A PAssage to Harvard

Hello guys

I'm still stuck to reading [url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050101272.html]Washington Post's article "A Passage to Harvard"[/url], a story about a Harvard girl student who committed plagiarism in writing her teen-literature.

This question is originally given to me by a Japanese learner of English, who is trying to read the article. The question is about how we should read the article's last sentence:

And Viswanathan, perhaps, has learned a lesson that the admissions industrial complex does its best to obscure: There are more things to cry about than not getting into Harvard.

What troubles us here is how to grammatically parse the phrase after the colon: "There are more things to cry about than getting into Harvard". Is the phrase working as the object of the verb "obscure"? Or is it a phrase put appositively to "a lesson" (the object of "has learned) ?

paco