The photo-story
consists of a list that unfolds over 11 web pages (to make it easier for the
reader to see all the ads). Each web page tells a celebrity’s “I quit high
school” story.
The
tease to the story on Yahoo!’s home page is unethically misleading: “This list shows you don't need a diploma to make millions in show
business.”
The statement and the list itself play a
deceptive fraud on readers, many of whom are impressionable teens and pre-teens
to whom the celebrity mongers are selling a bill of goods about what
constitutes success and value. While we can find celebrities and business
titans, and even scientists who have not finished high school or college, they
are rare and have become rarer over the last few decades. Writing “You don’t need a diploma…” has the
same ring of truth to it as “It will probably snow in January in Rochester,”
while in fact the successful person without a high school diploma is a
rarity.
To
drive home the deception in the article, I want to take a look at this odious
list of celebs without diplomas from three perspectives:
1.
The list itself: Of the 11 celebs without
diplomas, 4 come from families that are quite wealthy and well-connected, part
of the 1%. Most people can’t ask mommy who is “in the biz” to call a business
associate or pull a favor, so they might be well-served to get the diploma and
the additional training that goes with it.
2.
The celeb lists they don’t
give:
Wikipedia lists 86 television and film actors that went to Yale, 68 who went to
Harvard and 118 who went to UCLA. That’s
only three colleges and it only includes film and television. If I had to bet on either a college graduate
or a high school dropout making it in Hollywood or on Broadway, I’d go with the
kid with more training, and the numbers agree with me.
3.
The list of non-celebs
without high school diplomas: For every person who becomes a famous celebrity, there are
thousands who try and fail.
The
article never points out the hard cold facts of economic failure for virtually anyone
with no education or certification. According to the U.S. Department of
Education, the average wage of a high school dropout is less than $20,000 a
year. A high school graduate makes on average more than $27,000 a year. Someone
with an associate degree makes about $36,000 and someone with a 4-year degree
makes almost $47,000 a year on average. Kids with dreams of fame who don’t
quite make it can always fall back on their education—but only if they have
one.
And
many kids have dreams of fame. There are at least a thousand colleges offering
degrees in performing arts that graduate students every year, many of whom want
to work in show business. Every city has at least one modeling school and we
all know how many college teams there are for every major sport. Even for those with talent and drive, the
chance of celebrity success is slight.
The
ideological subtext behind the article is an extreme form of
anti-intellectualism, the premise that one doesn’t really need an education to
succeed. The news media feeds us this
nonsense with some frequency, but the OMG! article is especially obnoxious
because it suggests that kids won’t suffer if they drop out of high school and
pursue stardom.