(00:00) The colleges are incentivized to charge 17 and 18-year-old children who are financially illiterate. We’re talking $848 billion. People do not realize the scale of this. When I think about the avoidance tactic that college represents, like I’ll figure it out later.
(00:25) Why are we disconnected from our curiosity? Avoiding that conversation with yourself for another 4 years is probably not going to be productive, but it’s very tempting. We glamorize that and we say, “Oh, this group of people is educated. They’re smarter. They’re going to have better life outcomes.” Meanwhile, we have 18-year-olds who start in the workforce and they’re 23, they bought a house, they’re married, they’re about to have their first kid.
(00:44) Earnings don’t matter if you are in debt until you are 80 years old. Earning is not impressive if the earnings do not outpace the debt that you’re going to carry. Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan and today I have created a podcast asset for you, which is sometimes what I endeavor to do, where I want to create like a hard-hitting summary that you can share with somebody in your life that you love that essentially opens a portal and delivers kind of a summary of truths that would otherwise take a lot of investment to curate. So today’s guest
(01:26) is Hannah Maruyama who is with her husband of the degreefree way and what we talk about and explore and unpack in this conversation is essentially the myth of college education. why it overpromises and underdelivers and what is an alternative quote unquote reclamation path for the 16 to 20 year-old.
(02:03) Right? So what does one do if one does not reflexively go to college? And this is something very near and dear to my heart. So, I was very motivated to extract from this glorious woman all of the many pearls of wisdom that she comes ready to bear. So, I hope that this is as exciting and empowering for you as it as it was for me. Hi, Hannah and welcome to Reclamation Radio.
(02:25) Hi, Kelly. Thank you so much for having me on. And I have been looking forward to this since December when you messaged me and I have been uh listening to listening to Reclamation Radio to prepare and I am ready ready for today. It’s something to get ready for apparently. Yes.
(02:46) And yeah, I was, you know, we were just chatting offline and I was already tearing up a bit about um just sort of the later life realizations uh that I’ve had around mothering and this very humbling art form that I referenced of representing truths to our children, especially ones that we feel very passionately about without too heavy a hand, you know, such that polarity is generated and you know your kids end up adopting a perspective antithetical to yours just because yours is so passionately embodied.
(03:21) So, this subject that we’re going to explore and unpack today, which is perhaps summarized as the con of college, is one that I have been trumpeting for a couple of years. And I I told you I think I’ve already blown it a bit. Like I think I’ve already come on too wrong with my daughters because when I started to learn about unschooling and homeschooling as somebody who has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into my advanced education and training, I am, you know, sort of potentially a living hypocritical representation of the stance that one should, you know,
(03:56) abandon the educational system, right? And and my daughters will often point that out to me, right? like, well, but look, you know, you’re you’re still working with your degrees and and yada yada, and my heart knows and can feel a dupe, right? And that’s pretty much what I’m in the business of exposing in many different arenas.
(04:16) And I am excited that there seems to be a zeitgeist shift that you are a part of that is revealing the college experience and I would probably especially say the liberal arts college experience to be you know less reflexively necessary right like in even my kids generation like they know teenagers who are not going to college it’s happening it’s happening the edifice is crumbling and I know that you know I I shared my opinion a couple of years ago that I do not want them to go to college and that I will actually provide seed money for
(04:50) their entrepreneurial lives. I mean these days I’m pretty much like I will help you identify the perfect husband for yourself. That’s what I’m going to do for you, okay? Um so that he can provide and you can just enjoy your feminine expression. So the the uh advice seems to be evolving over the years.
(05:09) But suffice it to say, today I want to unpack what you have come to conclude around college and alternatives and what that looks like as far as the way that you support folks in this arena. Before we get into that, I want to double down on your husband theory. I have a friend uh Brett Cooper of the comment section. and she uh just recently stopped working for the Daily Wire.
(05:33) But yeah, she and I had a conversation about what we believe because she sees what I see as well in that the academic industrial complex is no longer serving people. And the the real reason and the real reason that you’re the zeitgeist you’re referring to is simply that the cost has gone past what most people in the middle class can afford.
(05:51) They cannot reconcile it to themselves anymore. And that is the reason for the vehement vehement just reaction to what’s being taught in colleges, what’s not being taught in colleges, who is teaching it, and then the qualifications of the people who teach.
(06:11) And then the not only the lack of qualifications, but the complete lack of ethics and the lack of scholarly behavior in the people who are held up as this academic elite scholar class. Co I think exposed a lot of cracks here. Um, obviously that was in a highly regulated system in the medical industry and that when people start questioning people who have medical degrees because one could argue that if there are are people that should have college degrees, most people can agree that it should be doctors.
(06:37) And so when people start questioning the top echelons of legally required degrees, everybody else starts to be questioned as well. So we start to question other quote unquote experts and then this it it just creates a waterfall effect of people just being increasingly skeptical of what exactly is going on here? Who are we giving all of our young minds to? And then why are we paying so much money? And then why are these results so poor? And then why are they telling me that you’ll make a million dollars more but all of the college graduates I know are underemployed or they’re employed in something completely
(07:08) irrelevant. But I do think that you’re right about the matchmaking. I actually think a massive result and a symptom of this complete abandoning of the college industrial complex is going to be people actually spending money on matchmakers for their kids.
(07:27) I actually think that that is a second order effect that will happen in the next four years. I think that’s going to get way more common in like middle class families. I think that that is going to come back in a big way. But totally totally irrelevant to that. It’s I mean there’s yeah there’s there’s like a a mandala that you can start to zoom out and see taking form and it has a lot of surprising ingredients.
(07:50) Trust me I am often you know talking about my feminist recovery journey and this was probably the greatest plot twist of all is coming to believe in traditional providership roles when it comes to you know caretaking the home and family as the woman’s domain and providership protectorship as the man’s. I mean, I would have taken great offense to that even, you know, 15 years ago.
(08:10) So, yeah, it is humbling. So, I want to start out because I’ve consumed a lot of your amazing content both through your podcast and just your, you know, social media content, but I want to zoom out and start with sort of um the conclusion, I guess, around how you would describe the college con and then I want to unpack, you know, some of the myths when it comes to the social.
(08:35) This is a big one because it’s the greatest objection that I encounter with my daughters. The social promise of college, the vocational promise and then even some of the developmental promises that seem to be programmed into us as available only through you know this this collegiate experience and and then we can sort of move on to the truth of the matter as you and I see it.
(09:00) So, so yeah. What would you say in the current climate is is the college con? I love that you called it that, too, because I actually have a draft of uh a piece that I was going to submit to the New York Post that’s called the Great College Con. So, really well done. Really well done with that. There are a few different myths that are perpetrated.
(09:26) And the thing that you have to keep in the back of your mind is that when we are talking about this industry, it is one of the most profitable industries in our entire country. It is massive. We’re talking $848 billion. People do not realize the scale of this. And the other thing is that because so many colleges are nonprofits, they think that nonprofit doesn’t mean it’s a business. They think that nonprofit doesn’t mean they’re out for cash. They are just like any other business.
(09:48) Just because a nonprofit has to spend all of their money by the end of the year does not make it any less of a business. They just operate differently with cash flow and budgeting. And so once you realize that it is in it is in the colleges are incentivized to charge 17 and 18-year-old children who are financially illiterate. That is who we want.
(10:12) We want middle- class kids who don’t understand the implications of the debt they’re signing on and the fact that it’s bankruptcy exempt. They cannot get rid of it. It will follow them until the ends of the earth. this KKR, which is a credit, it’s a credit firm. They just bought, I think it was, they paid something like $80 million over market, $800 million over market value from a bundle of student loans that they bought from Discover because they know that they can follow them and they can garnish their wages. They will get that money back.
(10:36) And people are just not understanding that what we’re doing is it reminds me a lot of the housing crisis in 2008. So, if you ever seen the big short, remember they go and they’re looking at all these houses and they’re realizing that a lot of the realators and the brokers are just writing multiple mortgages to anybody and there’s no backing.
(10:52) It’s the same thing except there’s no asset that can be seized by the banks. The only asset is the time and the money of of the graduate. That’s it. There’s nothing else backing it. And that is terrifying. There’s also a secondary debt market called SLABs, which are student loan asset back securities. And people just do not realize the scale of this. They just don’t understand.
(11:14) And so once you realize how much money is at stake and the behavior, the predatory lending behavior that is incentivized and the way that the colleges are allowed to make promises and fraudulently advertise outcomes that they cannot promise that they do not fulfill. And once you realize, oh wait, of course, if you can on average the NCES estimates 104 to 156K is how much people are spending. Now, that is not lost wages.
(11:38) That is not interest. That is not any of that. That totals, the NCES estimate for that is over half a million dollars for a bachelor’s degree. So, we are looking at something that just massively impacts the the generation that they’re targeting.
(11:57) And when they target young people, it’s on purpose because they don’t understand how much money this is ultimately going to be. They don’t understand how much time this is ultimately going to cost them. They look at it as, oh, it’s four years. Oh, it’s just $20,000 a year. It’s not that. They’re missing time in the market. They’re missing they’re they’re going to take on more interest.
(12:14) So, quite literally, when you have somebody that starts working at 18 and you have somebody that goes to college at 18, they are switching roles because even if this person has very little savings and goes into the workforce, they’re going to experience the magic of compound interest, the college graduate is going to experience the opposite. That’s why when they talk about college graduate outcomes, they always talk about earnings.
(12:34) Earnings don’t matter if you are in debt until you are 80 years old. That’s why they’re always, oh, you’re going to earn. Earning is not impressive if the earnings do not outpace the debt that you’re going to carry. And so, a lot of this comes down to just supply and demand. So, back in 1965, and this is we’re going to go into the history of this a little bit.
(12:54) So, back in 1965, that is when the government started subsidizing student loans. It was the Higher Education Act. When they did this, it allowed the government to get into the education game. And so, and I hesitate to call it education at this point, but into the college game. So, once they did that, they were able to access a whole new pool of people to pull money from who couldn’t afford to go.
(13:17) Now, not even not even 10 years later, the amount of people who had started to default on their student loans was so high they had to amend the Higher Education Act. So, this is 1965 when the people going to college were doctors, lawyers, engineers. They were all GIs coming back from World War II who had the GI bill and it was going to the colleges and they were all going into jobs that were like heavy STEM legal requirement related cuz back then 7.
(13:42) 4% of all the jobs in the country required degrees. Obviously those types of jobs paid more. It wasn’t the degree. It was the fact that the job itself was higher paying because it required a legal license to do it. And so it was this artificial thing where people oh it’s the degree and then they opened it up to all these people who should not have been able to go and they started loaning the money when before there weren’t it wasn’t it wasn’t loans there were no public loans and so now you have this glut of people into the market and not even 10 years later it had already started to fail. it had already started
(14:12) to fail. Not even 10 years this lasted. But when they when they changed the law, people did not stop going because they had said, “Oh, it’s the degree.” And so I think that our system has been running on fumes since probably the 1980s, like 1980 itself. And so now what we’re seeing is the amount of people who go to get degrees, the amount of jobs that legally require degrees has only increased.3%. So it’s 7.
(14:41) 7% of jobs now legally require degrees, but the amount of jobs that pay high that don’t require degrees has also increased. And but your amount of college graduates has also increased because we use social pressure as you said. We use emotions. We use fear of loss and hope of gain, which are just basic sales tactics. We scare parents. We tell them, “Oh, your child won’t be successful. They won’t marry well.
(14:59) That’s Nobody meets on college campuses anymore. If you look at the graphs of how people meet, it’s all online. And I’m sorry, but your children have access to the internet. that they don’t have to go into a college campus and pay $100,000 to have access to the exact same dating pool as all the kids on college campuses. You know, they tell you your kid’s not going to be socially accepted, which is ridiculous.
(15:17) The only case where that would be true is if your child is part of this 1% class where it’s nobody cares about the degree at all. It’s just the fact that they walked through the doors and that’s all they care about. If you’re not in the 1%, you you know, if you’re not in this group of people, nobody cares about them because it’s irrelevant to the rest of us. Okay.
(15:35) So, that is not going to socially impact your child. That’s ridiculous. Um, the next thing is that they’re going to sell to the kids, as you said, the social experience. However, the social experience is something one, it’s patently ridiculous to sell to lower and middle class families. I come from one of these families. That’s why I talk to I talk to this group of people a lot.
(15:57) It’s ridiculous to sell to them that they have to pay six figures to have access to a four-year party. It is infantilizing young adults. It is pushing the consequences of adulthood further away. If you meet a 22-year-old college graduate, one that’s unusual because 60% of grads take five and a half years to graduate. So, they’re actually 23.
(16:14) And you meet a 23-year-old who has been in the workforce for 5 years, they are wildly different people. And anybody anybody knows this because the 23-year-old is paying their own bills. The 23-year-old has an idea of how to maintain a car. The 23-year-old has an idea of how to go to work on time. you get a 23-y old out of college, they don’t know how to do anything.
(16:33) It It’s just and it’s because they’re in this controlled environment and they paid a premium to stay in this controlled environment. And then what you may have seen and what I see frequently and I don’t work with this age range, but I see parents who say, “Oh, my child wants to go get a master’s degree because, you know, the job market’s bad.” Or they just say they want to keep learning forever.
(16:57) What that really is is they have been upsold because the best customer you have is one you already have. And so the they what they want is they want to continue to upsell degrees. The other thing is that the loan system incentivizes this behavior as well. And so what they will do is when they’ve glamorized and made it seem noble to just stay on a college campus forever and never leave.
(17:14) Oh, what a what a noble pursuit of knowledge where they learn nothing useful. They contribute very little to society and in fact often are more of a drain on society because they’re they need public money in order to create research projects to keep themselves busy so that they don’t have to leave the academic bubble. And you are laughing.
(17:31) I can see cuz you know exactly what I’m talking about. And so you get these kids that and you hear like failure to launch and all this stuff and they’re 30 years old and they don’t have kids, they can’t buy a house like and it’s because they’ve been so scared and they want them like that cuz they just want them to keep buying because as long as they keep buying they don’t have to pay the loans back.
(17:54) And so we just incentivized this treadmill and so we’ve created this culture where we’ve put college up like this ideal and as long as you’re on a college campus you’re doing something productive even if you’re just digging yourself into unproductive debt. and it makes you feel at least like, oh, well, they’re doing something good. I guess it’s education, so it’s fine. And we glamorize that and we say, oh, this group of people, this this this group of people is educated. They’re they’re smarter. They’re going to have better life outcomes.
(18:22) Meanwhile, we have 18year-olds who start in the workforce and they’re 23. They bought a house. They’re married. They’re about to have their first kid. I say that because I every day of the week will put my youngest sister up against any other 23-year-old. My youngest sister is a structural welder. She started welding when she was 18 years old. She almost has enough time in to be a QA lead.
(18:45) She out earns the median master’s degree holder. She has zero debt. She and her husband are about to buy their first house. She’s married and they’re planning to have their first child in the next year. And it’s such a good example of how I would love to see and often people get very upset about this, but when I say, “How is your child doing?” Cuz 23 is when they graduate a lot of times, 5 and a half years, right? And they’re going, “Oh, well, they’re thinking about going back to school for another degree because they just don’t want to face the reality of life and
(19:16) they just haven’t learned how to be they haven’t learned how to work in a professional environment.” And then unfortunately for parents the job market is completely shifted. So if you’ve seen states are 17 states this last year have dropped degree requirements. My favorite statistic right now is at 7.7% right is the degree estimate for how many jobs legally require degrees.
(19:35) When Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, he’s the governor of Pennsylvania. He went through all of the state jobs and he eliminated all of the job listings that required that said required degree where they did not legally require a degree. Do you want to guess how many jobs were freed up as a result of that? 92.3% of jobs in Pennsylvania.
(20:00) So quite literally the exact estimate that Ryan and I had, the exact estimate was how many freed up the California 30,000 jobs just opened up, removed degree requirements, cyber security, fire sprinkler installers, IT administrators, jobs that pay 80 to $100,000 a year. Tesla, IBM, Axenture, Bank of America, all recruiting out of high schools. They’re skipping the colleges entirely. And that’s because intelligent.
(20:23) com just did a survey recently where it says 71% of employers admitted to hiring a Gen Z college grad or hiring and then firing a Gen Z college graduate within a year of starting because they can’t function at work. And it’s just a really a case of how the colleges are selling them something that they’re not preparing them for. They’re selling them an expectation.
(20:42) That’s really where it’s tough because colleges are telling them you’re so educated. You are just going to walk into the market and you’re going to make like an economics major estimate right now is $100,000. That’s how much they’re telling college graduates they’re going to make if they major in economics. Ryan majored, my husband majored in economics. This is years ago at University of Hawaii. He started at $30,000 a year.
(21:02) We had the chief economist for Zip Recruiter. Her name is Julia Pollock. She had a she had a PhD in economics and she was offered $31,000 a year in New New New York City when she graduated. Like, and they’re telling these kids they’re going to walk into a $100,000 a year job for a 4-year economics degree. And they’re just ruining their expectations, ruining it.
(21:22) And they’re telling them that they have to buy a degree to get these entry-le jobs. And they just don’t. And that’s the other thing is so many of them are realizing they paid all this money to pass go. They didn’t have to be there at all. They could have saved five years, but none of them tried to get the jobs that they wanted and they also just didn’t know.
(21:41) So that’s the other thing is they’re just buying time, right? They’re paying for the degree cuz they don’t actually want to go out and try anything cuz they’re scared. Cuz we scare them in high school. We tell them you can’t do these things. You have to buy permission before you try anything. And then we tell them that everything and we gear all of the K through2 experience towards college acceptance, which is a crazy metric because college acceptance is just loan debt. That’s it.
(22:04) Like, so when a when a high school when I I had somebody recently that said they run a private K through 12 education program and they work a lot with homeschoolers and he said to me, “Oh, we have 100% acceptance rate, college acceptance rate.” And I was horrified. I’m like, “That’s terrible. You should have a 10% acceptance rate.
(22:21) That would be success. You have literally the opposite of a success metric. You have a failure metric. 100% of these kids are going to college. That is way too high. So many of them don’t need to be there at all.” And it’s unbelievable that that’s still the success metric that so many schools are op are operating under because the only it’s measurable.
(22:41) So that’s why they use it. But all you’re telling me is that you funneled all these kids into a very limited menu of options. Like for example, the BLS, which is the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has 867 jobs listed in it, individual occupations. Now that is the government’s version of how many jobs are out there.
(23:02) Our estimate is that there’s 3,000 plus because there’s more every single day. They are not in the BLS colleges. Your largest university only has 100 majors in it. And so you are now telling me that you’re funneling these kids into one of 100 choices when there’s actually even the government says there’s 867 when there’s actually 3,000 and only 7.
(23:23) 7% of them legally require degrees. It’s a when you start to look at it, you just go, what are we doing? And then it makes sense as to why our culture is in crisis. It makes sense as to why all of these my generation, I’m the youngest millennial you’ll get, why we feel like we’re behind. We are behind. The average loan debt for somebody my age is $80,000.
(23:42) We can’t buy houses. And then people go, I can’t afford to buy a house. And I said, yes, because you spent six figures on a bachelor’s degree. like that is quite and and I I said that and I got the ton of heat for it, but it’s like you only have so many $100,000 bullets.
(24:01) If you use it at 18, it’s very unlikely you’re going to be able to amass the type of money you need to have the down payment on the type of house that you feel like you want when you’re 30 years old. And then they get all upset, right? And they don’t want to move to lower cost of living areas.
(24:14) They get upset they can’t live in Orange County, California, where their family’s from, because they have all this student loan debt. And it’s understandably frustrating. And there’s inflation and there’s other factors at play, but fundamentally nobody wants to take responsibility for the fact that, hey, that was a $100,000 bullet. I know the system screwed you. I know that’s what they told you.
(24:32) But now, I think Gen Z seems to be flipping that completely. They’re very suspect. Yeah. Which is amazing. It’s been amazing to watch like the critical thinking capacity that has somehow uh been reclaimed by by Jenzi, at least in my experience, at least with with my girls and their and their friends.
(24:52) I imagine that this is so validating for so many folks listening because I told you I I think probably most of the parents listening are homeschoolers or unschoolers and are on that path of questioning the indoctrination camp that we call the educational system. I am very curious therefore about like unpacking the psychosocial dimensions of like what is happening here that is is still like where does the programming still have its tentacles because you know when I think about the avoidance tactic that college represents right you alluded to
(25:28) that like oh you know I’ll figure it out later like what I’m going to do with my life well why are we disconnected from our curiosity why are we disconnected from our interests. Why do we have a very, you know, corrupted sense of access to what it is that drives us intrinsically? It’s because of the school system, because of the externalization of that and the oper, you know, how we’ve operationalized that and become right these like mini factory workers. So then this idea that you’re supposed to like know what you want to do, man or woman, with your life, that
(26:00) is not accessible because of the disconnection that’s been essentially installed for the, you know, the previous 12 years. So avoiding that conversation with yourself for another four years is probably not going to be productive, but it’s very tempting, right? Like I’ll figure it out later kind of psychology.
(26:25) Then there’s this idea of like like the the sociocultural millia, right? like the sense of belonging, you know, cuz I attempted to homeschool/unschool my girls in in 2020 and 2021. And if I had had a community of I did have a community of like-minded women. However, if I had a community of like-minded women with same or similar aaged children, both boys and girls, big though, I’m talking like 50 kids, I 100% could have gone down this path.
(26:59) because I did not have that, I lost the war, you know, and my kids ended up, you know, going back to school because they had a a longing to have this kind of community experience, social experience that is their birthright. Okay. So when we offer it later on or maybe even like the peak of their like social curiosity, when we say you can go hang out in a big community and you can meet all of these similarly aged kids and you can enjoy and have fun and build networks and whatever like how does so irresistible in part because the wound that has grown out of our fragmented nuclear family if that you know
(27:39) lifestyles is so gaping that this seems it’s it’s like the the alopathic remedy that you can’t ignore, right? So like when I think about that, I don’t know that the argument that that my girls would have to go to college is like, well, I need a I need a degree, right? So, I think they probably would be able to hear you say there are very few career paths that actually require a college degree today. So, you’re not actually going to position yourself better than if you just get in the workforce. Plus, they see the business
(28:16) that I run. They know I don’t even literally know if my employees went to college or didn’t. I don’t care. I’ve never asked. Like, it’s literally not relevant. So they they understand especially in the digital entrepreneurial realm that this may not be super relevant vocationally but I don’t know how I would you know um again because of the sociocultural programming and the wounds and all of the challenges that are built in and baked in to the the structure of their experience. um how I would contend with
(28:48) those aspects and you know all that I typically say is like well I literally have no friends from college okay I also went to MIT it wasn’t like the most like social experience uh but I you know all of my friends are from other aspects of my life and especially you know aspects of my life where I have more like modernday commonalities and you know where we share an ethos and I don’t know more than just like we went to the same campus for four years Okay, it’s a more refined like sense of overlap. But I I
(29:21) think that that’s the greatest challenge that I see like is how tempting a bait it is to imagine that you can have an experience of social belonging and it’s you know it’s sort of like structured in this very compact way.
(29:39) It’s like four let’s say five year experience and then you’ll go figure out later you know what the hell you want to do. And meanwhile, like you and I touched on this a little bit, but the disruption of the family unit and a woman’s identification and role as mother is actually well seated by the capture of those very specific years, right? And then programming these young women that they should be after that point focused on getting their careers started, right? So that you know I have many girlfriends in their 40s who are finally thinking about having kids.
(30:12) Okay, this is the product of that kind of prioritization that is not aligned with, you know, the kind of values that I think a lot of us as women are coming to see as primary. So is there anything else you would like add as far as the social and so sociocultural dimensions of this conversation? Yeah. So, there’s uh a caution and then and then the answer to that.
(30:36) So, the first thing is that I think homeschooling and unschooling parents I think are a little bit less susceptible to this, but homeschooling parents specifically. And I say that because my mom homes homeschooled my siblings and I cuz we were a military family growing up. That’s probably obvious now that I say it. And the basically homeschooling parents, especially like more OG homeschooling parents, fall victim to something, and that is they’re trying to show outwardly that they’re not bad parents and they weren’t bad educators. And because of
(30:58) that, homeschoolers actually attend college at a much higher rate. And that’s because parents are trying to justify the quality of their education of their children. So a lot of my kid got into Harvard, my kid got into this, and then they end up still having poor ROI.
(31:10) They end up still wasting a ton of time. They end up still. So the the challenge to homeschool and unschooling parents is do not try to put your child back in the system to make yourself and and the people around you think that you did a good job. You did a good job. That’s why you don’t have to send your child into a meat grinder.
(31:27) And so it’s crazy to spend K through 12 educating your own child and then send them back into a meat grinder that they have no need to be in unless they’re going to be cutting somebody’s head open. That is that is it. So that I just want to make sure that parents feel empowered there. Don’t do that. Don’t fall victim to that.
(31:44) That is such a big temptation and homeschool parents it’s it’s so hard for them to resist it because it’s oh my child got to this and they just brag and they use that to show that they did a good job, you know, to because there’s no other metric. All right, college acceptance is the metric. And even though even though you spent all this time bucking the system, you go right back into it to try to show everybody around you that you did a good job. So you don’t have to do that.
(32:03) So any homeschool parents listening, don’t do that just because everybody else is doing it because actually too not everybody else is doing it. And that’s the thing that should embolden people. Second is I believe that this concept of this whole like large extremely large peer group of all like-minded, you know, or all like age is not good. Historically that’s not been how it is.
(32:20) you have a small group of like five to max 20 kids your age. Like even if you lived in a small town, you don’t have that many kids that are your age. Even if you go to a small like village or town school, there’s really not that many kids.
(32:37) And so this whole concept of let me go and just be with that group of kids for four to five years. Uh just I think incentivizes a lot of bad behavior, a lot of infantilization, a lot of like Peter Pan syndrome I’ll call it. And then also it’s just not reasonable. You know, I think that as a result of choosing to send our kids into that environment as opposed to sending them into entry- level work, and when I say entry-le work, I think a lot of people picture the trades, like they probably picture welding, but I don’t mean that.
(33:02) I mean, if your child signs up for um let’s say Pinterest, Pinterest has a really good software development apprentichip program, they’re going to be around people who are of a similar age, maybe people a little bit older, but if your child is young, then they’re going in, they’re going to be with a group of people who are about the same age as them.
(33:20) So their peer group is going to be people who are trying to learn the same things as them in the same way. And so for example, I have a young man who I’m working with or and he actually went through the launch program process, wants to go into audio engineering. He is going to Tokyo, Japan for audio engineering school. His family saved, I believe, upwards of $90,000 on what they would have paid for music school tuition. And he doesn’t have to waste his time. He had no interest.
(33:42) He’s been producing a ton of music on his own. like very creatives with a lot of incentive always do well. They need the right environment. And so he did not need to go to a four-year college to be good at that and sit through a bunch of two years of general education classes he didn’t need. He’s going to Japan because Japan produces a lot of music.
(34:01) He’s going to he’s going to rent a little apartment in Shabuya and he’s going to get on the train every day and he’s going to go work with a producer who’s worked with BTS, which is this big Korean singing group. Like he’s going to get his name featured on stuff. He’s going to work one-on-one with him to teach him how to be really, really good. Somebody who’s produced for Apple, produced for amazing, amazing companies.
(34:19) And then he’s going to come back in nine months because that’s how long it takes to learn something like that. Even something highly technical with a lot of software and a lot of hardware and a lot of artistry to it. Then he’s going to come back with this resume, with this experience.
(34:37) He’s going to go through the program with a couple other people who are similar age, but not all 18, right? He doesn’t have to be with a bunch of 18-year-olds to grow. And actually he will grow faster if he is not around a bunch of 18-year-olds who are making poor decisions. Right? A degree of es especially for young men. I think a degree of loneliness is not a bad thing.
(34:53) Like not a lot of it but a little bit is good, you know, and a degree of being around people who are not all the same age as you. And that is going to lead to maturity. That is going to lead to learning. That is going to lead to being challenged. And so the community I think when we talk about community sometimes the definition of it is too large and community is not thousands of people on a college campus that’s not and also it’s not real. It’s fake.
(35:18) It’s artificial. You’re paying for it for four or five years. Whereas if you start working with people and you start being in a professional environment with people you have a common goal which is to improve or produce or work on a project or build something.
(35:34) And so if you were to start working at Tesla when you’re 18, the people that you come up with are going to benefit you and you’re going to benefit them far more than a bunch of unrelated thous you know thousand 18-year-olds who are in a college campus. Um, again, slightly outside of I’d say maybe there’s 10 colleges where the network that you’ll get if you’re a startup founder possibly, you know, if you’re if you’re maybe I guess somebody could make an argument for that.
(35:59) If somebody has the cash available to do that, that might make a difference or someone could say that it might have been a contributing factor. I don’t think you can directly link it back because I think it’s the 18 years prior to going to college that makes you the way you are.
(36:12) I don’t think it’s the four years you spend in college because colleges just white label kids who they think are going to succeed, right? They just take bets. It’s like saying, “Oh, you know what? He’s a really good shot.” Who is that? Steph Curry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We’ll we’ll take him. I’m sure I’m sure it’s I’m sure it’s having him on the Golden State Warriors that made him a good a good basketball player.
(36:28) Not the 18 years prior to that, you know? Not the not the 20 years prior to that. So, for for people looking for community for their kids, just look smaller. Like don’t don’t think that college is a substitute for real community which is going to be diverse in age, diverse in experience. And then if you’re actually looking for that too, you can look at the numbers like most college graduates or most college students have less cross race, less crosscultural, less less crossclass interactions than they would in the wild. Literally just walking around or working. So they’re going to be exposed to less people. And that just leads I
(36:58) think to less wisdom in general. I I just think that that’s true. And so if you are looking for community for your child, entry- level work, and this could be anything. So have them work at a gallery in your town, have them start, go to the Chamber of Commerce and see who needs an entry- level digital marketer.
(37:15) You know, your check your small business chamber of commerce wherever you live is a great resource. Amazing. There’s so many business owners. It doesn’t matter what they’re interested in. If they’re interested in a restaurant, if they’re interested in like a local services business, if they’re interested in modeling, you wouldn’t believe the people that go to the Small Business Chamber of Commerce wherever you live. Even small towns have vibrant chamber of commerce.
(37:34) That’s a great way to do it. Toast Masters is another place that I highly advise everybody to send their kids. That’s one of the top complaints about Gen Z is they can’t look people in the eyes and they can’t speak. So, if you can speak well, something that I myself am trying to work on.
(37:51) If you can speak well in public to people, that’s a huge superpower that will help your child network, that will help your child build connections. And then basically just knowing that your child doesn’t have to pay pay to access a college campus to get married well to have good community to have good network. And I mentioned that outside of obviously churches, synagogues, wherever you your place of worship as well or even volunteering, right? If you if you’re not particularly religious, but you volunteer at a food bank or, you know, a local like crisis pregnancy center or anything like that, those are all good places. Even a lot of uh thrift stores or charity shops in
(38:25) people’s towns are great places to meet well-connected people because they volunteer there because they have time. And so it’s a good way to just meet people who again have access to different social circles who are able to get you locally connected in a way that you just wouldn’t believe, you know, and that could be in any industry, tourism, trades, tech, anything under the sun. And so that would be my advice. Yeah. So resonant.
(38:50) And you know considering as you were talking about you know the imperative to get in touch with what interests you and to reclaim that for the reasons that I already referenced and also how you can’t force that right that it that that is a phenomenological experience where where your passions and your interests can come back to you. They do.
(39:15) I mean I as as we have discussed you know I was indoctrinated to a high degree and my like autodidact right like my my my intrinsic motivation was ready and raring to go as soon as I connected to my own dharmic path if you will right and I taught myself more you know from 2009 until today than I could have possibly memorized in the previous you know decade and a half.
(39:44) So that process is your journey right? It’s like your life narrative and and that that should have some sort of um ignition date even at 18 if you choose not to go to college versus at you know 23 if you do that you need to figure out what you’re interested in right so so almost a lot of the the support I imagine I can offer as a mother and you know that that we can start to talk about more in this collective conversation is like how do we help our our children recognize like what it is that lights them up. What is
(40:17) enlivening? Like what are they good at? I love this concept which I’ve written about and talked about and I imagine you’ve come across it that at least I’ve pronounced ikigai right this Japanese concept of this overlap right of of gifts and talents and proficiencies and prosperity and service and you know that that that is available to each and every one of us I think is the case whether you are a primary bread winner or you’re just you know playing with the expression of your creativity for a commodified you know product or or not,
(40:49) right? You can have this experience of that overlap, but how do you get there? How do you get in touch with it? How do you you discover it? I imagine part of it is experiential, right? Like until you actually try something, go have an internship, go volunteer somewhere, like see what it’s like to work in a jewelry store versus, you know, at a at a for Zoom or Pinterest, right? Can’t possibly start to activate that, right? Like there there must be something we can do. What was something you were passionate
(41:19) about when you were 18? If I look back right in my education cuz I was also I’m second generation and I was also uh how do I put this delicately? I was incentivized extrinsically to perform academically. And so I never had any sense of any of being interesting to me.
(41:38) You know, literally any of the academics that I was like a 4.0 student my whole career. Okay. And so I had no relationship apart from one thing which is interestingly probably still one of my greatest passions to this day which is writing. I’ve always always loved writing and I’ve always been good at writing. I’ve also always loved dancing and I’ve not always been necessarily good at it right like I could also sort of tap into like oh that’s a hobby and this is something that you know could translate into um you know some sort of life support. Then, you know, I was like, “Oh, but you know, writers don’t make money, and so there’s got to be, you know, some other
(42:12) STEM related stuff woven in there.” And of course, my feminist self was like trying to prove that I could do it. Men could do bleeding kind of a thing. So, it was a perfect storm. But yeah, I would say if there was one, you know, it was like a it was like a smoldering ember just like wanting a little glass around it the whole time, it would probably be writing.
(42:37) I think that this is probably one of my my more controversial takes and that is that we are placing entirely too much weight on on teenage passion. We choose one of two ways. There’s two traditional ways to choose careers right now. There’s passion and I think passion and interest are conflated often and I’ll explain the difference between the two of them really briefly. And the and the third one is going to be career.
(42:55) So career you can pick career for first. I’m going to be a doctor. I’m going to be a lawyer. I’m going to be a nurse. I’m going to be a teacher. Um, most kids can only name about six to six to six to eight jobs really. They they can’t really think of very many.
(43:11) And so, actually, this is a exercise we do in our book, The De-Free Way, but we have people think through how many jobs can your kids actually name. You’re going to be some of them cannot name very many. And that’s all they can pick from. They don’t know a job exists. They can’t go after that career.
(43:24) And then they definitely can’t work backwards and figure out what the entry- level version of that is. And then if they can’t do that, they definitely shouldn’t be buying a college degree, too. So if you can’t go through that exercise with them, they have no business spending money buying a degree. None until you guys figure that out. Like that’s a huge problem.
(43:37) But then picking I think passion and interest, especially with with parents with creatives. And I’m going to say this, I myself got into a chartered art school. I’m I’m a fairly decent I’m a fairly decent sketch artist. Not police sketch artist, but just charcoal. I took some lessons.
(43:54) I you know, I was I was like I said, I got into a chartered art school for this. And I did some commission painting when I was a little bit younger. And so I see this a lot. I just got an email from a mom that was talking about her daughter wants to be an illustrator. And she said she’s very talented. Parents of creatives always say that, you know, very talented and I’m sure she’s telling the truth, but then she said she wants to go to art school because she doesn’t want to. She has she thinks she needs a degree to be an illustrator.
(44:19) And that is an interest because she doesn’t do it and she doesn’t try to do it publicly. Whereas in contrast to the young man I’m working with constantly publishing music, publishing beats all the time, like collaborating with people, getting like letters of endorsement, like that is a passion because it’s action. Interest and passion are very different.
(44:38) So when you have your 17-year-old that says, “Oh, I’m passionate about this.” But they don’t do anything about it. That is not passion. Passion drives action. You know, if you are a passionate writer, you are writing. You’re writing. You’re writing. You’re publishing. Yeah. I mean, I was published first at 20 now that you say that. Yeah, that’s so interesting.
(44:56) I I actually was dual enrolled. So, in in Georgia where I graduated high school, I was able to go to the local college. So, I went to a I was actually in a university for a year and a half before I broke out and I wrote for the university paper and they paid me. So, that passion because there’s action like I took extra steps to write, right? Steps that other people don’t take. Interest is I’m a like I like to write.
(45:23) Passion is I wrote, I published, right? So, you had a passion for writing because you actually did it. So, a lot of parents when they have kids that are creative, they’ll say like, “Oh, they’re they’re this, they’re that, and I just, you know, I’m actually we were about to record a podcast episode answering this lady, but I said, she doesn’t have it until she starts publishing or trying to trying to get work or trying to do it.
(45:41) She doesn’t have it.” And that’s something that they can get. But to then base, you know, your child’s entire career now and to pigeon hole them based on interest even based on passion is not a good idea because they’re too young to know and it will change and it might change.
(46:00) And more than that, the most powerful thing you can do and it’s kind of this icky guy thing actually that you’re talking about. I have a I have a screenshot of that actually right here on my desktop. So, it’s funny that you brought that up, but it’s this intersection of passion and interest, right? And so you’re writing and you write because you do a lot of you do production, but you write and you use your passion with your interest, which is, you know, which is debunking the overarching narratives in society that you think are false. That’s where it gets really powerful. Your child will not have that until they’re older. That
(46:31) it’s very rare to have that at such a young age with no life experience. And if you send your child to college, it will push it off so far. or the college will put a carrot in front of your child and tell them that where they’ll get that is after they get a PhD and then $200,000 later they will realize that they have no options left and maybe they’re not even interested anymore but it’s too late because they’re already so boxed in which is something you and I talked about a little bit ago but so when parents are thinking about this question it’s very important when your child is first choosing a career or or
(47:02) the direction they’re going to take because they can always change where do they want to live and do life what type of schedule do they want to have? What sort of work environment do they want to be in? Um, this is huge. I’ve had somebody who um I had recently a nurse email us and just say like, you know, I went through nursing school, young nurse, and she’s like, and I hate the people I work with. I hate the environment of the hospital.
(47:26) Like, I hate I just don’t like the medical community. I don’t like it. And I said, well, you know, that is a good example of why you really have to think about like who you want to go to work with every day. You know, I have a friend who’s a speech language pathologist, master’s degree, hates it. Hates the people she works with. They’re just not nice people.
(47:43) You know, that’s something women really need to consider because women seem to care about work environment a lot more than men do, I will say. And then the last thing is income. If your child has goals that require money, they need money to accomplish those goals. And that doesn’t necessarily have to be a lot of money, but if they want to own a house by a certain age, they’re going to need money to do that.
(48:00) if they want to take, you know, if they want to be competitive at a sport like jiu-jitsu, you know, and they want to continue to carry that into adulthood, they need money to do that, you know, like jiu-jitsu is expensive. Going to competitions is expensive. There’s no wrong passion or hobby or sport or or lifestyle that you can have. There’s only what you need to accomplish it.
(48:19) And so parents need to change their definition of success to is your child going to get what they want out of life, whatever that thing is. Publishing a book, owning a house, having chickens, traveling to Japan twice a year, right? Anything that they want. And lining up the type of work that they’re going to have with what they want to do.
(48:38) And so if they want to run a season, you know, if they want to run a a coconut water business in Dest, Florida for four months out of the year, then the other half of the year they need to go salmon fishing in Alaska so they can have that seed money to go down there to run the boat.
(48:54) Like they have to figure out what they want to do and then they need to just stack their experiences while they’re young with no debt in order to do that because it’s just amazing what they can bring about if they have that freedom at the beginning of their life and they’re not boxed in with that amount of debt. It’s it’s just crazy. So, if you’re enjoying this episode, I want to extend a $300 gift to you so that you can start your Juvent journey. Head to juvent.
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(49:56) family, you can put it in the living room and hop on it for 10 to 20 minutes a day, knowing that you’re supporting your longevity and youthful body in ways that are proven. Again, that’s juven.com/Kelly Brogan. The code is kelly300 for $300 off at checkout. Your future body will thank you.
(50:18) And if you don’t completely love it after 6 weeks, you can return it for a full refund, no questions asked. Enjoy. Yeah. Wow. I mean, as I’m listening to you describe this, I’m thinking also about the priorities, right, that we have as women.
(50:39) And I know, you know, you I’ve heard you speak a little bit about the experience that young men, boys, uh, have in the educational system and what it does, and I’ve I’ve also spoken to this, the emasculating effects of the educational system. Even the mixed gender experience I think is like really does a number on uh manw woman dynamics. Yeah, it’s very problematic.
(50:56) But when I think about the frank assessment of priorities, right, I would also add the relational priorities that most women have, right? When when you think about being 50 years old, right, and and a and a grown ass woman, right, what do you imagine is going to feel really good? like having a deep intimate relationship with your children.
(51:20) Having a beautiful marriage, right? Maybe even grandchildren at that point. Having um a beautiful home and experience of like a shared project with your partner and your family, you know, what is it that feels or is it going to be having books on the shelf that you wrote? Is it going to be having products in a store window that you can walk by? I mean, as somebody who’s who’s, you know, created physical books and also created a ton of digital stuff, I will tell you that it is it feels so good to show my children these these physical pages that I had something to do with, right? Because whatever the the digital realms and the invisible realms that took me
(51:59) away from them as children, it’s a very complex terrain. And I spoke to you earlier about like the gaslight that says my fulfillment could ever have been found there. So the careerism that is the dogmatic assumption that career is what young women should be focusing on as a default is a part of the feminist programming that I’ve um efforted to deconstruct over the past, you know, couple of years.
(52:30) And I would say that your prompt, you know, to consider the lifestyle priorities, it is a really amazing beginning to envisioning and accessing the imaginal realm of like project yourself into this future. More into the future, not just four years, right? Like more Yeah. 10 years. Exactly. I ask them 10 or 15. I usually benchmark and say, you know, that’s how old I am. Uh cuz the age range I work with is 16 to 20.
(52:54) And when I do that, I ask the same questions of young men and young women. And there’s a reason I do that. Part of that is because I wanted to see how when asked the same questions in the same way, what they said. And shockingly, they say different things. And the young women, it’s interesting how when given when given the same questions and parameters will give you different answers.
(53:20) And that’s why the beauty of this the beauty of the process that we have created is and this is what’s so amazing to me is every time I get a different result right and so I had one young lady who uh really you know she just wanted to own she wanted to own her own business and this is irrelevant actually this this passion is irrelevant to actually but did end up playing in which when I can do that I love to but she’s going to go to herology school it’s watchmaking she and that’s something that one she can do from home two she could go into a physical location, but people can ship her product. She can be home, right? Which is a huge huge thing for women
(53:50) who, you know, a lot of in this in this economy, it’s diffic it’s difficult to have a one-inccome household. And so for some people, that’s just not feasible if they want to stay if one of their priorities is location. And so let’s say they their family is in a high cost of living area and they want to stay near their family in a high cost of living area.
(54:08) Well, you have to stack like now you got to prioritize income so you can get location, right? if the priority is location because of proximity to family and you want to have your kids around your family and your mom and your dad and all this stuff. And so for her that actually made a lot of sense because she does want to have a partner and so she’s not going to be she’s not going to be alone, you know, going into the future because one of her priorities is having a spouse. And so that’s a beautiful example of that. You know, another
(54:30) another young gal actually outside right outside of LA. Again, she has five sisters, all of them nurses. And she came in going, I want to be a nurse. I said, let’s make sure that’s true. So we go through the process, right? And she did end up still consistent at the end.
(54:48) Um, and she had actually shadowed and done a lot more work than most people her age had done. You know, shadowed in in a hospital, which is actually I recommend for anybody that’s going into a paint color job, schools, hospitals, and anything like that. Go actually look at what that looks like before you spend money to go into those fields.
(55:01) If you go into it and you like it, you know, full steam ahead. And she came out of it, you know, wanting to be an O nurse, but with the understanding that she can transition into tellahalth because she wants to be home with her children, right? But where she lives is very expensive and so she wants to live in her family. She has to make enough money to be able to afford to stay where she lives.
(55:21) And so it’s all this stacking of of things, you know, where for some of the guys, they just say, you know, my dad built a business, so he was able to be home a lot of our childhood. And so some of the guys will say that’s a priority to me, too. like I want to be able to work, you know, to be around when my kids are around and pick them up from, you know, pick them up from school or take them to practice, you know, go to the games.
(55:39) And so for them, you know, things that’ll come to the top are things like, you know, things like sales, things like real estate, because it just makes sense because it’s going to give them the type of time that they want to have, the type of flexibility that they want to have. And so it’s interesting how when you stack these things, especially for women though, usually the jobs that will come out will ones that allow them to be like to have the time to have children, which is something that’s very physically demanding, something that takes a lot of
(56:02) emotional demand as we talked about. And that’s just not something that ever comes into play. And the result of that is really sad cuz what you have is you have people that go into all the student debt, then feel trapped in their careers and now can’t live the way they actually want to. They’re literally unable to because of their debt burden.
(56:19) and it is now dictating. So 17-year-old passion for medicine is now dictating what they can or cannot do in their life at 28, at 35. And that is something that is really satisfying to see prevented because you can always do that later. Colleges will always be there. They will always take your money. Like you get to 25 and your brain’s fully formed and you’re sure, go for it.
(56:45) You know, that’s I don’t think anybody should be able to take out student loans till they’re 25 anyway. But that’s basically the the method is just stacking these priorities and just seeing where it shakes out and being really objective about it.
(56:59) It’s hard as a parent to go, “Oh, don’t you mean this?” Just let them talk and just see where things, you know, see what they say. See, you know, see where they land and then try to think about what will enable them to have those things. Schedule, location, income, and work environment, you know, depending on which one is work environment is good for people who have physical disabilities. Uh that that’s something that comes up a lot.
(57:17) I’ve worked with people who have been, you know, had cerebal palsy or or issues where they’re just not able to be too far away from their parents. And so the type of work, you know, the type of work that they have is going to have an impact. Like they’re not able to physically do certain things. So work environment can kind of rise to the top, but everybody can find a fit.
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(58:35) Head to equipfoods.com/kellyroen to get 15% off your order. That’s equipfoods equipfoods.com/Kelly Brogan. If you care about real nutrition with real transparency, this is the brand to trust. Amazing. I’m so grateful, you know, that you offer, you know, you have books and support system and methodology for unpacking, you know, this journey and and really repaving like a path, right? Because we we we long for that guidance and direction as like a surrogate for whatever it is that is offered by this more orthodox approach. So, I want to selfishly end on
(59:17) this note. But I’m going to put you on the spot, which is then if you had if you had like a minute or two with my daughters who are obviously, you know, they’re very used to thinking outside the box. It comes very naturally to them. They, you know, they’ve seen me challenge a lot of paradigms and you know that they’re not open and they’re also not right like the the folks that I would refer to you are like already baked, ready to go. They just want the support, right? Like that that gentleman you you know you you supported in going to
(59:47) Japan. I think that is who you know in the coaching world and support world and guidance world it’s always best to work with people who’ve already come to some sort of intrinsic realization however right like I’m not in the business of like persuading and like if you were to talk to them for a minute or two at this like very very vulnerable moment where a lot of the programming is seeping in about like oh when I go to college or who’s going to college or where would I go to college and whatever you know and and not for nothing their dad went to Harvard and so they have, you know, and
(1:00:17) and so did my brother. And you know, they have this kind of like whatever that oldw world. I mean, now I think of these as like, you know, woke indoctrination camps like that you literally pay for. Wow. So, it couldn’t be less appealing. And there’s it’s it’s fading, but it’s still it’s still there. So, what would you gently offer for them to consider at this moment? Like, if you had their ear for a minute or two? The biggest thing that I advise parents to do with this age is to do vocational creativity in real time and that is to you know products that they use and that
(1:00:51) could be makeup products or digital products and say oh you know that’s a that’s a job and figure out what the job title is for whatever that thing is. So if it’s a you know if it’s a character designer or a landscape designer for a game that they play just tell them that that’s a job that they can that they can do.
(1:01:08) The next thing the next step there is if they show interest is to go to the next step. So for instance you know interested in illustration that one’s really common with with young young girls right now super common I hear that one all the time and uh I would say that school of motion is a really good opportunity.
(1:01:28) So that’s the other thing is I think parents need to know go online and education college is not a synonym for education never has been never will be. Uh, nobody owns education. Nobody can pay wallet. Especially not colleges and universities and the people who run them most of all. They’re the least qualified to do so. And so you as a parent feel empowered. It is 2025. You can find things all over the place. I like you know they’re they’re interested in um sustainable agriculture.
(1:01:53) Send them to and this is something where I don’t think people realize but the amount of money that you’re going to spend and reclaiming mentally reclaiming that educational spend. $104,000 is a lot of money. You can do almost anything with that in a much shorter amount of time for much higher quality.
(1:02:12) So let’s say your child’s interested, you know, in vineyards or something, you know, it has some esoteric interest and you or cheese, right? You can send them to Italy. I’m not kidding. For a fraction of what you would pay for a college degree and for a year, you can send them to these really intensive amazing and this is something that I vet I vet these options for people. So I just know that there’s a lot more.
(1:02:29) You know, you can send them to Ireland to like cookery school that’ll teach them like farm-totable stuff that they want to start their own restaurant. You can send them to they want to learn a language, right? There are there are packages for $7,000. You can send them for three months to learn how to speak full immersion to speak a language, then come back fully ready to take language proficiency tests, to be official translators.
(1:02:56) Like a good example of somebody I know that uh just hired a Japanese language tutor and then took uh the JPT is the Japanese language proficiency test and you can study enough to take that to a business level. When you get to a business level and doesn’t take that long, you know, several years of study, especially for homeschoolers or unschoolers, your kids can go into sales. They can go into all kinds of international. It’s just amazing what’s out there.
(1:03:14) But just reclaim the idea. You have all this money that you’re going to spend. you’re going to get a subpar result. You are going to get a subpar result for a premium. So, how about for a quarter of that cost, you try to get a much better result? Because let’s just take a quarter of it, $25,000, let’s say $30,000, the amount of of experts that you can hire for $30,000.
(1:03:38) If you want your child to be an Olympian, go find from 5 years ago, find the find the runner up on the bronze team and hire them to coach your child. Like, I don’t think people understand what’s out there that’s just so far superior to college. It’s just not even close.
(1:03:58) Like, college cannot offer what the type of education that is available in the private market, but you have to look for it. And so that is where you as a parent who’s in tune with your child’s interests like they want to learn how to paint go to the local gallery where you live and see if they can work you know they want to go into have you ever seen those clips of so the bees the auctioneers they train those those are apprenticeships you can find people they can start go working at these art houses and being around this amazing works of art all these
(1:04:23) collectibles all these antiques all this history and they can learn that and they can be in that world and then they can move up in that world and that’s so much more interesting if they’re real about it than college. And once you get them into it and you get them a taste of what it’s like and the independence and the wide age range that they’re going to be around as opposed to a bunch of 18-year-olds that by the time they get done actually experiencing life, they’ll just go, I don’t want to do that at all. That’s uninteresting to me. Right? to sit through a biology one, you know,
(1:04:53) 1100 class. To sit through a sociology 1100 class where they’re told that they’re, you know, where they’re told they’re racist or they’re told that they’re privileged or they’re told that whatever is, you know, whatever their most recent IST that their tenure professor, you know, who’s got $150,000 of student debt is telling them that they are. It’ll be insufferable to them.
(1:05:12) Like even if they decide to go and they you don’t co-sign the loans and they go anyway, they’ll just go, “Oh, this is not interesting to me.” And so that’s how you can, you know, it’s allowing them agency to the earlier allow them agency in the area that they’re interested in so that they can tell if it’s their passion or not, that’s where you’re going to get outsized results. And that’s just creativity at the beginning. You know, it’s like, oh, that’s this.
(1:05:35) Oh, did you know that’s this? And don’t tell them to do it. Just tell them it exists. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, that’s guidance, you know, that’s that is that is guidance and support. And I have a girlfriend who has a freshman in college right now. And actually the price tag is 90k. 90k a year. Oh yeah.
(1:05:54) University of Miami is like uh I just read it. They’re 95 95 a year. University of Miami. And do people really and this is the thing is like I’m sorry but as a parent do you really think you’re about to get half a million that is going to that college degree all in by the way we’ve done these calculations is going to cost almost a million dollars.
(1:06:12) Do you think that that million- dollar bachelor’s degree is worth? Not you, but that does she really think that that’s going to get them that amount of value? Even if you do have the cash, right? Because some people have the cash for that. Even if you do, also your audience should know that if you have cracked this and you’ve gone, you’re just starting to suspect everything that’s going on.
(1:06:30) You can roll your 529 plans into Roth IAS penalty-free as of two years ago. That’s important information for people to know. So, you do not have to feel like your child has to go buy this subpar product that’s going to teach them a bunch of nonsense for no reason, make them feel bad about themselves, doubt everything, and like and and not even be worth the time that they’re going to sink into it. Instead of doing that, you can roll it into a retirement account. No penalty.
(1:06:52) So, just talk to your CPA or financial adviser. You are just such a wealth of extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, and I’m so excited to have crossed paths with you and to have you as an ally. I just I I do this. So this is what my superpower. I call in like exactly the right person to support me in you know the the germination of a new perspective.
(1:07:15) So we will make sure Hannah that everybody knows how to uh avail themselves of your resources and further support and I plan to be uh doing so myself and hopefully you will meet my daughters soon. So thank you so so much. Thank you to you and your husband for your extraordinary work. Thank you so much Kelly for having me on. It was a pleasure. [Music] I feel like I feel [Music]
