Pushing the heavy, gold-embossed brochure across the granite kitchen island felt like sliding a stack of chips into the center of a high-stakes poker table. The paper was thick, at least 106-pound cover stock, with a matte finish that whispered of exclusive hallways and mahogany-paneled futures. My sister sat across from me, her thumb tracing the embossed logo of a summer institute that promised to turn her sixteen-year-old son into a “Global Innovation Leader.” The price tag for this two-week transformation was exactly $6556, not including airfare or the mandatory “networking kit” they suggested parents purchase. She looked at me with a desperate kind of hope, the kind of look I usually only see in the eyes of people visiting my workplace when they are trying to decide between polished granite or raw basalt. I’ve been the groundskeeper at the local cemetery for 26 years now, and I’ve learned that people are most willing to pay for certainty when they are standing on the edge of something they cannot control.

Legacy is what survives the scarcity theater.

I spent the morning before this conversation testing all 26 pens in the junk drawer by the kitchen phone. It’s a ritual of mine. I like to know which ones actually deliver ink to the page and which ones are just plastic husks pretending to be tools. Most of the ones with the shiny silver clips-the ones handed out at conventions or high-end real estate offices-failed immediately. They had the weight of quality, but the internal mechanism was dry. This brochure felt like those pens. It was filled with words like “synergy,” “exponential growth,” and “transformative leadership,” yet nowhere in its 16 pages could I find a concrete description of what the kids would actually do. Would they build a circuit? Would they write 456 lines of clean code? Would they manage a budget of $356 to solve a local logistics problem? No. They would attend “seminars” and “engage in collaborative ideation.”

The Price of Ambiguity

Parents today are being forced into a market that sells expensive ambiguity. We are living in an era where social mobility feels like a game of musical chairs played in a dark room, and the tuition for these summer programs is the price of a flashlight that might not even have batteries. The frustration is visceral. You want to give your child the world, but the world is currently being sold back to you in the form of “prestige signaling.” We assume that if a program costs $7656, it must contain 7656 dollars’ worth of rare opportunity. In reality, that price often pays for the scarcity theater-the carefully curated aura of exclusivity that makes a parent feel they’ve finally secured their child’s spot in the meritocracy. I see this at the cemetery too. Sometimes the most expensive headstones are for the people who left the least behind; the grandiosity of the marker is meant to compensate for the ambiguity of the life.

There is a strange contradiction in how we approach these investments. We tell our children that the future belongs to the “disruptors,” yet we steer them toward the most traditional, gated, and rigid forms of enrichment. We buy them certainty because we are terrified of the alternative. If I’ve learned anything from maintaining 46 acres of burial plots, it’s that growth is never certain and it’s rarely clean. You can buy the most expensive Kentucky Bluegrass seed on the market-I once spent $126 on a small bag of experimental cultivar-but if the soil isn’t prepared and the drainage is poor, you’re just feeding the birds. Most of these high-priced summer programs are just expensive birdseed. They provide the appearance of a lush future without doing the hard work of tilling the actual earth of a student’s skills.

The Short-Handled Spade

I remember a particular afternoon at work when I was trying to fix a drainage pipe near the older section of the grounds. I had 6 different shovels lined up, and the one that actually did the job was a rusted, short-handled spade I’d found in a shed 16 years ago. It wasn’t “revolutionary.” It didn’t have an “innovative ergonomic grip.” It just worked because it was built for the specific resistance of the clay. When we look at summer opportunities, we should be looking for the short-handled spades. We should be asking: What is the resistance here? What is my child actually going to struggle against? If a program doesn’t offer a specific, measurable problem to solve, it isn’t an internship or a learning experience; it’s a vacation with a syllabus.

This is where organizations that focus on substance over signaling start to stand out. There are places that don’t rely on the “prestige” of a university’s name but on the tangible output of the students. For instance, High school summer internship programs for college prep focus on the actual mechanics of entrepreneurship and technology, moving away from the “perfume ad” descriptions of success and toward the granular reality of building something. This is the difference between a student who can talk about “innovation” and one who can actually explain the 66 failures they encountered while trying to bring an idea to life. It’s the difference between the pen that looks good in the pocket and the one that actually writes when you need to sign a deed.

Substance Over Signaling

I told my sister about the pens. I told her that she was trying to buy a guarantee in a world that only offers probabilities. She looked at the brochure again, and for the first time, she noticed that the “Transformation Gallery” featured photos of students sitting in circles on a manicured lawn, but none of them were actually holding tools or looking at screens or writing in notebooks. They were just… appearing successful. It’s a seductive image. We want our children to look like that-relaxed, confident, and ensconced in a $956-a-week bubble of safety. But that safety is a lie. The real world doesn’t care if you sat on a famous lawn; it cares if you can fix the drainage pipe when the rain starts falling at 6:00 PM on a Friday.

My own mistake, one I’ve reflected on while mowing the 16th row of the veterans’ section, was thinking that the cost of a tool was a proxy for its utility. I once bought a set of German-engineered shears for $236, thinking they would make my work effortless. They were too heavy, the blades were too brittle for the thick brambles of the older plots, and I ended up going back to the $26 pair from the hardware store. The expensive ones were designed for a garden that doesn’t exist-a perfect, static space. Many of these summer programs are designed for a future that doesn’t exist-a world where “leadership” is a static quality you can simply download into your brain during a 16-day stay in a dorm room.

The Predatory Business Model

We are witnessing the conversion of parental love into premium purchases. It is a brilliant, if predatory, business model. It preys on the fact that we don’t know what the job market will look like in 2026, let alone 2036. When you don’t know the destination, you are easily convinced to buy the most expensive map, even if the map is just a collection of pretty pictures. But real social mobility isn’t about the map. It’s about the ability to navigate when the map is wrong. It’s about having 6 core skills that you can apply to 46 different situations. It’s about the confidence that comes from having actually finished something difficult, rather than just having been “exposed” to difficulty.

I think about the 156 headstones I’ve cleaned this year. The ones that people still visit, 46 or 56 years after the burial, aren’t always the grandest ones. They are the ones belonging to people who actually built things in their community-the carpenters, the teachers, the engineers who designed the local bridge. Their legacy isn’t based on a “prestigious” summer they had when they were sixteen. It’s based on the cumulative weight of their actual contributions. If we want our kids to have that kind of weight, we have to stop buying them the theater of success and start finding them the workshop of reality.

Finding the Workshop of Reality

My sister eventually put the brochure in the recycling bin. It made a satisfying ‘thwack’ against the plastic. We spent the next 36 minutes looking for programs that required an application that asked for a portfolio instead of a bank statement. We looked for things that offered 126 hours of actual project work. It was harder to find. The “scarcity theater” is loud and well-funded, while the real workshops are often quiet and tucked away in the corners of the internet or the local community. But they are there. They are the ones that don’t promise to change your life in two weeks but do promise to give you a headache as you try to solve a problem that doesn’t have a clear answer in the back of a book.

As I walked back to my truck, I realized I’d left one of the working pens on her counter. It was a cheap, blue-inked thing with a bitten cap, but it had survived my test. It was reliable. It was honest. When the ink finally runs out, it won’t be because it was sitting in a drawer looking pretty; it will be because it was used to write something that mattered. That’s the kind of summer I want for my nephew. Not a $8656 pedestal, but a pen that actually writes, a shovel that actually digs, and a project that actually breaks because he was the one brave enough to try and build it in the first place. The graveyard is full of people who were told they were “leaders” in training; the world is kept turning by the ones who actually learned how to lead the work.