If having the “Harvard man” label is your one metric of success vs. failure, and if that isn’t likely to change, then so be it. But if you measure yourself by your level of achievement (or even just your level of fulfillment and enjoyment) in your chosen field, take comfort in a quick Google search, which will reveal many examples of people who have been successful quite late in life (many at double your age, and a few even triple). And some of the world’s most successful people have built their reputations despite not attending any college whatsoever. Quite a few “Harvard men” actually go on to work for the people who had the confidence to skip college and go build cool things because they had a growth mindset and knew they could “learn by doing”.

Also, being admitted to an elite school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I myself am actually an alumni of one of the “elite” schools more prominently featured in the middle of this admissions scandal. I took my $200,000 education and had two completely different but equally miserable careers (one as a travel agent and another as an overseas ESL teacher) before attending a coding bootcamp and landing in a field I love. I had no idea what I wanted my career or my life in general to look like when I was a high school senior, ended up using very little of what I learned in college, and could have saved my parents a lot of money and financial worry by attending a JC instead.

That’s not to say my classmates didn’t achieve a lot- of course they did. But that’s more a function of who they were when they entered college than who college made them into.

A lucky few people are precocious enough at that age to already know where they’re headed in life. Most people aren’t. That’s no one’s fault, least of all theirs.