew plenty of legacies that failed out of competitive universities after a semester or two), but it usually doesn’t.

If you know me in real life, you may have detected a chip on my shoulder roughly the same size and shape of the absence of an elite college on my resume. I’m trying to get over it. Really I am. I can’t tell if the situation is made better or worse by the fact that I live in a college town, surrounded by smart people with degrees from the kind of schools that either wouldn’t let me in or give the financial aid necessary to attend. I like that they think I’m smart enough to hang, even though I lack their credentials. I still hate it when people ask me where I went to school when do people stop asking where I went to school?, because it’s a journey, and nine times out of ten, I have to deal with their reactions when I answer. These tend range from pity to Really? Sometimes, I swear I can see their reappraisals of my character or intelligence play out in real time across their faces.

My mother would tell me, and most certainly has, that all of this is just my own insecurity. “No one cares,” she says. “The only thing that matters is that you graduated.” But the market value of my BA is far, far less than it ended up costing everyone. I feel hugely guilty about that.  I’ve yet to have a job that, strictly speaking, required it. I made some dear friends along the way, but I didn’t make any critical connections in the professional or academic world that helped on the job market. If anything, my high school experience, as a financial aid kid at a moderately competitive boarding school, has been marginally more useful. And that’s grading on a real curve.

The school you go to is more than status symbol. It’s opportunities and connections. It’s access. It’s a pretty good way to size up who you’re actually competing against—whether they’re really smart and talented or really fucking rich and lucky or all of the above.  Plenty of smart people that went to great schools end up working the same shitty jobs at the same shitty wages as the rest of us. Sometimes by choice, sometimes by circumstance. It’s unlikely that I would have ended up hugely successful even if I had gone to Harvard (which was, to be absolutely 100% clear, never in the cards for me). I never wanted to be a world leader or a titan of industry. I wasn’t interested in making great scientific breakthroughs or inventing whole new ways to live. I always just wanted to be a writer and write for a living. Which I am (sort of)  and do (technically). Might I have sold a novel or gotten a job at the New Yorker had I come out the kind of tiny, weird liberal arts college in the Northeast I dreamt of at eighteen? Maybe. It’s equally possible, though, that I would have  just gotten way more into cocaine and performance art on my way to a job in the advertising industry virtually indistinguishable from the one I have now. I don’t know. Neither do you. And now my bra strap is totally showing and my accent is slipping and you can see exactly many shades I blush when I have to talk to you about college. Sorry about that. I’ll buy the next round and hope you don’t remember how petty I look when I’m feeling sorry for myself.

I made plenty of mistakes in school. I sweated so many nights away worried about not being good enough. That kid that got admitted instead of me? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she never had to, because it never mattered if she was good enough, or even good at all.  The system was rigged from the start. The system has always been rigged. I knew it then, even then, especially then, as I applied for college among rich people, but I didn’t really know it, not until long after the acceptance letters were sent. So while I read about the admission scandal, I do laugh and gloat with the rest of you, but it’s with resignation, with fury, and something that feels almost like relief, but much, much uglier.