78% of College Grads Never Use Their Degree — Here Is the Degree-Free Fix

Is college really worth $520,000? In this episode of the Success Formula Podcast, host Shawn Lynch sits down with Hannah Maruyama, co-founder of Degree Free, to expose the uncomfortable truth behind America's $848 billion higher education industry and show every parent exactly what to do instead.


Hannah breaks down why only 22% of college graduates ever work in their field of study, why the true average cost of a bachelor's degree, including lost wages and interest, now sits at $520,000, and why sending your 18-year-old to college with no clear goal is one of the most financially devastating decisions a family can make. She unpacks the little-known history of the Higher Education Act of 1965, how bankruptcy-exempt student loans were designed to trap young people in a system that profits from their uncertainty, and why 62% of high school seniors are walking into a debt crisis that will prevent them from buying homes, starting families, and building real wealth.


In this episode you will learn why most jobs in America do not legally require a college degree, how Hannah's Launch Program has placed teenagers and young adults into thriving careers in weeks rather than years, why AI literacy and the ability to communicate clearly are now the two most valuable skills a young adult can have, how the apprenticeship model is making a powerful comeback across industries from construction to software development, and what the four-question framework is that every parent should work through with their child before ever filling out a FAFSA form. Whether your child is 13 or 21, this conversation will completely change the way you think about education, career, and what it actually takes to build a successful life in the age of AI. Subscribe to the Success Formula Podcast and visit degreefree.com to start building a smarter path forward today.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What if the smartest thing that you could do for your teacher was never to go to college at all?

SPEAKER_02 0:04

He was sitting at that graduation ceremony thinking that it would be better if he was dead.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Most of you were told that a degree was the only way.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

A TDS estimate for the average cost of a bachelor's degree right now, including lost wages, interest, and then tuition, is $520,000.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

My guess, Hannah, from degree three, is blowing up all that with real hard data.

SPEAKER_02 0:23

The people who go to college, 22% of them will work in anything related to their field of study.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

AI is making half of your major obsolete before you even graduate. And the students are still paying $80,000 to figure that out. They're the last one to know.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

Your kid can't buy houses now because you bought them a college degree. You let them go take out this $100,000 loan. That's the down payment on their house, and they don't have it anymore.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

This episode will change how you think about everything. So before we get started on all the data that's out there and the traditional education system and what's wrong with it and how we can fix it or what we're both doing to fix it. Tell me your story. Like what's your background? Where did you grow up? How did you, you know, what's your relationship with traditional school?

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Uh, I have uh a pretty windy backstory. I grew up in the military. And so a lot of kids my age, I think there's a lot of people my age, I'm I'm in my 30s. A lot of people my age, uh, their parents were called back into the military after 9-11. So that's what happened to my dad. And my family then got into the military and then moved around a lot. So I moved around probably every two or three years my entire life. And um I, because of that, and like a lot of military families, uh, my mom homeschooled us for periods of time when it was inconvenient to put us in and pull us out of school. Uh so during my K through 12 education, I had every school experience you can imagine. I went to charter schools, I went to public schools, I went to private schools, uh, and then I was homeschooled. So I've had the entire roster of every different flavor of schooling that you can have. And I think that probably the most impactful was definitely homeschooling because it's self-paced and the sheer amount of time and lack of rushing allows you to really get deep into material. So the primary way that I was educated was reading. I just had a lot of time and I was allowed to read whatever I wanted. And then my mom also read to us extensively as well. Um, terrible at math. I was terrible at math, it just despite my best efforts. Uh, and then my family moved to Savannah, Georgia when I was, I think, 15. Um, and then I was put into a private school, a private Christian school. And so I went to this private school, and I went for a few months. Um, my dad was deployed at the time, and then um there was an unfortunate incident at the school where uh the the quarterback on the football team uh was being pretty unkind to somebody. And so I spoke up for this individual, and then he ended up hitting me in the face. And so uh uh and then nothing happened to him after he did that. And uh after that I got pulled out of that school for obvious reasons, and then I enrolled in a private chartered art school. So there's a magnet school in Savannah that's a feeder school to Savannah College of Art and Design. Um, while I was homeschooled, my mom had me take lessons, drawing lessons, and um I used that to then get into this chartered art school. I went to that school for probably about a week and something just felt off about it. It just didn't seem like where I was supposed to be, and um ended up going to another, another uh school, another small, really tiny little private school. And my mom worked at that school in order to uh get tuition. My mom was a nurse, so she worked as the school nurse in order to, uh, in order to put me and my siblings in that school. Um, I went to that school for about two years, and then my junior year, my soccer coach, he was also my AP history teacher. Um, and I remember this so clearly because I was in this class and I remember telling him at the beginning of this class that I didn't need to listen because I already knew everything he was gonna teach me. And he said, prove it. And I said, Okay. So this is the first day of this class, and I took the I took the test that we were planning to take at the end to club that class, and I passed it. And so uh I I made a deal with him that if I passed the test that I could just take a nap on the floor every class because it was right after lunch, and he let me do that. Um then there's only four people in this class. This is a tiny little school. Yeah. Um, and uh later that year, he ended up um, and this man was a was a very big influence in my life. He looked me straight in the eyes one day and he said, You're bored, you need to get out of here. And I said, Okay. And then I dual enrolled at a local university. So I was going to school full-time, actually, my junior year of high school. Um, so I was 16 at the time. And um I went to the school. It's now a part of Georgia Southern, but at the time it was called Armstrong Unit Atlantic University. And um I got to that class. I did not do well in college, not because were were you paying for it or your parents? Um, I was paying for it. Uh I had a scholarship because I was still in, I was still in high school. And so there was a Pell Grant that I was going on, but I was paying a little bit of the fees because I was also working at the time. As soon as I was 15 and a half, I had a job. So um I was I was paying for it. But I went, so I was going full-time, and uh I remember very clearly that I was really disappointed with the college experience, as they call it. Uh, and I don't mean the social aspect. I mean I was really disappointed with the professors. I felt like there was a very serious lack of critical thinking. There's a very serious lack of open-mindedness, which seemed odd to me because supposedly this is where all the smart people were. This is where all the academics were. Right. And uh I remember very clearly that I had uh an econ professor who assigned us opinion pieces. And I remember, I don't recall what I wrote about, but I wrote about I wrote an opinion piece. And uh I remember her actually holding my paper up in class and telling me that I was wrong and then failing me on an opinion piece just because she didn't like my opinion. Not because my citations were wrong, not because of anything structural, but just because she didn't like what I said. And uh, I took that paper and I went to the university paper and I gave it to the editor. And the editor liked it. Again, I was 16 at the time, almost 17 years old. And the editor said, I like it. I'm gonna publish it. Do you want to write a column for our paper? So I ended up being the youngest paid writer at this university paper. Um, I like to just tell the story because when I do talk about what I talk about, one of the biggest rebuttals I hear is, Oh, well, you just couldn't get into college. I'm like, no, no, no, it's not that hard to get into college. Um, they'll take anybody's money, you know, they'll take, they'll take anyone's money. And they took mine.

SPEAKER_01 6:56

Did you mention the teacher in the paid money?

SPEAKER_02 6:59

I didn't. I didn't. Because, you know, I felt like I got uh I felt like I got my I felt like I got my revenge by just having a column that I was getting paid to write. Um but yeah, man, I just I had a really hard time. Uh I was just bored out of my mind.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

Did you graduate from it?

SPEAKER_02 7:13

No, no, no, no, not at all. I uh I had I was really bad at math. So I remember I did study as hard as I possibly could for my college algebra class. I could never pass algebra, but I got to basically year three. So by the time I was 18 and I left, I had, if I had been trying to get an English degree, I probably could have. Um, but I couldn't pass any of my math classes despite tons of efforts.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Well, FYI and 26 years of business in every industry that I've been in, I haven't had to use algebra. So I think you're gonna I think you're gonna be all right.

SPEAKER_02 7:45

Well, you know what's so funny about that too, is I actually uh, and again, because of my company and because of what I speak about, a lot of people think I don't care about education. Actually, quite the opposite. Like I'm currently right now trying to teach myself basic physics because and and and trying to teach myself uh areas of math because I I just had such an allergy to it because of the way that I was told I had to learn it. Um but there's just no rules about how you have to learn things.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

And I think also people that is their first thing, is like, oh, you you don't you disagree with education. No, no, no, not at all. I just education and teachers are amazing. Um they're just teaching the wrong things. Yes. And a lot of stuff gets left out and it's just outdated. And so I think I think that's the biggest issue. I think have people have a misconception when they hear uh me say something or you say something or somebody that goes against that traditional system is like I I actually think teachers are great. I just don't think they're teaching the right things. And you know, teachers and mentors and uh professors like really great people, and but if they were teaching the right things, I think it would be super helpful and super important in people's life. And and I think what we say isn't really like against uh the people that are doing the work, it's what they're learning and what they're and what they're leaving out to, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 9:00

Yeah. I think that there is too um I think to an extent, I I agree. To an extent I definitely agree, but I also think that there are, and this is this is kind of something that um Ryan, my husband and I have been talking about recently, but there a lot of teachers are really fighting back against AI because they see it as a threat to their job. And when I say teachers, I mean K through 12 and also professors. However, I think that that's actually a good thing. Um, I think we have too many teachers uh in a way, because too many teachers employed in K through 12. Uh, there are uh and a lot of that is because we're trying to figure out what to do with all of our college graduates. Now, this is this is really important because I think that as AI picks up speed, and this is actually a good thing, I think that are there are a lot of people who are teaching in K through 12 education that should be doing different things in the market, and they're in schools because they didn't know what was out there or because their jobs have not been created yet. And so I think that a lot of teachers are pushing back against AI being put into schools in certain ways, and I'm not saying to eliminate human teachers at all. It's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that there's definitely, I think, going to be a pushback towards there's very basic curriculum. It does not take that long, it does not take that many people to administrate it, and a lot more of school needs to be work. And I don't mean like put the kids in the minds, but what I mean is that more doing, less like sitting and reading a book. Correct, correct, and that less sit still, don't talk, do this, do that. Like I think there's gonna be way less of that. And I think as a result, a lot of people are gonna do better in the system. I think we're gonna have higher levels of adherence, and I think a lot of teachers are going to leave teaching and they're gonna go to other areas of the market where their work fits a lot more of what they want in their life, a lot more of their schedule. A lot of them I think are gonna get paid more as well. And so I think that that is gonna happen over the next few years. That's something that I see occurring that is not a bad thing. It's just gonna be painful in the in the in the interim.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

I don't think the educational system would have ever changed if it wasn't for AI. I think they're gonna be forced to now. The scary part and the part I feel bad for, and one of the main reasons like I really kind of jumped into the education space is there's gonna be a gap that right from right now until you know 10 years from now or whatever it is, until AI gets a little bit more mature, to where school will teach none of it, but the marketplace is doing something totally different. And so even somebody starting college today, like today, they start today, and then in four years they get out, like nothing's gonna be the same. So those are the people I feel the most sorry for. I think eventually it will catch up to where they have to do something and they have to kind of change the way things are going and the what they're teaching. But right now, like the people that are going through the traditional model, uh, it's gonna be a bad outcome, I think. Um if they're gonna stay that same path, go to college, get out. Like, I I don't know what's gonna happen. I don't, you know, it's it's just ever changing and uh changing extremely quickly.

SPEAKER_02 11:50

That was something quick. Recently, have you did you see that uh interview with um Amjad from Rep the CEO of Replit?

SPEAKER_01 11:58

I probably have seen it.

SPEAKER_02 11:59

I think all those it made the rounds, but and I think he was talking to Alex Hermozzi and he was talking about how the skill turnings, and this is something that keeps coming up. Um, you know, uh this this just keeps coming up, but a lot of people who are involved with building the picks and shovels of the of the AI rush, a lot of them are saying, hey, this stuff is fast, people. Like this is fast, pay attention. Um, and what I took from that as somebody who gets 18 to 20 year olds into their desired careers is that they don't have time to be in college. That's the thing.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Because uh college is four years of like some incredibly neck breaking, speed changing technology, right?

SPEAKER_02 12:39

Right. And so most of them have um the skill turnings are gonna shorten significantly. So things are gonna take, you know, people are gonna have to change skills every like 12 to 18 months. And and and and this um I think to make this less intimidating for people too, it's not like you have to change everything that you know every 12 to 18 months. Your main skill, because most of the time it's Pareto's law, most of the time what you do at work, 80% of what you do is gonna be like one or two things, right? So you're just gonna have to change slightly or upgrade or slightly improve the way that you do those things, which is just learning, right? That's just learning. And um, colleges just are fundamentally not set up to do that. Um, and I don't know if you I don't know if you saw this, but uh there was like a map I'm I'm gonna crack up just trying to explain this. But they had a mastermind of m it's hilarious. They had a mastermind of people come together and figure out academics, how are we gonna solve the college crisis that we've caused? Um and their bright idea, do you want to guess what their bright idea was?

SPEAKER_00 13:34

I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

Three-year college degrees. Oh, okay. That was their improvement. What's funny about that is currently we have four-year college degrees. Um, most graduates take five and a half years to graduate. So their bright idea, their big solution um was not a la carte classes, which I think is the only way that they come out of this. The only way they survive is no, I only learn what I need from you because that's all I need from you. Um instead, they're like, oh no, no, three years. And their three-year degrees are gonna take four and a half, five years. So essentially no change, basically. Um, and then recently I've seen that people who are going to online universities are getting through their degrees in like three months. And again, this this like in ensconced group of academics are like, no, no, no, we can't have that. And it's because they're just trying to legislate, they're just trying to push back from a policy level against technology, which is going to be impossible. That's why people, I feel bad for people who are sending their kids to college thinking that it's gonna get them work because it's absolutely not gonna do that. And because they're trying so hard to build up this stone wall against a force that is just so much greater, which is just progress and technology in general, and they're just trying to just trying to protect their walled garden as much as they can and tell people, no, no, no, you have to, you have to come through there while a river is literally rushing around it. That's how it feels to me when I look at what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

It's gonna be really kind of incredible. And I'm I can't you're kind of like watching everything happen in real time. I mean, it's like it's really moving. What percentage of people that go to college actually go into the workforce and use their their degree?

SPEAKER_02 15:08

22%. It's abysmal. Um and and this matters a lot because um we are sending eight times too many kids to college than should be there. And I say that um and and maybe I should I I make sure I state this. Like so of the people who go to college, 22% of them will work in their f in anything related to their field of study. That also does not mean that that job that they get, that 22%, doesn't mean they like their job, doesn't mean it gets them the life they want, and does not mean that it has par positive ROI. That's that's the real thing. Is just because we have degree match to job match does not mean that that that worked out in their favor. It just means that the flavor of degree that they bought relates to the job that they have.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Yeah. 22% of people that what they got a degree in, they actually got a job doing.

SPEAKER_02 15:57

Right. And it also doesn't mean they're not underemployed. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

It doesn't mean they they still have student loans, doesn't mean they make enough to pay those back, doesn't mean they by the time they get a car and an apartment, they can't pay back their student loans. It doesn't mean any of that. It just means they happen to get a job in that industry.

SPEAKER_02 16:11

Right. Correct. So for instance, you could have somebody come out with a with a and and I just I just saw a uh video about this the other day, but a a girl that came out with a medical physics degree and um she is working as a cleaner at a hospital. So technically, technically that's that's career match, right? Technically, that's degree match. She works in healthcare, but that does not mean that her loans are paid back. It doesn't mean she likes her job. It doesn't mean that she's working in the intended job. It just means she's in the industry. So that's all that that means. So those numbers are even fuzzy.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

What's the most uh common thing that you see? I mean, you work with a bunch of youth and teenagers and young adults. What's the most common thing that you see right now that they lack that they haven't learned from school going into, you know, the real world, I guess?

SPEAKER_02 16:56

Uh definitely the ability to speak in public and speak clearly.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

That's a big one.

SPEAKER_02 16:59

Uh secondarily, which is part of it, is the ability to write and articulate clearly things. And then third, I would say is um, ironically enough, is gonna be AI literacy, is what I'm gonna call it. And that means that if you're working with a young adult and they and I define this as like 18 to 20 years old, okay, um, they don't know how to dictate to AI or give directions. And a lot of that does ladder up to the lack of ability to speak clearly and lack of ability to write clearly because and think your way through problems. Right linearly. That said, I think a lot of us lack that. I'm I I personally am a creative, so the way that my mind tends to work is like a spider web with all these unrelated things that are connected. Um, my husband, on the other hand, is very much a linear thinker, and I've noticed that as we use AI tools to build automations and and improve our business and improve what we do, I've noticed that it's forced me to learn that as well, and to the point where I'm now going back and think, I think I need to um, and I have been starting to teach myself physics at a very basic level because um I think that that ability to think linearly is gonna be really important going into the future, even if you have unrelated, unrelated creative ideas. And so if parents can do that with their kids now, that would be huge. What's cool is that's accessible to everybody. Get your kids reading, put them in Toastmasters, and then um the the other thing would just be get them with AI tools, but I don't mean just like chat, you know, asking at things that you can Google.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

Google, yeah. I think that's the the majority of Americans out there. I think we're kind of I'm back in the online space. I used to be a long time ago, and I think we see what's happening. I think the majority of Americans don't really see how powerful all this is, and I think they're just using it as like a Google search, wow, I can get more information, I don't have to scan through many as many websites. But they don't see like the technology just advancing so fast and it's pretty much affecting every industry. You know, my thought that what's gonna happen to the industries because people go, Oh, you still have to go to college to get a doctor or attorney or whatever. And I think what's gonna happen is industries are just gonna be incredibly small because you're not gonna need, you know, 10,000 engineers to go to the, you know, and or a thousand in one firm, like you like 20, 30 engineers, probably with a bunch of you know, executive assistants and AI that know how to use it, are probably gonna run a huge firm. And so I think the job market gets even more competitive because then you almost have to be this super engineer, like at the top 1% of engineers in the country, probably to even get a job. And you have to be able to work with AI, right? And not just engineers, just attorneys and everybody. It's just like that job market. You can't be a just a mediocre, probably gr college grad, and then think you're gonna go into the workforce. I think it's just super small and super competitive.

unknown 19:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:37

Because you just need less over time. And will there be new jobs? Yeah, I I don't know what a lot of those are gonna be.

SPEAKER_02 19:43

I think nobody does, right? There's so many being added every month. I see, I see another vision of another version of the future that I see is actually uh smaller teams that solve more specific problems growing, also. So I what I'd like to see and what I believe will happen actually is um while we're still in this time when smaller companies can access these tools before they get too expensive, right? Because eventually the tokens are just gonna be too much for like small to medium-sized businesses to be able to afford. But we're kind of in this middle adoption period. So um Uber did this, uh, DoorDash did this, where they're kind of subsidizing people to use it before the price goes up. So remember, Uber used to be really inexpensive, and now it's not really inexpensive anymore. You know, it's 60 bucks to go anywhere, pretty much. And so that I believe is kind of what we're in now. So there is this window where uh small to medium-sized businesses, which account for almost 80% of the jobs in our country, and um this group of people is gonna have access to these tools and be able to use them. And if they're able to use them and grow, or smaller people are able to use them and then create enough jobs, then there'll actually be more. There's gonna be quite a bit more jobs. But the way entry-level work looks, everyone's trying to figure out right now. Um, and so it's gonna be very interesting. The next like two years, I think, are gonna be pretty formative. But I think the way that parents can equip their kids is like you have to get them base level skill set, which is speak clearly, think clearly, and then um, you know, be able to use and solve whatever problem of whatever industry they're going into with um, you know, with AI automations and tools, which is not that hard. Like there's a little small things that you can do that take like 10 minutes that can add a huge amount of value to a business. And these young adults, if they're able to master these things, can go into any small local business, add huge value, and then potentially even um, you know, learn the skills that they need to build their own businesses, or to the point where they may be able to buy out small local business owners.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

Nobody my age wants to learn AI and try to implement it in their business. You just don't. You're busy running your business. You're like, I would rather hire some young person, it's like a a whiz that like just understands all of it. It's like, hey, come in and do it. I in I I have a lot of business owner friends that they're the same way. Like, you know, one of my friends, you know, runs all the uh hand wash car washes in town, or he owns them, and he goes, Man, I'm I'm trying to listen to. Podcast, I want to, you know, try to incorporate it in my business. And he's like, I just don't get it. And but he's he's a he's a master operator at these car wise. Like he's really good. And so he would be one of those guys that would pay some kid that if he knew how to come in and do the AI receptionist and just hook it up and do this, that they would get him a job today. Yeah at three o'clock, as soon as they walked in. As soon as we and so I think that there is a big opportunity. And not only do they not it's just they they don't have time to learn it, and then they just don't want to. They're they're older and you're like, you know what? I don't have to I don't want to. Yeah, it's like you just you you can hire a young kid to do it, they will. And that I think that'll be a lot of the entry-level jobs.

SPEAKER_02 22:39

I agree.

SPEAKER_01 22:39

Is like where you're working with some AI somehow to incorporate it in a business that become helps it become more efficient, right?

SPEAKER_02 22:47

That is what we're seeing too. So when when we place young adults, uh, you know, what we do is we we help them figure out what careers are gonna work for them that fit their needs. And then through the whole country, we're going, okay, well, what's the best place for you? Where are you gonna get in? What's the right we call it strategic entry-level work. So so um, but what's the right strategic entry-level work for you to get into this industry so that you can get experience so that you're able to get into and build a career in whatever industry that you've decided to go into that fits your needs. And um, we get a lot of inbound inquiries from business owners all across the country, uh, media, creative, construction, just anything you can imagine. Um, and we've recently been getting inbound for entry-level software engineers, which is wildly interesting because of the fact that if you look at the greater computer science unemployment rate for college graduates, it's very high. And it's very high because colleges are not teaching them to use current tools. They just currently.

SPEAKER_01 23:45

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:45

People who teach in colleges, especially and even STEM, this is something that I always get a lot of flack when I say this, but professors are not professionals. Like it is very rare to find professors that are uh either professors of practice where they really did do that at one point, or they're adjuncts where they still work in that industry most times because they're not necessarily allowed to work and also be professors at the same time. And um, it's very rare for them to have worked, even STEM professors who have worked in the in the subject that they teach in the last 15 years. So you've got business professors that started teaching before it before Instagram was invented. Just for like just for reference. So like parents are paying a hundred thousand dollars to have people teach their kids business who either last time they last time they were in business was 15 years ago, or worse, they are second generation professors, which means they never they never were in business. They went to school for business to learn from someone who had not been in business in 30 years, who is now teaching. So you've got these kids coming out of college now are third generation theory grads that they have no idea what's gonna be just teaching kind of theory and not especially hands-on practical stuff that you can use today.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

Yeah, which is again changing you know, ever so fast. What about the student loan debt? You know, what do we do? The the hard thing is you hear the government saying, Oh, we need to, you know, subsidize the loans and give you know give them credit and you know um not make them pay them back. Like what do you where do you think that goes?

SPEAKER_02 25:22

Oh, this is such a hard conversation. One of the reasons uh there was a podcast that I did uh it was a couple years ago, and that it was a financial podcast, and the host was like, well, you know, it doesn't really have an impact if we pay back everybody's student loans. And I just went, what are you talking about? Of course, of course it does. The government loaned that money, the government doesn't have its own money, they have our money, they have everybody's money. Like the government doesn't, they don't, they're not a bank, they don't have their own money. And so if they guarantee a loan and then someone defaults on that loan or doesn't pay that loan back, the taxpayer is on the hook for that. And the reason that I think that, and this is so um, I don't want to cry about this, but I I feel very strongly. Like I I've had people on my podcast before. There's one young man in in particular I think about, and his name was Bradley. And he uh when he was 17, his parents were not very financially literate. Like a lot of my parents weren't very financially literate, like they weren't irresponsible by any means, but they just weren't, you know, they just didn't understand a lot of the rules of this game that the way our economy works because it's designed to be complicated and they were working and raising families, they just didn't have time. And uh he went to school, everybody told him he he was uh Italian and his grandmother, his nonna, taught him how to make pastries, like wonderful, you know, wonderful cook and just instilled that love in him. And when he was 17, his guidance counselor said, Oh, you have to, you know, have to go to culinary school. And his parents were like, Okay, you know, that sounds great, like that's good. And he went to culinary school right out of high school. So 17 when he signed these loans, okay. Um, and he graduated in four years, which is very uncommon. Most graduates do not graduate in four years. So he worked. Like he, you know, he he he got through his four years. And I remember him on my podcast telling me that he sat uh they called him into the burser's office uh a week before he graduated and they told him what his loan payments were gonna be. And he went to this, they said, Oh, you know, get into this good colon his high school, get into this good culinary school, you're gonna be great, you know, just go do this. And he's a kid, like he's a kid, and he just didn't know. He didn't know any better. And he went and he's like, Okay, well, as long as I do this, I'm gonna be able to get a good job. And then he graduates, and I remember him telling me this so clearly where he was, it's it's just tragic. Like, it's tragic, and this is what's happening to young people in our country. And he said that he he said that he was sitting at that graduation ceremony thinking that it would be better if he was dead because of the amount of loans that he was gonna have to pay back. And that just like shattered my heart. And then he was unable to work in the industry he wanted to work in because of his loans. He was not able to be a pastry chef because he couldn't make enough to pay the loans. He couldn't work on the line and live. But if he had just gone and worked on the line, for all he, you know, for all I know, he could be a he could be a top pastry chef right now. But everyone told him you have to go to college. They didn't say, go work under a good chef, go wash dishes. Like I worked, I worked in restaurants for years, I worked in service industry for years. Like, you don't need go work in a kitchen, you know, and that and that analogy is true for most jobs in our country. That's the thing that parents are thinking, oh, well, my kid doesn't want to be a chef. My kid wants to be an engineer. And I'm like, no, no, no. Your kid needs to go find a skilled technician role, entry level, where they train them. I'm talking to you. Like, if your kid, well, my kid's gonna be an engineer, less than 20% of the engineers that are employed in our country have PEs, which is professional engineering licenses that are degree-required engineering degrees, like legally required by law.

SPEAKER_01 28:44

There's a stat that it says or that I've read that says 43% of people that graduate don't know what an interest rate is.

SPEAKER_02 28:52

Yeah, I believe that.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

So, but yet they're signing on all these loans, which is the biggest problem, right? You're like, oh, here, your monthly payments are $100 or whatever the the dollar amount is, but they don't understand what they're signing.

SPEAKER_02 29:03

I wrote um, this is so funny. Uh and this is why um uh a few years ago I wrote something called the College Lemon Law. And basically what it was was it required the colleges to co-sign on all the loans. And then it also required them, like a hedge fund, because that's what they are, to keep in reserve enough to refund students for their degrees if they do not get employment, if that's what the college is advertising, or feel that they are appropriately educated enough, right? So if they come out of college uh unable to think critically, uh to understand basic math, uh unable to do fractions like a lot of young adults who are in college now are unable to do, then they should be able to get their money back. Um, because what I don't like is the fact that colleges are the only industry that is completely able to have no quality control. None. And they're also the only industry that is allowed to give bankruptcy exempt loans to minors.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

Which is crazy. Which is wild too. The only thing you can't that you can't file bankruptcy on, right?

SPEAKER_02 29:57

The only thing you cannot. Like, and and the reason this is so critical to that.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

That's the only thing that, right? And correct.

SPEAKER_02 30:02

It's the only thing that's like that. And it's like that because it this whole thing, like we can go into the history of it really quick, but basically the only way to fix it now, and the only way to fix the college system now is to abolish the higher education act um of 19 uh 1965. Abolish that completely.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

Let the loans fail.

SPEAKER_02 30:21

Let the loans fail.

SPEAKER_01 30:21

And then it becomes a a market, a real marketplace, right? Correct. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:25

Um, so you you abolish the loans.

SPEAKER_01 30:27

College rates go way down if you want call yeah, if you want to get them down, make it a public marketplace. Yeah. People aren't gonna continue to loan money for things that don't work. Well, what's you have a bit a high default rate?

SPEAKER_02 30:38

Well, no, no. And here's why. Like this is what's this is what's so interesting. And this is why I've been researching this for years. And so kind of what I was telling you is I have this uh massive report basically that breaks down every myth that you've ever heard about college, like the million-dollar earnings myth, 2012 Georgetown study, multiple times debunked, but you can't get people to stop saying it because you know, every politician, every politician, no matter their political affiliation, has just repeated this over the years. And it's been repeated so often that people think it's true, but it's not. Um but the Higher Education Act was passed in 1965. Before 1965, and that so the 1965 Higher Education Act is what made parent plus loans. It allowed parents to co-sign on the loans and it allowed the government to fund these loans. Okay. Before that, it wasn't like that. It was just private loans. That's it. That's all there was. And nobody gave them out because it was so high risk. Night in the 1950s, all the GIs came back from World War II. It was called the GI bulge. And right, so the colleges expanded in order to take all of these GIs who had government money, right? So this government money addiction by academia started in the 1950s. As that tapered off, also, by the way, all of these were grown men coming back from war going to school for things that legally require degrees. Doctors, professionally licensed engineers, architects, CPAs. That's what we're talking about. So of course they had high employment. Of course they made money. They were all going into legally required degree professions that were high earning because they allowed them to be business owners and they allowed them to earn high because they were in a legally protected class of jobs, right? It was the license, right? The doctors don't make money because they're medical degrees. They make money because they have a license to practice medicine, um, which is why they're so tied to their license. If they lose their license, their degree is worthless, right? And so um, so this GI bulge started to taper off, and the colleges were like, Well, how do we get this money back? Like, we want, we're getting very used to the style, the standard of living. Like, we like all this money coming in. Where can we get it? You can get it from the parents because the kids didn't have it, right? So you make it so that parents can now take out these loans. And in 1965, now you get all these people at that time too, about 10% of young adults in our country were going to college. So 10%. This is very important. So 10% of young adults going to college. Now, by the way, it's 62% of young adults going to college.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

Really?

SPEAKER_02 32:51

62% of high school seniors will go to college.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

Do do is that how many what percentage graduates?

SPEAKER_02 32:56

What percentage graduates?

SPEAKER_01 32:58

Yeah, like that actually make it through college.

SPEAKER_02 33:00

A little over half. Okay. A little over half. Yeah. Um, so 41% of them will not graduate. Okay. Um, so we are sending eight times the amount of of high school students to college uh that we need to fulfill the legally required jobs in the market. That's the problem. Like that's the root of the problem. And this all started back in 1965. So Higher Education Act passes, then we've got this huge glut of college graduates. At the same time, uh, the Vietnam War happens. And the only way to not get sent to Vietnam is what?

SPEAKER_01 33:27

Go to college.

SPEAKER_02 33:27

Go to college. Right. So now you've got this private money coming in because people are just trying to keep their kids from going to Vietnam, understandable. And then you also have this government money coming in because now parents can access these loans. So this all happens. And at the same time, though, despite this, uh in by 1976, the default rate on the loans went from 2% to 9% in 11 years. That's a 350% increase.

SPEAKER_01 33:52

Yeah, super quick.

SPEAKER_02 33:53

Huge. In 1976, they had to amend the Higher Education Act to make the loans bankruptcy exempt because it was that bad already, 10 years in. So if you think about the tailwind of this, the 1980s, the economy was so strong, it did nobody noticed. Nobody noticed that the degrees were having like negative return. And also now the default rate was down. So people were like, ah, well, that's taken care of, right? And so now I I think and I theorize that probably the last time there was positive ROI for the majority of people who went to college was in the mid-1980s. So when you look at how people are talking about the million-dollar earnings premium, all of that data is averaged from 1965 to now. So they're disguising, it's just what colleges do now, right? They're disguising the outcomes with granddaddy's degree, with his medical degree, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:42

What happens if you don't so since you can't file for bankruptcy on it? And what happens if you just think a student doesn't pay? What do they do they like levy their account? I mean, what happens if you get a judgment? Really?

SPEAKER_02 34:54

Yeah. Yeah, but yeah. You garnish, they garnish their yeah, garnish their wages, tanks their credit score. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, one of the most interesting things that's happened that I've heard from people as we've gone through this, um, like as we build this business, is a lot of mortgage uh loan professionals will write into us and tell us like everything you're saying is right because they see people trying to buy houses. And one thing I got a ton of heat for saying was like, hey, um, your kid can't buy houses now because you bought them a college degree, like because you let them go take out this hundred thousand dollar loan. That's the down payment on their house, and they don't have it anymore because all that money went out the door. They lost wages every year that they were in college and they were paying. So most uh the NTES estimate for the average cost of a bachelor's degree right now, including lost wages, interest, and then tuition, is $520,000.

SPEAKER_01 35:42

Crazy.

SPEAKER_02 35:43

Which is why nobody can buy houses.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

That is so crazy.

SPEAKER_02 35:47

Yeah, all the money is going to the colleges.

SPEAKER_01 35:49

That being said, what do you say to a parent that still wants their kid to go to college and they're about to spend $60,000 a year on it?

SPEAKER_02 35:56

Um, I think that if your child has a trust or they need to go for a job that legally requires a license, which again is gonna be somewhere between uh somewhere between 6.53 and uh nine nine point four percent of the jobs in our country.

SPEAKER_01 36:11

In the United States.

SPEAKER_02 36:12

In the United States. Um Nevada has the lowest amount of uh the lowest amount of degree required jobs, is that six percent. And then the area with the highest percentage is uh Washington, D.C. Even though I don't know who would want their kid to work in Washington, D.C.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

but what do you think that um you know what's the alternative? So I would pay my kid not to go to college. Like I've already kind of and not that he not that he's probably won't go. I mean, but not that he's gonna want to go, but um what's the alternative? I think the parents should take the college tuition and either fund a business or fund whatever they want, right? There's just so much more that you can teach them with that money than going away for four years and not learning anything.

SPEAKER_02 36:55

I think there's a couple different ways to go about this. Uh one one thing I feel really strongly about is that that money should be invested earlier on. Uh, and I don't necessarily mean in a fund. I mean like you invest that in the child early on. Uh language learning, uh, critical thinking, arts, uh, and this is again where I'm actually really passionate about education. I think all that stuff gets invested in them now. The goal is that when they turn 18, they have some idea of what they want their life to look like, as far as where they want to live and build their life, who they want around them, what sort of work environment is gonna work for them. Uh, this is really work environment is really important, and then schedule is really important as well. So, like when you do your work. Um, what and then the last thing is income. So, like what sort of income do you need to make? And then what sort of income like are you aiming for? This matters a lot because uh for all, for all young adults, these are the actual criteria that matter. And if people considered these before they decided they would go to college, they would get better outcomes also. This there are so many kids going to college now that have literally no idea the answers to those four questions. And then what parents always say to me is, well, they sh they're so young, they shouldn't be able to answer those questions yet. I'm like, well, then you shouldn't be putting them in bankruptcy in debt yet. That's crazy. If they can't answer those questions, what are you buying that degree for? You have no idea what it's for. And like you wouldn't buy them a Ferrari just because they think Ferraris are cool. Like, that's crazy. Do you do you have a reason? Are they gonna use it for something? Like, what are they gonna do with it? And if you don't have an answer, you shouldn't you shouldn't do that.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

Yeah, that's where I think the big gap is too. It's that, you know, well, really, it's everything, but you know, when you know, 10, 11, 12 years old, all the way to 18, that the school leaves out so much that you actually need in real life. The day you turn 18, the day you graduate, the day you get let out on your own. And, you know, whether it's you know, the main thing is financial literacy, but I mean communication is a big one. Communication and sales and then being able to solve problems for people and solve your own problems and just be a critical thinker. And that was what kind of drove me to start the thing that I did is like it would be it would help those kids in that age range age range because I think they can apply it the most to their life.

SPEAKER_00 38:56

They can.

SPEAKER_01 38:56

Yeah, that's why I wanted to start with that age group, because they're like le no matter what we teach, I think that they're at the age that they can apply it. My son's seven, he has a short attention span. I mean, I I work with him every week, but it's a lot different. And especially if they're not in person, it's hard. And so I think that's why I picked that age group, because I think that that age group is going to be able to apply the things that we're teaching like immediately to their life.

SPEAKER_00 39:16

Yeah, I agree.

SPEAKER_01 39:17

And they'd be so much better off when they graduated when they're 18 learning just true life skills.

SPEAKER_02 39:24

It's the best the best thing is aside from aside from investing in them earlier on, and I know that that's hard, right? Because when they're younger, usually parents are building their own careers too. So there's not a lot of a disposable income. I think a lot of the reason too that parents are so willing to spend that money on college is because one, that's the whole goal through K through 12 education, right? It's to make this $100,000.

SPEAKER_01 39:43

It's also the system they came from. Right. So I think it's like, hey, this is what I did, and I don't know any other way.

SPEAKER_00 39:50

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 39:50

So I think that that that's a lot what gets put on the kids is the parents just don't have another way to teach them. It's like they don't have the alternative. So they're like, well, just do this. That's what I did.

SPEAKER_02 40:00

Well, that's something that uh I read uh it was a Pew research study with that was talking about the reason that most parents send their kids to college is because obviously they think it's gonna get them a job. That's just not true anymore. The next reason is because they just don't know what else to do. And I think the thing I really want to take out I really want parents to hear about this is to take the fear out of it because there's all this like pressure. If you think about it, it's almost like falling off a cliff when you graduate high school. Like you have got to do something, and part of that is social pressure because like you want to be able to, oh, my kid's doing XYZ, like it because it's a reflection on you.

SPEAKER_01 40:29

Yeah. Right. I think that that does come, that's part of the college thing too, is like my kids going to you know, XYZ school. And like it it makes them feel better. They can tell their friends, not that that's gonna create a good outcome. It's just that they're in that school right now.

SPEAKER_02 40:43

Yeah. It alleviates, I think, a little bit of it alleviates it for a little bit. And uh, the reason I say a little bit is because we get so many, we we don't work with kids that are over 21. We do we do not. Okay. And the reason is because it's impossible to place them. Business owners do not want to hire them. College graduates, we we don't, we don't work with them. So we work with young adults in this very specific age range because it's very difficult to place college graduates. Um, a lot of employers, especially so remember I said um it's like 80% of the businesses in our country uh that create most of the jobs are small to medium size. So, like you said, small regional, like local businesses. Um, those business owners, it's incredibly expensive for them to hire. Incredibly expensive. Like even if they wanted to hire kids from their hometown, it's expensive for them to do that. When they hire college graduates, 71% of employers reported firing a recent Gen Z college graduate. The churn, they can't handle the churn. It's too expensive, it's too risky. Um, and then if they come in with a college degree, they're gonna have an inflated expectation of what their pay is.

SPEAKER_01 41:41

That's what we see in our companies.

SPEAKER_02 41:42

It's like it's called the reality gap. College is created because they don't have it before and they have it after.

SPEAKER_01 41:48

Is this like a new thing? Like it's like everybody wants a hundred grand. Right. It doesn't matter who it is. If they're graduating from college, they're like, they think that they deserve a hundred grand and it's not like on their skill or on anything. It's just like, hey, I did all this work and I got my degree and I did this. It's like, well, that's not really how it works in business. Like we just need the best person.

SPEAKER_00 42:06

Right.

SPEAKER_01 42:06

Like I don't that that's all we need. Like we need to perform as a company. I need to be able to pay my employees, I need to be able to uh return money to shareholders if you know, if you know the whole definition of a business. And so I can't hire you and pay you that because you have a degree or you went to school. I need the best person.

SPEAKER_02 42:23

Well, a lot of it is a disconnect too for what they want to do. So um you'll have kids that and making a hundred K is a great goal. Also, I realize inflation has been uh rampant.

SPEAKER_01 42:33

And so a lot of it's definitely different than it was a long time ago.

SPEAKER_02 42:36

Yeah. But a lot of the reason they feel that so acutely is because they are they are experiencing negative compound interest at a time when they need to be able to just take any work that's strategically the right move for them to get the right skills so that they do command that in the market within four to six years. Like it's possible, but it's not possible if you waste all that time in college not working, not building network, not building skills. And so that's why like we get all these messages from parents who are like, oh, my kid's 23, like, can you can you please take them? Blah, blah, blah. They can't get a job, computer science, business, economics, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, uh no, uh I can't, you know, because uh what they needed, you needed to find me a couple years ago. Because at the beginning, you can teach kids a minimum effective dose skill, like Tim Ferriss talks about minimum effective dose. And that's because they're 18. It's totally acceptable for them at 18, 19, 20 years old to have a minimum effective dose of skills in order to get into an entry-level job in a business where they're actually learning and they're actually able to contribute a little bit and they're not expecting to make uh more than you know, because again, people people just have this really um, and maybe it's social media has probably been part of it as well. But I think a lot of it is the colleges because I have identified, you know, we work with this 18, 19, 20 year old age range. And when we were first building degree free, I did, I did try to help those those older kids. Like our team did try to help them. It's really hard. They get this crystallized mindset. Um, they get really fixated on trying to apply their degree and so. Of being able to just like, hey, this actually, you know, you have this art degree, you can't live on you can't live on that. Um, you would be able to if you were not expecting all of these things now because you're 25, right? Because they're a little bit older. And it's like, okay, but you don't you have the same skill level, you literally have the same skills as an 18-year-old, sometimes less.

SPEAKER_01 44:21

Yeah, and you want more money.

SPEAKER_02 44:22

And you want more money. And that, and that's like, um, you know, oh, the livable wage, blah, blah, blah. Like, sure. But when you're 18, the amount that they're offering you is a livable wage. You're gonna be your kids are gonna be applying for the exact same jobs as 18, 19, 20-year-olds. And I know that because there's parents in our DMs, in our emails begging us to try to help them get the exact same jobs that we're having zero trouble, zero friction, 18, 19, 20-year-olds. Like we had a we had a young man come through our uh our our program and three weeks. It took three weeks uh to make him an intro to a field service engineering role, medical, medical device, field service engineering. He left Texas AM because he's like, uh, and I hear actually hear this a lot too. Um, a lot of young men who are in engineering, uh, they have trouble understanding their professors. Like there's literally a language barrier. Uh uh, because a lot of our professors are from other countries.

SPEAKER_01 45:11

Especially engineering for sure. I can imagine that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:14

Yeah. Um, but I've also I've also heard this from like uh design and interior design and architecture. Um, and there's also a huge problem with that because a lot of the technologies that they're teaching, even the software they're teaching, they're not teaching Revit, they're not teaching Autodesk, they're teaching like um uh there was a one young lady that came in, an interior design program. And she's like, I don't really know what I'm gonna do with this, and I don't know, like I'm not learning anything really in college. She said, and our professor's teaching us to use a software that they only use in Egypt because the professor was Egyptian. And she's like, I don't know how to use any of the things, like I'm applying to these internships and I don't know how to use any of the things that they want for the internships I'm applying for.

SPEAKER_00 45:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:52

Right. Whereas I had we had a kid come through, uh uh go through uh building and building information modeling, extremely high demand, extremely high demand building information modeling. It's uh construction, it's a construction job, but it's a desk job and it's a design job. So it's the actual like the HVAC and the plumbing and the wiring and stuff. And you maintain these models uh for for construction project management. You don't need a degree. Uh the certification for that, uh their tiered levels of certificates, kind of like Salesforce is a you know, is a CRM and you can get an admin and an architect, and they just have this well-laid out path for education for in their in their product line. Uh building information modeling is like that, and you can just go up, get experience, and earn certifications. And the first one is like two grand. And that's what you need to get into the job. Whereas this young lady is going to she's she was in year four with no applicable skills. Whereas this 19-year-old kid we had, you know, it took him three weeks to get.

SPEAKER_01 46:47

I kind of see that that would be the future of education a little bit, is where you have this little specialized course not by a college, but you know, may probably by the companies that need the roles. And then you take this little specialized course, and then we know that by the time you get out, and it's probably cheap, it's fifteen hundred bucks, two grand or whatever. We know that when you get out, you know, you have a X amount of percent chance of getting a job with us if you can do X, Y, and Z or something. So that's probably where it goes, like these super short, um, like specific courses in like whatever field that you're going into is probably like the where the majority of Americans go, it seems like that would be the most effective way.

SPEAKER_00 47:22

A lot of people can do something.

SPEAKER_01 47:24

A lot of people can do something for four weeks, right? And like focus on it and be successful at it if they know that they're gonna get an outcome. Four years of just, oh, I'm gonna take some of my classics or my classes that are the basics, and then I'm gonna get into this stuff. Maybe they'll get into the stuff that'll actually teach me how to do what I'm trying to do. Sure. And it just it doesn't make any sense. And so, you know, it would make sense if that was the new that was where the model went, where people had these little small courses that they could take and then just get a career role or whatever they're gonna whatever they're wanna go into.

SPEAKER_02 47:55

You know, we were talking about the colleges uh reporting their numbers. Um and one thing again, I got like I just take so much, I take so much flack on the internet, but where I was talking about Texas AM and I was talking about, and again, it's it's because Aggies are like diehards, right? Which I get it. The people can't separate the sports from the from the institution. And like, oh, well, you know, I'm from AM and I make this much. Okay, cool. The the Texas AM on their website, people are like, where are you getting these numbers from? And I'm like, from Texas AM's website, unfortunately for you. Uh they report that their their average graduate makes 85k a year. Okay. This is very important. This is their knowledge rate. So it's the amount of people that they can actually verify make that, um, and it's the amount of people who are employed. This is not counting women who leave and are stay-at-home moms, which by the way, a majority of college graduates are women. The majority of college graduates are women. Most people that buy paper are women. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like by by by a pretty good margin. Um, most people that buy college degrees are women, and women buy more college degrees than men. Um and then a woman a woman with bachelor's degree is gonna make less than a man with no bachelor's degree. So they make a thousand dollars more. Or sorry, they make a thousand dollars more. So they spend $108,000 to $156K, um, and then they make a thousand dollars less than a guy with bachelor's degree. A lot of that has to do with career choice, uh, and then uh like when they work and and motherhood and all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of factors here. But um, this matters a lot because so Texas AM reports on their website, they make their grads make 85k a year. Average.

SPEAKER_01 49:23

Overall, that's every grad from random.

SPEAKER_02 49:25

That's what they say, average. Okay. Now, this is really important because uh one of the things that happened in this comment section, I'm talking this video got like a hundred thousand views or something like that. And everybody in the comments just went, Oh, you're just using deceptive numbers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All these people not understanding the difference between between average and median, okay, for salary information. Very simple concept. I don't have a college degree. So, you know, if people are watching this clip later, I don't have a college degree, but it's a pretty simple concept. Median is very important for salary information because average is not going to give you the most accurate, uh average is not, or average is not going to give you the most accurate accurate representation of what people are earning. Median is supposed to account for high skew and low skew. So median is what most people are getting out of this. Not mode, which is most often occurring, but median is the best representation. The median Texas AM college graduate makes 62K 10 years out of college. That is very different than you graduate and you make 85K.

SPEAKER_01 50:22

Yeah, and the reason implying that you're gonna graduate and they're gonna get an entry-level job at 85K.

SPEAKER_02 50:27

Which is what they do. And they imply that because they are using their petroleum engineers, their engineering program, which is not the majority of degrees that they grant. The majority of degrees they grant are psychology and education. And those degrees, uh they're graduating about 490 psychology, psychology majors, and they're graduating like 60 petroleum engineers, but they have to combine them to disguise the outcome. Because for most of the graduates, they are getting a psychology bachelor's degree outcome, not a petroleum engineer, a licensed engineer, legally required degree outcome. And so it's the knowledge rates are huge. And I was talking to a guy who works for a company who um does tuition insurance, right? This is very interesting. Because I went, okay, I want to know, I want to know what the actual um, I wanted to know what the actual refund rate on these on this tuition is.

SPEAKER_01 51:18

I was gonna say explain what tuition insurance is because I don't really know what that is.

SPEAKER_02 51:21

Right. Cause what I started wondering was, okay, what I want to know is it's so hard to get accurate information. And so I figured that the best place to get accurate information is from two places, not the colleges themselves, because they're terrible at keeping information. And then I'll tell you this in a second, because what this guy told me was not surprising to me, but it might be to some parents. Um, so they do tuition insurance. So I thought, okay, that's a good place. The other place was um a guy I know named uh Wes, and he manages student housing, off-campus student housing. And I said, okay, well, if I want to know how what the enrollment rate is, right? Because you've probably seen headlines recently. We say, oh, enrollment's up. Enrollment is not up, enrollment is down, very much so. And the colleges are trying to pad their numbers so that they can keep people thinking that everyone's going to college. That's not what's going on at all. Um, and so Wes, I asked him, like, you know, he manages properties nationally. And I said, How many kids are leaving? Because the first people that know are actually usually the off the housing, um, not the on-campus, but the off-campus, right? Um, and so I asked him, hey, like how many kids are leaving? He's like, it's a lot. You know, to the point where the industry itself is starting to panic.

SPEAKER_01 52:23

There's high vacancy. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They're housing.

SPEAKER_02 52:25

They're not doing good. Um, and the second group I thought might be able to give me some information about it is insurance. Because I said, I know that there's tuition insurance.

SPEAKER_01 52:32

Yeah, they have more data than anybody, right? It's a math problem. All insurance is just an algorithm and a math problem.

SPEAKER_02 52:37

Right. And they keep really good data. And also because I figured, okay, well, these, and again, this is just this just basic logic. This is a good example of how like anybody these days can be a good researcher, have theories and hypotheses and test them. And so I figured that people who send their kids to college and also get tuition insurance are fairly high income, right? Because to pay the additional money to have tuition insurance, one, the tuition has to be high enough that you want insurance for it. And then two, you have to be able to pay the monthly premiums for tuition insurance, right? And so I went and I I called this company and I was talking to uh I was talking to one of the guys uh that runs the company. And he told me, he's like, Yeah, we really can't track the colleges, like we really don't trust their data because they don't track really what's going on with the grads. Um and he's like, so the part of the reason that uh, you know, part of the way that we do our rates has nothing, we don't we don't use the college's information at all.

SPEAKER_00 53:30

What do they use?

SPEAKER_02 53:31

Um they use their own, their their own proprietary data. Like they've just tracked historically what like what refund rates go for which colleges. But he's like, we don't know how the insurance work.

SPEAKER_01 53:41

I don't under I've never heard of that. So somebody can get tuition insurance if they can't get a job or they don't finish college or what what is the tuition if they leave.

SPEAKER_02 53:49

Okay. Yeah, so if they leave uh due to like medical issues or mental health issues or whatever, um, which honestly is super prevalent.

SPEAKER_01 53:55

Just get a refund.

SPEAKER_02 53:56

Uh yeah, right now, like, you know, as far as mental health issues and people can uh you know, people can can talk about that all they want, but like college students are really not in a good in good shape. Like if you have a if you have a son and he's like 18, you know, if you have a son and you're sending him, you're gonna send him to college and he does not legally need to be there, I would rethink that because he is more likely to come out with a mental disorder than he is to come out with a job. Like that is where we are right now. Young men are more at risk, they're more likely to come out of college with a mental diagnosis than they are to come out with employment. It's like crazy to me when I see people that just send their kids like with no clear goal. They have no clear reason to be there. Like, oh, it's just, you know, he got a little bit of a scholarship or he wants to play lacrosse or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 54:38

I'm like, Well, they also think what are you doing? They also think that it's gonna fix because they don't know what they want to do with their life. So they think that that's the solution. It's like, oh, you have to go to college because it's gonna fix your problem.

SPEAKER_02 54:50

Right.

SPEAKER_01 54:50

You're gonna know exactly what you want to do if you go to college and you're gonna figure it out.

SPEAKER_02 54:53

They just think that if they send their kids to college, they're gonna be able to figure out what they do. But we have we we, you know, we have these kids that are like um kids that are like men's, you know, they've got mensa kids, they're varsity athletes, um, they're, you know, champion like chess players, even. And they just they they'll come to us and their their parents are like, they have literally no idea what they're doing. And and inevitably, what happens too is part of the reason so many kids are so stressed out on college campuses and so depressed is they're outside of everything that they know, right? It's this whole it's very unnatural. And it's crazy because um I've said this for years and I get fried for it every time I say it. But I'm like, it's unnatural to send kids to college. It's super weird. It's very weird, it's very recent to history. Let me peel off my 18-year-old child and send them with a bunch of random strangers, drunk 18-year-olds, drunken high 18-year-olds, and college professors who have no practical work experience. And that's gonna, that's gonna be good. Oh, and by the way, they don't know what they're doing there. They don't know how it's gonna benefit them later in life, and a lot of them are in debt. I wonder why they're so depressed. I wonder why they're so stressed out.

SPEAKER_01 55:54

I think that the argument well, the argument that the parents make that do that is like, oh, well, they're gonna have connections and they're gonna have a social experience and it's gonna make them grow up. That's the argument that people say. Well, the Which is insane because of course one of my buddies went to a school here in Texas and it was a big party school. And I didn't go to that school, but I went there every week to party with them. And I was like, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen. Like every night that there's a party, it's like, how is that possibly gonna benefit your kid's life? Like, I went through that stuff, and I know it doesn't.

SPEAKER_02 56:28

Well, that is what a lot of people say is, yeah, you know, you're you're absolutely right. And I'm sure you've heard that, right? Oh, well, you know, that's the argument. That's the argument. It's the social experience, like catch-all. It's like, oh, well, they're gonna get network, oh, or they're gonna gain maturity, oh, well, they're gonna make friends, or that I'm like, what you were referring to that you're mistaking for the college experience is literally just them aging. It's the same thing because how do I know that? Um, because I did not graduate from college, and yet I have extremely tight friends from that time period because I was moved out. I was was with my friends. I had a ton of work experience. Like I worked at nonprofits, I worked in sales, I worked in marketing, like I worked on a dolphin boat, I worked, I did all kinds of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 57:09

I actually disagree with that because they if saying your kid's gonna get all this social experience and they're gonna mature and all those things, it's actually gonna delay it. Because if they go to college, yeah, their their parents are probably paying for it the majority of the time, or they have a loan and then they're partying half the time, or you know, they don't know what they want to do. And so they're just kind of like wandering through this like mediocre life. And so it delays you having to grow up and fend for yourself and make good decisions. And so it's like four years of delayed. And so the people that graduate, I feel like are more delayed than someone that like just went straight in trying to figure out life, trying to figure out it on their own. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 57:45

When we look at, and I'll tell a story about my sister, she actually works for me now because I recruited her. Uh, but my sister, uh, my youngest sister is degree-free also. Um she decided when she was 18 that she was gonna be a welder, a structural welder. Okay. Um, and this is not a trade like because I always say this, but I'm not micro. I'm not, oh, don't go to college, go to trade school immediately. Like, no, you still have to apply the same four criteria. And then if a trade is the best fit for your child, then do it. But it's this whole like, oh, if not college, then trade school, because parents just want to put their kids somewhere. I'm like, no, no, no. It doesn't matter where you're putting them, if you're just trying to stick them somewhere that you think is secure, it's not. Figure out what the right fit for them is. They all have different fits.

SPEAKER_01 58:26

Yep, they're trying to solve uh the problem again of their kid being lost and not knowing what they want to do.

SPEAKER_02 58:30

Trade school debt, still student loan debt, also, by the way. And just because they go to trade school doesn't mean then there's a job. That's why it's so important to do this reverse engineering and actually look from your area what trades are hiring and then where. Because my sister, um, she ended up going to this uh steel company, structural steel company. They build, you know, she's built rocket launch pads and pieces of rocket, just like very cool blueprints. Like for all intents and purposes, the way that they say American technicians are engineers in other countries. Like we our skilled technicians are the level of like Japanese engineers. It's that's the skill level that we're talking about from a practical standpoint. Um, and the pay kind of kind of reflects that. So at 18, she goes, it's an apprenticeship. They pay her to train, it's not a union or anything like that. But this is a good example because I'll have people say, Oh, well, my son went to welding school right out, you know, right out of high school and he can't get a job. And I'm like, did you check to make sure welding was the was the thing that was available that fit his needs? And probably not. Like maybe he should have gone fiber optics, maybe he should have gone software development, maybe he should have gone marketing. I don't know. But that's why it's so important for every single kid in every single zip code with every single need that they have, always gets a different answer. There's a fit for everybody, but like parents have to take their individual child and they have to figure it out. Like you can't just skip to the end and pick a thing. You have to figure out all this basic stuff before you take an action. It's the why of the action. So my sister, 23, she owns a house. She's married, you know. They have they have, you know, their first, their first little one on the way. Like very much. And 23, by the way, these kids are graduating college right now, no job, no work experience. She's had a full career now. And not only she's been a ton of experience. She's been in it so long, she could be a QA. If she ever wanted to go like work for a company, she has a skill set that's worth $120,000 that she got for not only zero, but positive. In fact, she made so much money during that time that they were able to buy a house, right? And this is an illustration not of trades over college. This is an illustration of cash flow positive with skill match for the life that you want. That's what it's that's what I'm trying to illustrate to parents, is like you need to figure out what your kids need and then with the best available resources where you are. Because somebody in Michigan is gonna get a different result than somebody in Miami. It's gonna get a different result than somebody in the Bay. It's gonna get a different result than somebody in Wasilla, Alaska. It's always gonna be different. That's why you have to do it right then when your kids are ready to make a move and help them figure it out right then. It's like very important to do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:56

Hey everyone, real quick, I just want to let you know this podcast is 100% independent. No ads, no sponsors, just real. If you're finding value in whatever we're doing here, the biggest help that you can give us is hitting subscribe and sharing this with someone who you think needs to hear it or someone that it will provide value to. That's how we continue to grow. And if you did that, I would really appreciate it. But I also think that all these college grads that end up doing really well, like in whatever field they go into, and they're the top one percent of whatever, they probably would have been successful at anything they did because that's the top one percent. They figure things out, they do more than the average person. And so it's it skews even the college stuff more than that because the top one percent, whatever path they choose, if they did anything, they're gonna outperform other people, they're gonna work harder, they're gonna study more, they're gonna learn more, they're gonna do whatever it takes to get to the top. And then it's like, well, they would have they didn't go to college and that didn't create the outcome. That was they were just a top performer in whatever they decided to do. They applied theirself in whatever they decided to do in their life. And so whether it was business or whether they did anything, they would have been at the top of their field, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:10

Well, it's the college, like they don't even have to be.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:19

Give me the top 1% of the country, smartest people, most hardest working people, and give those people to meet. Like, I could make everybody successful too. It would be super easy.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:28

Well, that's what it's it's uh these kids are successful in spite of the college, not because of it. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. That's what I always say. Your kid does not need college, like Bosch the athlete top score. Your kid doesn't need college, college needs your kid because they need to white label a result that's a result of the 18 years prior to them getting a hold of your child. And if your kid makes it through uh the toxic college environment, and then the Especially nowadays, it's getting weird. It's it's it's so like um it's so wild to me. I and I say this a lot, especially with like um uh there's so many, um, so many different stories from different families that I hear. And it's it's really interesting to see how like both sides of the political spectrum are pulling their kids for different reasons. And it's like it's amazing what a catastrophic failure it is, truly. Like how it is not serving anybody well. Like almost nobody is getting a good result out of this. And yet, again, 62% of high school seniors going to do this thing that is not benefiting them socially, it's not benefiting them professionally, it's not benefiting them from a life skills perspective. Like the the critical thinking is a huge thing. So have you heard of the CLA? The CLA is the collegiate learning assessment. So this is uh uh in 2000, uh the the government said, Hey, uh, you guys got to prove that you're teaching critical thinking since you claim that that's what you're doing. And the test that they use was the ability to comprehend the language on a credit card brochure. That's how simple we're talking here, okay? And uh and again, like finance stuff's tough, right? But like you would assume a college graduate would be able to understand like the terms, like APR, like you think that they know that. No. Uh so and you'd think that after they go through college, they'd at least have a better gauge of of that kind of stuff. And this is really an indictment of the system itself. Like, you can't claim that you're education and not educate people. You can't claim your job training and then not train people for jobs. You can't claim that people need you to experience like a good social life or to be well-rounded and then not help them do any of those things. Like, if colleges didn't make those claims, I would not criticize them, but they do, and they do that wholesale to the whole country to say you have to come through us to get all these things. These kids, two years in, 45% of them, zero change in critical thinking skills. Zero, no impact. After four years, 36% of them still zero change in critical thinking. I also think that it's very unlikely the college is the reason for any change at all. It's just age. Because they're spending four years to six years in college. They're just growing up.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:52

And start picking up things that are happening around you in the real world.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:55

But even if that is the college's fault, it's a coin flip. And I'm sorry, but you're paying 108 to 156,000 for a coin flip.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:01

That's the dollar amount that is crazy. It's wild. Right? It's just that's where it's pretty sad that somebody does go into debt if they were not fortunate enough to have their parents pay for it. And then they get out and then they're stuck in they're kind of stuck because you almost have to once you sign a apartment lease and get a car note to get to work and have a cell phone, like you're it's it's hard for them to get out of it because they don't know how to do anything else. And so it's like they are in that path without one day, maybe they'll have to take a huge risk coming to them and just quit and learn something new.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:35

Right. When they're 30 years old. And it's like, but it's so much harder to do it then. Um, it's so much harder to do it then. And and I think um what's what's really unfortunate is like so many people are doing that, right? They hate their jobs, they hate their life just that they don't make enough, and they gotta go reinvent themselves. I think if we stopped putting kids in debt when they were 17 to 18 years old, they wouldn't have to do that. They could just work that stuff out when they're young and it's low risk and they don't have families and they're not trying to buy their first house. Like they

SPEAKER_01 1:06:00

This is what the best time to take risk is when you're 18. I mean I did. I took a bunch. And I again I told you earlier, I was like, I can live off, I can eat off 20 hours a week. I was like, what's the worst thing that could happen if I take this risk and do this thing? Um I learned a lot along the way, but that's what I did with everything. And so there's no family. There's no anything. Like I could sleep on a floor. Like it didn't even matter. I didn't have to support anybody.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:23

You're mostly healthy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:25

It was great. And you don't, it doesn't bother you. You're like, I don't care. This is a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:28

Your body doesn't hurt when you get up in the morning because you're 18 years old, so it's fine.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:31

And just like you're you'll never have more energy. You'll never have more like wanting to achieve something in life at like that age.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:39

And so if that's like I tell people, like that's the time to take the biggest risk. Yep. It truly is, especially, you know, we had kids later in life, but I couldn't even imagine if I, you know, had kids when I was 21 and then wouldn't be able to take as much risk, or 25 or whatever it is, and which happens. And so if you don't do that when you're 18, you delay four years of your life and then you get in debt and then you go do this thing, and then you try you want to start a family, you're like, wow, I can't really do much else besides stay at this place because I I I I'm not gonna be able to pay our apartment to to support my family.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:10

And then there's this sunk cost from the degree too. So a lot of them, yeah, like most get you know, most people don't have an easy time. Uh and while while we should be able to just be objective about it, like college is not an objective purchase. If it was, people wouldn't be making it, right? It's very emotional. It's very um, it's it's a very emotional purchase. And so because of that, people, you know, they buy this degree and then they they spend all this time trying to get a job or trying to like make enough in the in the thing that they bought a degree in. And you'll see this online. Oh, you know, I have a master's degree in this, and like I can't get a job. I saw this girl, she was probably like 25. She's like, I went into the local museum and she's like to try to get this job, and it only pays $41,000 a year, but I have a master's degree. And I'm like, yeah, but it probably paid just about that much before you did that. I did the master's degree, yeah. You should have just you should have just checked. And also, if you had checked and you went, I can't live on $41,000, you shouldn't have gone and bought two degrees to then go complain about the shovel. Like you should have made different choices. But then it's hard to, to be fair to them. It's very difficult to then go, oh shoot, I have to start all the way over. They have all this debt, they put all this time in, they're like, you know, mid-20s now, and they want to start getting some traction in life. And then they have these raised expectations of what they should be able to afford because they're older, right? And and it's just a really tough situation. But that's why I don't think we can't forgive student loans. We just have to stop. Like, we just, you know, to what we were talking about earlier, you just have to stop cut the money off. Like it's so crazy. We've got people like, you know, um, get rid of the DOE, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. I'm like, no, no, no, just if you just cut the Higher Education Act, you would cut most of the corruption and most of the blow in our country because it's coming from academia. Like, um, it's also flowing down to K through 12. Because I'm not saying that the DOE shouldn't be abolished. I think that that's probably a good idea too. But like at the core of it, um, and this is something that most remember we're talking about the jobs that require degrees. So one of the most interesting things that I've found is that the amount of jobs that require degrees, what professions do you think uh account for most of the jobs that legally require degrees?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:10

Just off, you know, based on what everybody else you would assume was like doctor, attorney, and engineer. That's like the f or or you know, m nurse or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:19

Well, nurse, so good. Nurses is definitely one of them. So 38% of the jobs in our country that legally require college degrees are two professions nurses, specifically RNs, and teachers. Now, both of those jobs until not too long ago were just trained. They're trained by hospitals or they were trained by schools and there was examination. So they are policy. It is policy that requires them to be that way. It is not necessity. And so, um, and the BSN specifically, so the so nursing, uh, that's just something the colleges were just went to the hospitals and then threatened their ratings if they didn't have nurses that have a certain amount. Really, it was just greed because the colleges were like, wait, if we can force the hospitals to do this, then we can get the nurses' money too. Like we would love to take the nurses' money. I know that because my mom didn't, my mom was just trained. Um, and my mom was a nurse. And so um the wildest thing is realizing that most of the jobs, so the largest, you know, most of the jobs in our country that do legally require degrees don't need to require degrees at all. Uh teachers, uh, and the and the and we're gonna we'll get a ton of flack, I'm sure, for saying that about teachers. But the simple fact is, and people can get as angry about this as they want, and I truthfully don't care, it's just the facts. Um, teachers who are trained perform the exact same or better than teachers who have degrees, even master's degrees. And there are programs in our country, and you can see this, um, and this includes like secondary math. Like, this is even math teachers, like, of course, with English, that makes total sense, right? You can be trained into that. And the thing is, too, what I really hate is I hate this for nurses and I hate this for teachers because they should be able to go into those jobs if they want to without that amount of debt. Everybody should be really angry about the fact that you have to buy a college degree in order to be a teacher. Like, people should be angry about the fact that you have to go buy a degree in order to become a nurse. We have a nursing shortage and we have a teacher shortage.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:07

And the teacher thing doesn't make any sense at all.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:08

It makes no sense. Take an exam. They take an exam now. Why can't they just complete an amount, an allocated amount of hours and then take an exam to qualify as teachers? Because when there's a teacher shortage in an area, that's what they do now. They do that now. And it's like, why wouldn't we just alleviate that debt burden on all these people? The other thing is remember women buy most college degrees. Yeah. Right? Women are the most paper demographic. So they buy the most degrees. Um, they buy degrees at a higher rate and they have the most degrees. Now, of um of the jobs that legally require degrees, so let's just round up, you know, well, it's in between seven, you know, it's in between that 6.53 and then uh 9.58 uh percent and so of jobs in our country that legally require degrees. Now, um, of that, 38% of them are nurses, so registered nurses and teachers, K through 12 teachers. Now, most of those are women, obviously. Like the vast the vast majority. Um, for teachers, not even worth mentioning male teachers because there's so few of them. Like it's all, it's all women. Um, this is the most interesting thing. So like this is just really goes to how when you look into the data, it's all like everything that we think is just not true. It's just not true. And I and I'm gonna use an example for this because this matters a lot. So who people marry matters a lot too. A lot of the way that the outcomes for degrees has been obscured is through marriage, because the way that we track household income and household wealth is through marriage. Now, this is important because of the nurses and teachers, 75% of them or or um yeah, it's I think it's I think is it is it 75% of them? Yeah, 75% of them are married to men who do not have college degrees. So they're degree-free. Of those, three-fourths of them, 75%, their husbands out earn them. But um, and this matters a lot because um the way that we measure the data, we attribute the net worth of that household and the income of that household to the degree holder. So so really, so household income is. So Joe Rogan's wife has a bachelor's degree. Joe Rogan is degree free. Joe Rogan's income and his net worth is attributed to a college degree.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:18

Really?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:19

Yes, because in his household there is a degree holder. And we made that change a few years ago, and I think that that's because I think it was about 15 years ago, made that change. And the Brookings Institute.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:28

My wife has a degree holder too.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:29

So all of your yep, I was gonna ask actually, because I was like, and I bet she doesn't even probably use it.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:34

So like so she went to school for a bachelor's in business business, I think. I don't even remember what she graduated for, University of Houston. And she got a retail job working at I think her first job was at Dillard's, that might have been during college, but then she ended up working for anime Marcus, and she liked makeup and um was a good artist, and so she got into the makeup industry. So when I met her, I had started my businesses. We were both probably 25, 26, sure, and I was working all the time, and we were together, she was great, loved her more than anything. And about a year and a half went by, and she's like, Hey, you work too much. I work, you know, she kind of hated her job every single day. She hated it, she hated the drive, she hated like not being off for you know family stuff, every everything about it. And so she broke up on me. I stayed split up for about a year and a half, and you know, I had pushed her to start her own business. I'm like, you need to start your own business. She just has a the drive and the the right mindset to I I knew she wouldn't fail. There it was impossible. And so I kept pushing her, kept pushing her. And so right as we were breaking up, she started her own business. I remember. And so, like a year and a half went by, and she uh her friend reached out to me and said, Hey, she really misses you. I was like, Oh, I'd you know, love to see her again. And so we go on a on the first date, and she goes, I understand all the stuff you were doing now. And we got back together and and everything's great. But she her business degree didn't she didn't go start a business. She like went into makeup artistry and that led her. Yeah. And then all this she's had a business for 15 years now and very successful at it. But she will tell you herself, not one thing in school applied to anything she's done over the last 15 years. Not one.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:21

Well, probably because nobody that she was teaching her had ever run a business. And like the but it's the craziest thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:28

But I guess our household income, even though she makes a lot, yeah, a ton. Yeah, it's like, but it's from her business. Right. But she has a bachelor's degree, so I guess her bachelor's degree is our household income is X. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:39

So they've now taken like a good example, another good example of this is Mark Zuckerberg's household. His Priscilla, his wife, has a college degree and he doesn't have one. All of that, all of that doesn't get does it really that's a good idea. Bill Gates is a good example. Again, he dropped out too.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:55

He also did, yeah. And I actually say broke out Steve Jobs when he was alive. And you see how like they are they've done an excellent job obscuring the real picture. But then you think about the amount of money that's at stake, and it makes a lot of it makes more sense, right? Um, and also because the people who track all of this are academics. So they have a vested interest in not finding the real numbers and not looking for the real answers because um they don't want to know the answers. They don't want to know that the system that they've, you know, like we and I talked about, that they bought into, that they've devoted, that they're tied to, that their income's now tied to is not ethical. Like and and that's the thing that I think uh parents really need to think about. Like a lot of people, well, you know, that people will talk about big oil, big all these big corporations, big pharma, right? But nobody talks about big college, big academia. This is an $848 billion industry built on the backs of the debt, bankruptcy exempt debt of 17 and 18-year-old children. There's a lot of money at stake. There's a lot of motivation to make sure your kids just buy, just sign on the dotted line. There's a ton of pressure and none of it's real. They do not get to push you off that cliff at 18. Like they don't get to do that. Um, and they don't get to take advantage of your kids' insecurity or their naivety when they don't know what they're gonna do. And a lot of this is like there's still like this uh social background. So, but I've noticed um a lot of a lot of parents that we work with, um, and this is something that's really interesting, are professionals. So, like, and when I say professionals, I mean they have uh degrees that legally require licenses. So CPAs, doctors, lawyers, they're the ones a lot of times that come to us and say, I don't know like what the future is, but I don't want my kids in medicine. Like I don't want my kids in this as punishing and I hate it and I'm trapped in it. Like I'm an orthodontist. One of the things I always think is interesting when I talk about different alternatives too, people's usually knee-jerk reactions, well, well, the trades are gonna break your body down, like you've heard them, like you've seen the comments, right? Um, no one talks about the fact that all professions have risk for one. Uh let's just take orthodontists, for example, or dentists. Orthodontists and dentists have some of the highest suicide rates of any profession.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:59

Do they really?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:00

Yeah. Well, think about their job. Think about their job. Nobody wants to be there. Nobody wants to go to the doctor or the orthodontist. Nobody wants to go in there. It's dentists specifically are the worst. Um, but nobody wants to be there. No one's happy to see them, right? You're a fit dentist, you're not happy to be there. Um, they work really long hours, they don't really talk to people. People are always like, you know, they don't, ah, what loud tools.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:18

The dentists that I that that that I've been to, it's only been a few because I've kind of gone to some of the same ones forever. But they're in like extremely good mood all the time. They seem to be.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:28

Well, that's good. Like, I'm glad you don't want you don't wish that on people. No, no. But it's one of those things where people are like, oh, you know, what's so risky to work in the trades? Like, it's so risky to be a doctor. Like, it's risky to be a doctor for your mental health, for your physical well-being, like the lack of sleep, you know, and and so people just really this is where it's holistically though, it's right for some people. And this is why it's so important for parents to like just start with those first principles so that their kids don't make the wrong decision, like off the rip, and then get stuck in something that really doesn't mesh. You know, I had a young lady come in and her mom was like uh telling her, yeah, you know, she thinks she thinks she wants to be a dentist, blah, blah, blah. But then she also says she wants to be a stay-at-home mom. And I'm like, those things are fundamentally opposed. And she needs to figure out which one's more important because like one of them should win out. And this is again where this conversation has completely been avoided. But I feel really strongly about this for women as well. No one talks to young women who do want to be mothers and they don't talk about how they need to plan and then execute their careers in a way where they can have those things. Um, and and how to, you know, there's no balance really, but like which trade-offs are you gonna make to get which thing? And there's no right answer. It's like some for some women, like, yeah, the career is the thing that's gonna win out. For some women, it's gonna be, you know, motherhood. But if you want to have a life that looks a certain way, you need to plan it and then execute it in that way. And it does take that amount of thought. And they should kind of start figuring that out now as opposed to later when they have debt and they no longer have the luxury of having those options because the doors are just closed.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:55

A big thing that I see because you know, I was on one of my buddies runs uh so teaches people how to start service companies, and he's like, Hey man, I'd really love to get you on my coaching call. The guys will get a lot out of it. You have a lot of business experience. I I mean, I'd love to do it. I'd love to talk to them. Two people on the call. Um, these kids are in college, but they're also running a service company that he taught them how to run. Both of these kids well, he asked me, he goes, Hey, what do I do? My mom is like, she will kill me if I drop out of college. I was like, Well, let's just do run the math then. Let's just let's just see if let's let's do the math to see if it makes sense. Because I'm not gonna tell you to drop out of college or I just don't know your situation. I said, Well, how much are you making with the service company? And he goes, Well, I think working part-time this year, we're gonna end up hitting like 270. Wow I go, well, that's extremely good. That's awesome. And I said, It's probably m well I said, how much your parents make? And he was like, told me the number, and of course it's a lot lower than that. I go, so that really doesn't make any sense because you're working part-time. So you need to take those numbers to your parents and say, hey, mom and dad, I'm making 270,000 this year, but I'm still going to school. Like, if I quit and I can make 500 or 600 or whatever. I said, So it's math, is like, why would you what do you want to do when you get out? He goes, like, well, I'm just gonna run my business, and but he has they'll kill me, they'll kick me out. I was like, Well, you're making 270,000 a year. I was like, just you're gonna be good, trust me.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:19

And then kind of a check for the tuition they're gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:21

A lot of people are really pressured by their parents, and so it's not always the kid being lost and not knowing what to do. So I've had a bunch, and the same thing, kids DMing me is like, hey, or asking me questions when I do a QA. It's like, hey, my parents like really want me to go to school, but I know it's not the right path. He's like, I'm good at XYZ and I can already make money. And I'm like, prove it to just show them is like, hey, just put it on paper and say, hey, mom, like I can do this and make 50,000 a month. Like, why would I not do this and give it a shot and then go to school and get out and not make 50,000 a year?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:54

It's I think to I think the biggest, the biggest thing they're scared they're gonna be a loser if they don't go. Right. But what they're not seeing on the other end, and it's so hard, right? You feel lost more than you feel gain. That you know, so so for so many people, they just don't see like what's gonna happen on the other end. That's why I I haven't talked about it before much, but I'm like, hey, I don't I I I'm telling these stories of these parents who are like, my kids 25, just all that. Like, and it's directly a result of college and the wasted time and the wasted energy and and and the debt. And I'm like, people need to stop doing this. Like, they need to stop doing it with no goal. But the other thing for parents is like, I just want to completely de-risk this. Let me completely de-risk it if they don't go to college. If they don't go to college, nothing will, nothing bad will happen. Do you know why? Because they can go later. College will take your money at any point. It's a business. You can throw money at those people at any point. They will take money any which way, up, down, left, right, Sunday, Monday. Like they will take it any which way and they will take it whenever. So so many people, there's all this pressure, all this pressure, I think, is put on this high school transition, like the college cliff is what I call it. And it's because they want to get them on campus when they're too young to understand what they're doing. And that's because there's a higher chance, I think that, and I know, is that if they go in, they don't know what they're doing, they're gonna go back and buy again. Cause this is what you see. When people want to change careers, when they get older, what do they do? They go back to school. They go to grad school, they go to master's degree. And that's because that's the only way they know. And now you've turned somebody who's a $100,000 customer into somebody who's a $600,000 customer, right? And you can't let them get you can't let them get to the workforce because then they're gonna realize that they don't need you at all and they'll never come back. A few people might want to or need to. And then later, when they are 25 and their brains are fully formed, then parents can pay in cash. Like middle class, lower, lower and middle class families can save and pay in cash if their kids, if they do not fill out that stupid FAFSA. I just had a mom who's a very high, she's a high earner, and she just emailed me about her daughter. She's 18, she's about to graduate. Um, she's top of her class. She's top of her class, and she her mom said, I do not want her to go at all. Like I do not want her to go to college. I think it's a giant waste of time. However, she's determined to go. And she said, What can I do about that? And I said, and I basically just walked through. I said, I can't tell you what to do because I don't know what she needs from her work. And like, we don't, you know, we didn't put her through a process, so I can't give specific career advice. I don't do that unless I know all the specifics, so I don't give the wrong information. But what I said is functionally for the FAFSA, right? That's tied to your income. And so explain what that is to people that do. So the FAFSA is the federal student aid form. Student aid, it's loans. It's loans, it's bankruptcy exempt loans. Um, and the way that um that's tied to your income. So if you don't fill out the FAFA, you really can't. You really can't not fill it out. They've made it so that you must fill it out. Parents have to fill it out. If they don't, uh, the only way you can waive that is um basically you have to prove that there was neglect or abuse or whatever. And for most kids, you know, that's like not, that's not the case. And um, if they don't fill out the FAFA, then they get a tiered loan system. So it's like five, I think it's $5,500 freshman year. Uh, I believe junior is sophomore year, it's six, five. And then I think senior year it's seven five. That is the amount of loans that they get. So that's enough like for community college for like a semester, maybe-ish. Um, and this young lady wants to go to the IVs, and the um tuition that her mom is looking at is $90,000 a year, which is not uncommon. People like, well, that's so much. Like, and I get people, oh, that's crazy. Like, you know, you can only pay $2,000 a month a year for college. I'm like, that's not, it's the average is $38,000 a year. Like that is the average. Um, so $90,000, just tuition or not? Room and board and that's kind of the all-in cost. Um, that's not counting uh tuition and lost wages and all that stuff. That's or that's not counting interest and lost wages, it's just the cost of attendance. So it's tuition and then room and board, uh, you know, lodging, stuff like that, books. But $90,000 a year, tuition. So hers is just tuition. This is $90,000 a year, just tuition. It's gonna be like probably $120 all in, $140,000 all in per year. So we're looking at a half a million dollar, probably more than because she's not gonna go for four, she's gonna go for five and a half, that's the average. Um, and the mom is just like, what can I do about this? And I said, Well, you know, if you don't fill out the FAFA, she's gonna get that $5,000 amount. And I was like, you can let her sign the loans. But the thing is, the Ivy's have something called um, they have like a profile. And a lot of people don't know this about college tuition. But the way that this works is they basically take your income, they take your net worth, and they go do research on you. Like they go do research on you, especially if you're gonna be above the um, if you're gonna be above a certain income threshold. Like they're gonna find everything out about you. And what they do is they basically put in um uh, they put, they put your income into a little, almost think of like a bingo wheel. I'm not kidding. And they go, how much merit aid can we give this family that'll make them sign, make them feel important enough that they, you know, make them feel like their kids smart enough, make them feel like they've got enough like stake in the game to get them to sign this, sign this tuition. Um, that's how they determine what to charge you. That's how they determine what merit aid or scholarships to give your kids, and people can get as upset about this as they want. Ron Lieber, the price you pay for college, he's written about this extensively. Like this is how they do it. They make up what they charge you, they make up the discount they're gonna give you. It's think of like Meritade like a coupon for something that you don't need to buy, like at all. That's that's basically what it is. And they do that to just make parents feel a little bit that they lose something if they don't send their kid to the Ivy Leagues, you know, to the Ivy League colleges. Um, but basically the mom has no way out of this. Uh and this is like again, K through 12. It's you're going to college, you're going to college. The daughter has no idea what she's going to college for. Not a clue. Like she doesn't need to be there because she's going to go to med school. She's just going to go because she wants to. And the mom is like, I it's it's this weird place of being um too high income to get any break. Cause they're gonna charge her full, she's gonna be full pay. Like, they're not gonna give her any breaks for that. Being too high income to full pay and being uh too not ultra wealthy. Night, you know, in order to be able to pay that in cash. So it's a really terrible position to be in. You know, it's like not a good that's not a good position to be in. That's not her only child, also. That's just her oldest child.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:10

What I tell parents too when they either DM me or ask me questions, I tell them that the world has changed so much. So you can't expect uh them to go the same path you did. And so you have to like just be open-minded that just because you went through that same path, it doesn't mean it's the same anymore. Because, you know, with AI, with all this stuff, it's just so different. Internet, like making money online, like there's there's so many things that you can do. And parents that went through the traditional system, maybe got a traditional career, they're want their kids to go down that same path, but they just don't want to I don't think they have an open mind to say, well, maybe it is different and maybe my kid does need to do something else. And so I tell them I'm like, hey, you at least have to have an open mind. You need to know that there's all these other things out there, and you can't expect your kid just to have to go this path that you just because you went down it.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:01

And I think there's there's a misconception, and maybe maybe parents say this to you too, but they think that um most of the high-earning jobs are gated by degrees, and they're not. And they also think most jobs require degrees. That's also not true. Like if you just look at the actual numbers from the job boards, which have some of the best information about this, but um LinkedIn, it's 18% of the jobless things. Even mention a degree, not even say required, just say even preferred, which means that's totally freaking optional. I've had tech jobs that all say they required, also not even preferred, but required bachelor's degrees in computer science. No. Um, earlier I forgot to mention in my story, I ended up self-educating into tech, and then I worked in AI machine learning for years. So that's why um, that's why I started degree free. It's because I started to see all this coming down the pipeline and I was like, yeah, this colleges are just, you know, they're done. Like they're not, they're not gonna survive this um tech turning, basically, and not in their current form. And then parents, um, they think that if their kids don't go to college, they're not gonna make money. That's the biggest thing. But most of the hiring careers in our country are not gated by college degrees. Most of the hiring careers in our country are gonna be um, they're gonna be things in manufacturing and logistics and sales across all industries, construction. They're all in real estate, you know, as you well know. Like they're all in things aside from these random little um, you know, uh Goldman Sachs, quant jobs, but even those don't require degrees. If you're really excellent, they'll just take you.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:28

I promise you, if you're yeah, if you're smart, they'll find you.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:30

Especially, yeah, they don't care if you have a college.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:32

Any business that needs ultra high performers, they want somebody that's good. They don't care about anything. It's like if you're self-taught, fine. Like if you can perform what we need you to perform, like we want you.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:44

Do you notice that the the language around tech changed a lot too? Like as the Overton window shifted, because before it was like, oh, you need a college degree to get into like tech or engineering or or software development, blah, blah, blah. But then as that's increasingly gotten not true, then it's oh well, it's just tech. It's just software engineering. And it's like, yeah, but you you guys have changed your tune from a couple of years ago because now it's inconvenient to your narrative. Like everything is moving that there's less degrees.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:10

Have you seen those big, big numbers thrown around when like everybody's competing for the top AI guys? Like huge numbers, like hundreds of millions of dollars contract. And you think that they care that they went to college to they they're like, this is the top guy in the country. Like, I want him, I'll give them a hundred million dollars to join. So Facebook, everybody's competing right now.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:29

The top three people in the AI race, two out of the three of them do not have college degrees themselves. Sam Altman is degree free, and so is Mark Zuckerberg. It's just so funny to for them to people for people to say, Oh, of course you don't need one to build it, you just need the one to run it. And I'm like, that's the silliest thing I've ever heard.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:43

What are you talking about right now? I think the other argument people make besides the social experience is they say that, oh, well, if they can prove that they can go and study for four years, it's a higher likelihood of them being able to stick to something in later in life or whatever it is. Like I've hear that I hear that one too, is like, oh, well, it shows that they can, you know, study and do this work and then you know apply their self in in real life. So like that's the other argument for outside of the social experience that you get.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:11

I've definitely heard that one, but just for the amount of debt, like I don't think that that shows anything good.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:15

Yeah, if you just look at the numbers, it doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:17

That just shows that all you did was make a really poor financial choice for multiple years. Like like I hire, but I have a pretty you know decent size like creative. And this is one of the things too. I feel really strongly about this. I saw this video of this girl, she was crying, poor little thing. She was crying, she's she was a sophomore, she said in the video. Um, and she's crying on TikTok. She's like, My professor said that there's gonna be no art job. She's an art, she's an illustrator. And I wanted to like laugh, but also I wanted to kick, I I wanted to like yell at the professor because I'm like, what? These people are just so out of touch. They're so afraid of their own jobs getting automated away because they don't need to exist at all. Like their jobs don't need to exist, that they are just telling that these kids things that are not true, but then they don't even know that they're not true. That's how far removed they are from the actual market. And this young lady, I'm like, no, that's like quite the opposite. Disney is now hiring hand illustrators. I don't know if you saw that. But they're hiring hand illustrators because uh what's naturally going to happen is people want more human things. Hand-drawn illustration is gonna get more valuable because everything you can make anything with AI, but also AI is going to just like the cell phone camera, like Sonia released the phone camera and I think it was like 2003, I think. And then this billion dollar creator economy exists. Like you and I are literally talking right now because we met on social media, right? My entire business exists because I'm able to talk on social media about what we're doing. And so that and it's given rise to all these jobs that didn't exist. Like, you know, we're we're sitting right here and there's all these people that facilitate all, you know, all of this, all of these different industries that just didn't exist, all these jobs that didn't exist in the last like 15 years.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:47

Um I mean, there's tons of if you take traditional career paths and people that have started doing some side stuff online, like teachers, for example, and then you see them making millions of dollars because now they can scale it to 100,000 people and it's not just 30 people in this classroom. Right. And so you're right. I mean, there's so much stuff that that comes out of like technology and change, and I think people do get a little bit freaked out. I I think where they do need to be scared for like this this short window of like where AI is like just going so extremely fast is just nobody's prepared. Schools don't teach it, colleges don't teach it. And so there's just gonna be this weird gap where it is gonna be pretty catastrophic, I think. Do I think there's gonna be a lot of new stuff? A hundred percent. I just think like this this period where it's like just starting like early, early days, and you know it's not mature yet, and we don't know what's gonna happen is gonna be the hardest thing for all the people that are in school right now and like coming into the workforce over the next like five years is is gonna be a huge gap in what you need to know and what you've been taught. And I think they'll sh they'll have to change one day. So I do think that the system will change somehow. It's not gonna probably be great, but I do think it'll have to at least change in its current form, and colleges will have to, or they'll be out of business, right? Like you have to. I think the big three will probably be okay, but as far as like the majority of regular colleges are probably gonna beat on.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:09

Yeah, well, you have uh hundreds of them closing. And the thing is it's so yeah, what's the numbers on that?

SPEAKER_01 1:35:13

I don't I don't know this.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:15

This year, which is good college colleges?

SPEAKER_01 1:35:17

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:18

And that really what that is is and and honestly, it's a relief to me. And it's crazy because people will just say, um, and again, I so often I can just hear the comments like before I even say something. So many people, ah, this is anti-intellectualism. If you can't see from an ethical perspective, uh just and let's just use a little bit of the Socratic method here, like let's just be the tiniest bit logical. If these institutions' only function is to put the next generation of people into bankruptcy exempt debt that has no function for their life, keeps them from starting businesses, having families, and buying homes, it is a very good thing that they are closing. Um, another thing I think that people say, oh, well, you know, it's just gonna reduce access to education. No, it's gonna reduce access to college degrees, which is not education. These places barely teach what they do is barely education at this point. I would not call it education, I wouldn't call it higher education. The median college graduate reads seven books a year. It is not that hard to be more educated than a college graduate. Like they can't read. And this is something where it's amazing to me they've been able to just kind of pretend like this it's it's their, they'll say that we are responsible for education. And then when someone points out like you're not actually educating these kids, it's suddenly not their fault anymore. It's the fault of the kids. I'm like, you can't have it both ways. Like either the good results are yours and the bad results are yours, or the good results are not yours and the bad results are not yours. You can't just take the good results and then uh pretend like the bad results are not your failing.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:42

If it was any other type of business in the world, it fails, right? Yes, you can't have a bad product.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:47

And then you you succeed. It's just it's it's pretty much impossible. Yeah. And if it doesn't fail initially, it will fail at some point. And but they're allowed to operate just because of what you said. It's like the loan stuff is propping up the industry for the most part, right? Because the product can remain bad because you still have access to all this money that you can just continue to collect, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:37:10

Right. And and they, you know, all people have to do is say, oh, you know, we're defunding how we're defunding education, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, no, no, no, you're just defunding this this educational product. This educational product does not serve people. It's dam it's literally damaging them. And for people to claim that they're educated and that they can't see and they can't differentiate between the college academic complex and education, like capital E as it exists in the world, which is someone being an educated individual, someone being well read, someone having basic logical skills, someone having problem-solving skills, critical thinking. Like the irony is too much for me when I see people that they can't distinguish between the two things. And then they have the audacity to say that if you don't buy paper, that you're uneducated. It's just wild to me. But you're proving my point right now. Like you're proving that the system has failed because you cannot understand why this is a problem, like from uh from an emotional perspective, from an ethical perspective, from a moral perspective, you know. Um, and it's just so interesting to me to see how, again, people just can't separate the two. I'm like, these are not the same thing. Education and college are not the same thing. And that's why conflating them is what's caused all of this.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:17

So give me a recommendation for parents and you know, their kids, you know, maybe they're not graduated yet, but they're, you know, their parents are worrying about it and they're maybe deciding if they're gonna go out go to college, not go to college. Um, what's the recommendation you you have for parents? Like what's the first step they should take to ensure that, you know, their cat their kids not lost and, you know, they find out really what they want to do in life.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:39

Uh biggest thing is uh sitting down and figuring out how many jobs they know about, how many careers they know about. And I want to say this is um the career side. So there's a career side and an education side, because again, like conflating the career and then conflating the education, not the same thing. Uh, and and that's why I think we need to separate them and we need to divorce them. And then we need to say, okay, this is the one for careers, this is the one for education. If you want your child to have a good career, help them figure out how many jobs they know about. That's the key. Most kids only know six to eight jobs. Globally, there was a survey done of uh of about 700 kids across the whole world. Most of them only can name 10 careers. It's always the same ones. It's always the same ones. And uh that is why kids have so uh such a limited range of what options are out there. There's thousands of jobs, thousands of jobs, some of them not even in the Bureau of Labor Statistics because more jobs get invented every month. Like new job titles come out every month, new new occupations.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:33

When you see it in the online space, it's like it's crazy. There's a need for a ton of different skill sets, right? Yes. And it's not, there's not really like a traditional job title for them. It's not like, you know, a marketing manager. It could be like we talked about earlier, it could be something to do with like hooking up my AI systems and you know, uh tying together all of your like lead automations and all this stuff that you actually need if you're gonna run an online business. That's but there's no job title really for any of that stuff. You're just like, I need you to be able to do these three things.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:01

And that's why the and that's why the figuring out what they know about and then figuring out what they what they need from their work is so key. Because then when you're hunting on the wilds of the internet, which unfortunately people is the best thing to do. Like if if parents want to make sure their kids have the right opportunity at the right time, they have to look for it. They have to find it. That's why we do it as a service because it's hard to do that if you have a job, a full-time job, and also you don't really know what you're looking for, or you just need a third party to help your kid figure those things out without like the, you know, the your child telling you what you want to hear or or what have you. So helping your child figure out what they need from work, how many jobs they know about, then when you go out to the internet and you're going, okay, we're looking for a job that pays X amount of money, is in X location, has X schedule, and then has X work environment, you'll know it when you see it because you're looking for it. And then you're looking locally because you're gonna look where you are, right? So you're gonna Google your hometown and then careers that have meet X, Y, Z criteria, and then you choose from the available options and you say, oh, well, this one requires you to do this. Oh, this one requires this. Oh, in our county or in our state, you have to do this in order to do this job. And then um, once you do that, then you help them figure out which one's the most interesting because now you've found, okay, these fit your needs. And this is exactly what we do in our launch program. This fits your needs. Now what do you have to do? Okay, now what do you want to do? What are you willing to learn? And then you figure out how they're gonna learn it. And that's the way. So, like some people are gonna end up in trade school, right? Some people are gonna maybe end up in college, very few. Um, but it might be the most expedient way with the available tools that someone has. Like if they have GI Bill resources, if they have like, you know, free local vote school, but that they have to figure out from the get-go if that's the right path or if they just need to go get an entry-level job somewhere and then work their way up. But that is the career side of it. The goal is help them figure out what they need and then help them find their strategic entry-level work that gets them into that industry. That is the path. Do that as quickly as possible after they graduate high school. Um, if you are home, if you're a homeschool parent, then you can do it before that, right? But everybody else has to wait until they're 18.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:02

And the faster they they do that for parents that are that are listening, that's they're gonna get more experience by just going into the field that they want to work for than they would ever get. Kind of sitting in class and taking some basic classes. Like they're just gonna be so much more advanced, they're gonna be so uh far ahead of what they do wanna know, what they want to do with their life. Like maybe they find out that they don't want to go into that industry and they go into another one and then they flourish, right? So the faster I think that you can do that is better where you're actually practicing the things that you want to do or just you know, some type of hands-on, some type of figuring things out is gonna make you it is gonna make you help the dis right decision, you know, long-term in life for sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:42

I think for uh what I call high-risk, uh high cost degrees too, I call them pink collar jobs. Those are gonna be like social work, nursing, teaching. If your child has determined that one of those jobs does fit their needs and they do want to do that and it does require them to go to get a college degree, the way you can reduce risk is to then get them in that environment as quickly as possible. So if they want to work in a hospital, then go get them in a hospital and see if they can actually hack it, like CNA positions, medical assisting positions. Your child wants to be a veterinarian. I hear this all the time, especially the girls, they all want to be veterinarians or psychologists. Um, go get them work, like if they want to be in psychology, whatever their end goal is, have them go volunteer or work in the office at a psychiatrist, you know, at a psychology or psychiatry office. Um, go have them work an entry-level, like an orderly job or something at a behavioral health center. Like have them actually work in that, see if they really want to do that all day long. If they do, then great. Now you know it's a good idea. Vet tech, vet tech. If your your child wants to be a vet, don't send them to don't send them to school to be a vet until they've been around that all day. Some people can't hack the hair, some people don't like the smell, it's too loud, like they don't like the clientele, they don't like having to put animals to sleep. You know, they just don't like seeing animals in pain all day. Like, oh, I love animals, I want to be a vet. I don't know. Go work in that and see if you can bite that off.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:56

Go experience it a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:57

Yeah. Uh if if they want to go into something like high, high cost, high risk like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:01

Hey everyone, real quick, I just want to let you know this podcast is 100% independent. No ads, no sponsors, just real. If you're finding value in whatever we're doing here, the biggest help that you can give us is hitting subscribe and sharing this with someone who you think needs to hear it or someone that it will provide value to. That's how we continue to grow. And if you did that, I would really appreciate it. What percentage of people, do you know the percentage of people that just they start going to school and then they go for a degree, but then they end up changing it like at some point and then they end up, you know, going into a different field? I'm just curious, like that's what I hear a lot of. I remember when I was a kid too. It's like, oh yeah, you know, uh, because I had friends that went to school and you know, they changed their degree a couple times and it took them a while to figure out what they, you know, wanted to graduate for. But I feel like that's super common too.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:50

I don't know the answer to that question, but I know an adjacent answer, which is that the average millennial changes careers six times. So there's it's unlikely that they're in the same it's on it's very unlikely that they're using their degree if they got one. About half millennials have one. It's very unlikely they're using their degree if they have one, um, just because they changed careers so many times. Which also goes to that's gonna pick up. People are gonna change careers more often because of the skill turnings that we talked about earlier.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:18

Like your career path looks again, everything's back to the future. Like uh, I remember um I was reading, it was like about a pioneer, as like a pioneer family. I remember we're talking about the dad throughout the story at multiple times, had like different he worked on the railroad or he worked like a logging company. Like they work, you know, whatever work is available. Like you have your business, but leading up to that, or while you're building your business, you know, your farm in this case, you just do whatever work is available that needs to get done to meet your needs, like and or that you're willing to take. And I think that the future looks a lot more like that. I think the future looks a lot more like that. So the way to get um and for entrepreneurial young adults too, I think that a huge thing, get so many people, my kids interested in entrepreneurship. Um, I'm like, okay, well, they need to work. Like they need to work hard and they need to work around somebody who understands like base principles or is building and being successful. Because um, if they don't have an idea of what they're gonna do, for the ones that don't know what business, because a lot they're entrepreneurial, but they don't have any business idea or they've never tried to start one. I'm like, I was go get a job.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:20

I was there at 18 and get some skills.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:21

Like you, but the thing is the people that come to us, they don't know. You would never have come to us because you already knew. Like you already, and and those people don't need our help. The people that do need help are the ones that don't know like what to do next. Um, and that's something my husband talks a lot about the fact that of the two of us, like I didn't need, I didn't need, I wouldn't have needed our service. Like, I just went and did, you know, I just was like, I'll I'll figure this out. And those kids are just gonna figure it out, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:46:49

Small percentage of people.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:50

Small percentage of people. Um, but but some people are just like that. I'm like, ah, I don't know. I don't want like I'll just figure it out myself. The people that come to us, my husband was a great example. He talks about a lot the fact that he had no idea, like he just didn't know what careers were out there. His family was like, Oh, he's he's Asian, my husband, uh, Hawaiian Japanese. And um, in Asian families, it's law, medicine, finance. Those are your options. And he thought those were the only three categories, right? I think if if he had gone back now, he and I talked about the fact that he would have probably gone into software development, but he never would have gone to college for that, right? But he just didn't know what's out there. He didn't know what the options were. They were you go to college, you go into one of these three industries, and then good luck, right? Um, but for kids that don't know what fits their needs, they need help figuring that out before they make an expensive mistake. Because my husband's like, I didn't need to go to college. It's a huge waste of time, huge waste of money, you know. Um, and and that's really, that's really who we help a lot is the ones that don't know. Um, but my advice to families with entrepreneurial kids that don't know what business they want to start is to go get strategic entry-level work in whatever industry is gonna help. Yes, like they have to find it and they have to find it quickly. That's um, you know, that that's the best thing to do. Um, for education. If you want your kids to be educated, uh this is my opinion. This is my opinion, because I think now that careers are separate from education. The definition of education is very hotly debated. That's why I think there's so much conflict in our country is who's educated. Possible question to answer right now, because it's not it's not PhDs, right? It's not people in college. So who is it? Who is educated? And I think that um the best way to help your kids get educated is just go back down to in your family, what do you value as education goes? Um, so for us, it's gonna be like um, you know, playing, we're playing chess, we're doing piano, um, we're reading extensively, um, and then trying to speak a language and then be able to speak clearly and articulately. That's it. That's like base level skill set.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:50

It's really all you need, anyways.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:51

It's all you need. And then obviously math, like basic, basic basic math.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:54

Yeah, basic reading, writing, and math. And then if you have the ability to communicate, you're gonna be okay. You're gonna be fine. Yeah, the communication thing I lacked a lot of whenever I was growing up. And so I work on it very extensively with my son because I'm like, it's not happening to you. Like you're gonna you're gonna be a very, very good communicator, probably like his mom. His mom's amazing at it, but she was a little bit more natural. I had to work at it a lot. And you know, it's something that I know is really, really important in life. And so, you know, it's a it's a heavy, heavy focus on what we do. And he was a little bit of a late talker, he's fine now. But you know, um, it's one of those things that that in sales, which technically kind of go hand in hand because if you're good at sales, you're a good communicator.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:37

Uh it's probably two of the most important things you can have when you're extremely young. And you'll be able to you'll be able to pretty much get any job you want, even if you want to go into a job, is if you can communicate really well and you can sell something, whether it's yourself or just some something else, you will be very successful at something.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:56

Yeah. I I I fundamentally agree. I think that that's the that's the thing moving forward is is people just figuring out how they're gonna equip their kids to be educated up to their household standard, whatever that is, and then to find a career that fits their needs and gives them the things that they're doing. And everybody's different.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:11

Like everyone's different. Like I would never work in the hospital. Like I I hate it so much. And then there's people that love it and they want to go help people and they don't mind seeing somebody cut open or blood. Like, I don't. That's the last thing. I'd be miserable.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:24

But that's so beautiful, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:50:25

How like that Yeah, everybody you need everybody. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:28

Yeah, like everybody's gotta fit. Yeah, everybody's gotta fit. And it's the cool it's the coolest thing. You know, we just had a young young lady down in Florida who um went through our launch program, and she is gonna be a farrier, which is horseshoeing.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:40

Horseshoeing, right? But this is a good example of how when you cast in that really wide, you know, you can eliminate uh I think because there were things on her list that did have to do with medicine, um, logistics, right? There was a little bit of design stuff on there, and she just eliminated down to that. And it's and then we go, oh, okay, well, now we're looking for, you know, we're calling farriers, we're figuring out who, you know, who will take her as an apprentice. And that's that's you know, but have you ever even heard of that? Did you know that like I mean, I wouldn't have thought about it, but well, there's people that string guitars for a living, they're called luthier's. Like there's you know, it's just like anything, but there's a fit for everybody, and that's the coolest thing is like if you do the one-on-one and that's the hard everyone's trying to manufacture this with software, you can't. It's like it's exactly what you said. You have to be in a room, like or you know, a virtual room, but it has to be like a person talking to a person.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:25

Um, it's just everyone has specific interests in life. Yes. And so it's it's always gonna be different for everybody.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:32

And that's what's so cool.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:33

Yeah. Well, probably could talk to you about this all day, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:51:37

Same.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:38

Probably to wrap it up.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:40

Um, I really appreciate you coming on. Uh, super helpful. Where can people find you if if they want to?

SPEAKER_02 1:51:45

Sure. Uh, so degreefree.com is our website. And then if you want to get our books, it's a really good place to start these conversations, especially because it's gonna help you get a gauge of where your kids are at, as far as like what jobs they know about, and then also how to think differently about work. So to think more deeply about work and what opportunities are there, as opposed to what's this menu we know about. But uh it's it's more of, oh, there's a billboard. Wait, how did that billboard get there? Who built it? Who leases it out, who sells it, who does the copy. Right. We call that vocational creativity. It's like looking out around the world and seeing, oh, there's HVAC ducting. Well, somebody runs payroll for that HVAC company. That's a job, right? And just kind of figuring out all that kind of stuff. Um, and then helping them figure out what they need from work, budgeting, which is key and very important, and then helping them narrow it back down to what jobs most closely fit your needs, and then also ideally some of your wants. And then, okay, do these legally require a degree or not? If yes, how are you gonna move forward with that? If no, now you just need to go find the most expedient route to get strategic entry level work.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:42

Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you for coming on.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:44

Yeah, thank you so much. Awesome.