3 Myths That Colleges Use to Convince Families to Buy A College Degree (DF#187)

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:00]:
It's very important for parents to understand that only 7.7% of all the jobs in The United States legally require a college degree. There's a reason we say legally require. If there is not a legal requirement for a college degree, anybody who is degree free can get that job.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:20]:
Aloha folks and welcome back to degree free. Today, we are going to be going over the three myths that colleges use to con parents and their children to buy a college degree. The three myths. I won't bear the lead just starting off right at the beginning. Number one is going to be your kid. Won't get a good job. Number two, your child won't have a network or community. And then number three is your child.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:43]:
Won't be able to find a spouse. These are great. And it's something that we hear all the time. You probably heard these before, and if you haven't, we are in this every single day and we hear this every single day. These are the concerns of the parents that are thinking about sending their kids to college. And especially these are the concerns of parents that are thinking about not sending their kids to college or their kids don't want to go. And they're saying, okay, well, what are the downsides here? And these come to mind for a lot of parents that we talk to. Let's talk about the first one.

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:13]:
Your kid won't get a good job.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:15]:
This is my favorite myth because it's the easiest one to knock over. This is just patently false. I recently saw a comment on our Instagram. This This lady was very angry that we would dare to say that a college degree is not a necessary purchase. And then was also angry at the stating of the facts that I'm about to state to everyone who's listening to this podcast, things that people need to be equipped with because allowing people to proceed forward with such a permanent financial decision with the wrong information is ridiculous. And there's a reason that colleges do this. They do this because it's in their best interest for you to have incorrect information and believe the narrative that you have to buy from them and your child has to buy from them to be successful at anything. And this lady was very angry because she was a homeschool mom and her daughter is in early college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:59]:
She said, I must be the worst parent in the world because her entire trajectory of teaching her daughter was to get her into early college, not necessarily to help her figure out what the right type of career for her life was. And I think when I see people that are this angry about what we say, oftentimes I think what's underneath is the sneaking suspicion that we may be right. And that's why we want to talk about this because I want parents to have this information now so they can change the way they can take this information, research it, double check it for themselves, see that it's correct. And then factor that in as they move forward with their children's education and with the career trajectory that they're going to help their child follow depending on what their child wants out of life. It's very important for parents to understand that only 7.7% of all the jobs in The United States legally require a college degree. There's a reason we say legally require. If there is not a legal requirement for a college degree, anybody who is degree free can get that job. This is a very simple concept for some reason controversial, though, I don't understand what it is about this that just rubs people the wrong way.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:00]:
Hey there. I hope you're enjoying this episode of the degree free podcast. At degree free, we want to help everyone thrive and succeed without needing a college degree. And the only way to truly reach everyone is with your help. If you're getting value out of this episode, or if this is your second, third, or fourth episode that you're tuning into, if you could just ship this to a friend, just click that one button and share it with someone in your contacts or on your stories. It would mean the world to us. And more importantly, get our message out to more people who need help getting out of their current situation. If you could do that right now, that would mean a whole lot.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:36]:
But a good example of this is to be an administrator at a hospital. There is no legal requirement for a college degree. There are hospital administrators who are degree free. They run hospitals, they run large businesses. There are people who are retail managers who run stores that do tens of millions of dollars of sales a year. Something that is so difficult that MBAs wouldn't be able to do it because they don't have the skills necessary. And those people, there is no legal requirement for them to have a college degree, to understand hiring procurement, for them to understand how to negotiate, for them to understand how to resolve HR issues. All of these things are complex skills.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:12]:
And I say this because right now the pioneer in AI machine learning technology, building AI machine learning businesses or nonprofits, depending on who you ask is degree free. He did not have to buy a college degree in order to do that. Again, when we look at the top of all of our giant tech businesses, you can see that that is the case. People didn't have to buy permission because there's no legal license that is going to keep them from doing those things. The reason I go straight to the top here is just because if I can prove to somebody and make them understand that at the very top at these jobs that pay, which for a W2 employee, half a million dollars a year. So just to be very clear, these are people who out earn physicians, not necessarily surgeons, but out earn physicians with specific technical skills. If your child can do that without purchasing a college degree, because other people have and other people do, then everything below that, everything under the scope and different arenas is open to them as well. And that's why I always go straight to these extreme examples, because if you can go to these extreme examples where people think technical fields are too gated off or too complex, for some reason for degree, for people to understand them, and you just point out that's who's building it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:12]:
The number one thing that people are going to say is that those are just outliers. And then if you look at the infrastructure of the people underneath them, they have degrees.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:19]:
Yeah. I love that one because it was so funny. There was a technical writer on LinkedIn. And the funny thing was that he misspelled a bunch of the things that he said to me while he was telling me that I was an idiot. But basically he was talking about how his example for when I said I use Mark Zuckerberg and I use Sam Altman as examples because he said that people can't quite literally cannot get into these fields. And then I said, I was in this field and then look at the people who run the largest companies in these fields. And he said, well, that's not true because people that they hired didn't, but that's actually not true. If you look at the people who they hired, they also did not have college degrees.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:52]:
Who's the founder of Asana? Dustin Moskowitz also degree free Wozniak at apple Steve jobs. And then he used apple as an example, which again is a very silly example. Cause again, the people that he pulled to work on that project were also degree free. They did not have college degrees. Those people didn't come until much later, if at all. And not saying that there's not people at those companies that do have it, but they didn't need those people to build what they had. And that's why it's just such a ridiculous thing to say.

Ryan Maruyama [00:06:15]:
The point that they try to make is that the people now, now that they are established company, now they're looking for PhDs in math, and now they're looking for PhDs in machine learning and those types of things. They're not looking at the Genesis of it. They're saying now days would now that the companies that are there, we're looking at the companies that we're talking about are established and now that they've made their mark and they're no longer, maybe not on the cutting edge, but they're no longer small and they're no longer worried about talent acquisition or rather they are always worried about talent acquisition, but they're worried instead of, Hey, I don't know if I can afford X, Y, and Z. They can afford anything under the sun. And then the people that they do afford, they all have degrees.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:56]:
That I think is a little bit different. And bear with me while I try to explain this thought. But one of the things that I think, and this is something I heard Peter Thiel talking about this as well, but he believes that our stress on stem is going to get less important due to AI simply because human beings don't have to lean on our own understanding of math anymore because we have access to a machine that does a lot more calculations a lot faster. I'm not saying that AI is flawless, but I'm saying functionally as a calculator, it can be accurate and useful. So he believes that in the future, it's not necessarily going to be these STEM skills that are really important. And historically he's been pretty accurate about his predictions of the future. So when those people hire people that have PhDs in advanced mathematics, they're not hiring them because they have a PhD. They're hiring them because they're good at advanced mathematics.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:39]:
And as we are learning tools, as we use AI to create learning tools that are more dynamic and more accessible to more people, we're going to get a lot more people who are more advanced at mathematics because they have access to the type of learning that is typically only gated off or still. Where we talk about access, we talk about the universities used to be only place you could access certain written material. The only place you could access certain types of learning. As that ceases to be true, we will get people who are advanced mathematicians and advanced scientists that do not have college degrees at a much higher rate. I believe. I think that people are conflating advanced mathematicians with PhDs, not necessarily because all advanced mathematicians have PhDs, but because the only way to become an advanced mathematician currently is to go on a PhD track and not the only way, because there are advanced mathematicians that aren't degree mathematicians that aren't degree free, but by and large, that is the way that's available for them to get access to the type of teaching that teaches advanced mathematics. So anyway, that's my counter argument to that, which is they're conflating PhD because that's not legally required to do those jobs. Again, there's a license to be a mathematician or a statistician or a data scientist.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:42]:
There is just experience and qualification. A good example of a place you can see where that there is exceptions to that is Wall Street. If you're a quant and you're a good one, you don't have to have a college degree because they do take outliers who are just really brilliant and they don't care. They just care about whether or not they can actually do the work.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:56]:
Yeah. I agree with you. The point of the degrees and when people use it as a filtering metric is that I understand or this candidate understands degree as that bar. I know that they can easily hurdle over that. And now in the changing economy and in the changing landscape of work, we are gonna start seeing with the improvement of finding work and showing and how to qualify and quantify how good you are and what you've done, that is going away rapidly. The degrees historically have been there to say, hey, this person is qualified up until this point, but now more than ever, it's starting to go away.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:39]:
And now the way that we're going to measure that is going to be skills test based, I believe. Oh, not too long ago. It was just several years ago, but I applied for a job that said it required a master's degree. And this is a really good example of this because I'm not a mathematician. That's not my skillset. I'm not good at stats. I'm not good at those types of things. That's just not my skillset.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:59]:
But I was curious and I wanted to apply for this job. And it was interesting when I screened with the recruiter, he didn't care at all that I didn't have a master's degree. He just said, oh, that's fine. As long as you pass this assessment test. And then he gave me a fairly difficult assessment test. Had I been able to accomplish the level of math required, which I just didn't have the skillset for, they would have hired me. Cause he liked me in the interview enough to to go ahead and push me through. He said, yeah, take the assessment and we're going to get you through to the next round.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:22]:
It was good because I saw in real time how they were actually assessing skills and he just, well, you can't do the test. So sorry. You can't progress.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:29]:
Yeah. I remember that vividly. The candidates that they were looking for. Absolutely. It was like, oh, master's degree required. But really, they did not need that filter at all because they weren't even using it as a filter. At the point where you're sitting down and interviewing with somebody, they know that you don't have a degree at all and nevermind a master's degree. The thing that they really cared about was whether or not you could pass that assessment.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:52]:
They didn't care whether or not you had a master's degree. They were making the assumption that if you had a master's degree, then you could pass the exam. But really they didn't even need to do that because you didn't pass the exam. And therefore that was a good enough filter. If you can't do this, then you can't do this job. If you can't do this task, then you can't do this job. But instead they're like, okay, well, if you don't have a master's degree, we're not going to interview you, which is the logic that they thought they had, but they didn't have because they still interviewed you. And then, okay, well, if you have a master's degree, but then that's good enough to interview, but that's not good enough to get the job because you still have to do this assessment.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:25]:
Everybody did the assessment as part of the job, as part of the interview process. And that's what we've talked about many, many times on this podcast, which is opening up all of these opportunities to degree free people and not having the degrees being the thing that gate you from getting your license or certification, or even getting a job in this instance to do that, taking your MCAT or taking the bar, for example, taking the CPA licensing exam, those should be the test. If you can pass the test, well, you should be one of those things.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:54]:
Because people can self study to the point where they can. And the reason we know that is because they used to, that's how it used to work.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:00]:
Yeah. I agree with you there. And as of January 2025, '20 '2 States have taken executive or legislative actions to remove degree requirements from the majority of their state jobs. And this is bipartisan. This comes from different states with different politics on both sides of the aisle. They both recognize that universal economic problem. Exactly. That recruitment is a problem.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:22]:
And the thing that they need is talent. And the thing that they don't want is more things and more obstacles in the way of acquiring that talent that they need. And one of the things is having a degree required or having a degree preferred on their job descriptions, because it stops people that are degree free, which is two thirds of the American population from applying to those roles. Some might argue and people have argued before, if I put that degree required there and I don't really care about it, the degree free people, they should still apply anyway. Cause those are the people that I want to work for me. That's valid. I mean, if that's the way that you want to run your company and that's the way that you're going to hire and that's the way you're going to run your recruiting process. But what these states are finding out is that they're having a really hard time attracting talent.

Ryan Maruyama [00:13:01]:
And instead of putting up these artificial gates that don't need to exist, and we know that they don't need to exist because they've been taking them down.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:07]:
And then it works. I didn't actually put this in our notes, but Delaware was one of the first states to start rolling back degree requirements. I think it was Utah, Maryland and Delaware started to do this first. And like you said, totally bipartisan effort. And so Delaware started tracking how this was going and they have basically said it was a rousing success. They had jobs that were completely filled in sectors of their economy that they had 40% openings and now they're completely filled with applicants that they define as qualified for those jobs. And it reduced vacancies overall by something like 11%. And then in certain departments, 6%, some departments a little bit higher, but they said they filled really crucial state roles and that they are thrilled with the results of the plan to continue removing degree requirements wherever possible.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:45]:
And then this just really reflects the tone of the country right now, too, because like we talked about a lot, our analysis says that only 7.7% of all the jobs in the country legally require college degrees. Now this is similarly reflected in that the max amount of job listings that even mentioned a college degree, that means even say preferred in the listing on indeed is 17% and trending downwards On ZipRecruiter, it is 14.5% and trending downwards. On ZipRecruiter, they keep really good data. And one of the most interesting stats from their report about this last year was that the declines are in industries where typically college degrees are always listed and that's finance, healthcare and education. Again, this is a good example of when you see it, these highly papered industries just dropping requirements underneath that, you know, that other industries are removing them too, because it's completely unnecessary for them. And then just as an example, our Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania opened up 92% of state jobs was directly mirrors our data almost to the point. It was pretty crazy when we saw their numbers on that. And then Gavin Newsom of California just did as well.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:46]:
And immediately it opened 30,000 state jobs. The guidelines that they're using too, it seems like most of the States are using this executive order from 2020. So his executive order in 2020 to remove degree requirements unless legally required at the federal level opened a hundred thousand federal non military cybersecurity jobs. You don't have to go into the military to get these jobs. These are civilian DOD contract or just DOD jobs. Your child can get almost any job in this country without buying a college degree. And people just haven't caught up to the shift yet. But I want parents to understand at max 17% and that's the conservative estimate because that is what online, even people say preferred for these jobs.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:24]:
And then when they do say preferred or they do say required and it's not a legal requirement, your child can still apply for those jobs and still get them. I'm sitting here having done that multiple times, and I am far from alone. A good example of somebody who we've had on our podcast before, a friend of the pod is Drake Porter, and he is a PM at Meta. He's killing it. And he was 23 years old. His total comp is, like, $4.85 or something like that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:47]:
It's more now. It fluctuates with the way that Meta stock

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:50]:
The stock is. Has gone.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:51]:
And it's done well lately, so he's making much more than that. And that's not even a private thing.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:56]:
He talked about on

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:57]:
Well, not only he's talked about it on a podcast, but I think I saw a comment that he left on one of the things. This is a few months ago, but his comp, I don't want to misquote it. And I don't know what I was private and what was not private. So we got to get him back on

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:07]:
and ask him about it again.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:08]:
Yeah. It's in excess, not in judging way, but it's more than $500 for sure. I think it's quite higher than that now.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:15]:
A good example of what's accessible to your child without purchasing a college degree and your children can do it. They have to learn the right skills or the right job and then know what they're looking for. And that's something we talk about a lot.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:26]:
And then learn how to present those skills to employers. That's really what it is. Know what they're looking for, know how to learn those skills, learn those skills and learn how to present those skills to employers. Really, instead of going to college, that is the playbook right there. Go and do those things. And the confidence boost that they'll get from that as well is going to be through the roof. And I think that if they do this instead of go to college, you're really going to create a killer here in the best way possible. You're going to have your child be confident and not delusionally confident.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:57]:
They're going to be confident because they did it. They're going to be confident because they know through their own actions and through their own effort that they went out and they learn these skills and then they went out and they got this job and then they went and said, you know what? I can do this next job too. And then they're going to go and get that next job and then continue to move up and continue to move up and continue to move up.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:15]:
And then the last thing I'll say too, is that I know another counter to this. We need to do a deep dive on this at some point. But there's a reason when colleges talk about, and you've heard the million dollar earnings myth, there's a reason it's about earnings. They talk about earnings. Well, college graduates will earn a million dollars more. One, that's not true, which we've talked about on this podcast before. But then two, there's a reason they talk about earnings and they don't talk about actual household wealth. And the reason is because they're disguising the actual outcomes for college graduates because they under earn, they're underemployed.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:41]:
It takes them ten years to even get what the median employed American has. And most employed Americans are degree free, 60% of them. Just because your child may earn lower than a college graduate when they're 18 years old, doesn't matter because their finances are going in the opposite direction. If they pick a career that is going to fit their needs down the road, they're going to be cashflow positive learning in an industry where they're going on a career progression, where it doesn't matter if their earnings at the offset are not the same because it doesn't matter. And that's why they refer to earnings so much because they're trying to disguise the fact that the earnings later have to be extremely high to out earn the debt and the lost wages and the interest that these college graduates are taking on.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:19]:
Yeah, it is crazy. When you think about if you are fortunate enough as a family and as parents to have gotten to the point where they're 18 years old and they're it's their eighteenth birth day and they didn't sign on for any student debt and they are not going to college. I mean, you could also go to college, but you are able to afford it or they're able to afford it. However it is, but you're not signing any paperwork at all. Other than I commit to pay this amount for this year or for this semester, whatever it is at that point, they are doing better than half the country at 18 years old clean slate. And that's a wild thing to think about. The point of it was that when you look at the comprehensive picture of their personal finances, and this is just our opinion, the comprehensive picture of their personal finances, you'd look and see that from a net worth perspective that degree free people almost always, or at least on aggregate are doing better than those with degrees just due to the massive burden that student debt causes and the majority of people that go to college take on student loans.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:22]:
Yeah. And the last thing I'll say about this before we move on to the second point is I just recently saw this in action to how colleges use averages to obscure the actual picture. I saw Texas A and M release an article talking about how 30% of their college graduates graduate debt free. What they fail to mention is that something like 50% of their accepted college students come from the top 10% of earnings. So that really affects whether or not you're gonna come out with no student debt. I read the stats on it. I was like, this picture is very inaccurate and it's definitely on purpose. Something like 10% of their student bodies from the top 1%, extremely wealthy people.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:57]:
And of course, if you come from a wealthy family, I think they said the median income for Texas A and M is $120,000 a year median. So that's representative of most Texas A and M students. So they're screening for people with a high household income, but also it was funny cause they said, Aggies, Texas A and M graduates make $85,000 a year on average. And I looked at that and I was like, that's not an accurate picture of what's going on. And I know it's not because the reason that this is skewed is because Texas A and M has a petroleum engineering program and the petroleum engineers earn really well because there's not that many of them. And not only are there not that many of them, but the jobs that are open for them pay extremely high. It's a professional engineering license. This is a good example of a legal requirement.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:37]:
You have to have this in order to become a petroleum engineer. So that paints a very different picture because it's saying Johns Hopkins, they aren't really high. Well, yeah, because they're all medical doctors. That'd be the reason. Just

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:46]:
to break it down a little bit more simply, What you're saying is that you're not accusing them that the number is wrong. You're just saying that the choice of average is misleading at best.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:57]:
Extremely. And I'm about to tell you why. So Texas a and M says, oh, our graduates make $85,000 a year on average. And I looked at that and I said, what's really going on here because this is not an accurate picture of what's going on at Texas A and M. I don't even have to know what their spread of graduates is for, to know that this is not accurate. Actually, let's just mirror how many psychology graduates they have versus how many petroleum engineers they have. So last year, how many psychology graduates do you think they graduated?

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:22]:
I'm going to say that last year they graduated 1,200 psychology graduates.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:28]:
Okay. So they graduated four ninety ish psychology graduates. How many petroleum engineers do you think they graduated?

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:34]:
500. Let's say it's even.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:36]:
No, it's 90. There's a very distinct reason they're choosing average. And that's because the median income for a Texas A and M graduate ten years out of college. What do you think the average Texas A and M graduate? So remember, Texas A and M says our graduates make on average $85,000 a year. I'm like, that's not an accurate picture of what's going on. What do you think the median wage for a Texas A and M graduate ten years out of college is knowing that their spread of petroleum engineers is 90 and their spread of psychology graduates is $4.90.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:07]:
60 grand.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:08]:
Dollars 60 5 thousand, 10 years. It takes them ten years to make $65,000 median, which means that is the outcome for most of the graduates ten years out. Now, dollars 65,000 a year, they better stay in Texas because they can't pay state income tax on that, or they're going to be in big trouble if they want to live in Dallas, Austin, or even in Downtown Houston. So they're making $65,000 a year and their student loan payments are like 12 to $1,500 a month. They're bringing home. What is that? 65 divided by 12, dollars 5 thousand 4 hundred a month. And then after tax

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:38]:
So let's just call it $5,400 a month or so. So 1,200 over 54, that's like a quarter, a little bit less. Their debt to income is pretty high already, and that's just the student loan debt. So from the deceptive part of that, I didn't see this before. I'm assuming that they put out an accurate number. I'm assuming that the average from the people that they've pulled is 85,000.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:01]:
I'm assuming that as well.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:02]:
I'm assuming that that's correct. And that's not where the bone that you're picking with them. For me, my question to you is, did it give a timeline?

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:09]:
Oh, for the average? Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:10]:
For the average. Did it give a timeline? No. For me, that's where it gets misleading as well because

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:15]:
it's all of them.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:16]:
So even the outliers really, really high. The most common example is there's 99 people without a job, unemployed, homeless people, or whatever that are down on their luck to have $0 in income a year. And then bill gates is the hundredth person. He walked into the room. Now the average income of that place is now millions of dollars. Cause it's his income divided by a hundred and where that just really points to the inaccuracies there when it comes to large numbers and trying to figure out meaningful data within large numbers. So income is one of those things, obviously. For me, it is especially with okay, Texas a and M graduates, how long to make $85,000 a year.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:56]:
So if there is no timeline, I'm assuming that they're taking everybody that answered the polls and that's from people that graduated in the 2 thousands. That's the people that graduated in the 1990s. That's people that are in the 1980s. And the problem with this is that your income can only go to zero, but the amount of money that you can make is infinite. Really. You just need a few people in that number set like bill gates to skew it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:19]:
And you know what really helps with that? Coming from a family that makes $120,000 a year.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:24]:
Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense too, from the graduating without debt, 50% of the people in there come from families that are already well off and that are already in some of the highest tax brackets around. It is really no wonder that they don't have debt. Exactly. But it doesn't make those numbers inaccurate because if that's where they're marketing to, you're rich, you don't want to send your kid to some other school, send them here. You can afford it. And that's accurate. Nothing wrong with that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:51]:
I saw that they had stats similar to the Ivy leagues, where if you come into Texas a and M as a poor student, then you have a 1% chance of becoming a rich adult, which is similar to Harvard, Yale. Like they have awful results, which really just proves it's not the college. It's the socioeconomic connections that your parents have. That's probably going to land you the network that you need to get your first job. And that is not something that the college has any control over other than when they filter you in and then take responsibility for something that has nothing to do with them.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:17]:
That was a pretty long one. We kind of went down a couple of different rabbit holes there, but let's put this train back on its track. Number two is going to be your kid. Won't have a network or community.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:27]:
This one, I have a very simple question for people. If you are degree free or, you know, people are degree free, do they not have community and do they not have network? The very obvious answer will be no, because you don't have to purchase a college degree to have a community or to have a network. This one's almost laughable to me because of the amount of concern people have over this. And it kind of ties into a little bit and I've heard this before. It's like, I wouldn't have my friends and they act like people who don't go to college and don't buy degrees. Can't have friends. You saw the friends that I had when I was 18, they moved to Hawaii with me and you saw how close I was and still am to the friends that I I had then. And it's because of the formative time that you have those relationships.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:07]:
If you make any friends during that time, it will be a formative time and you will have a different bond with those people than you do with friends later in life or from earlier in life. I

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:15]:
think for most people, especially parents and that I think I know for at least the parents that we talk to, it's not so much about the friends. It's about the professional network. The assumption is that your kid is gonna go to college and they are going to meet people that are in the exact same phase of their life. And they're gonna be able to work through together through these different phases. These people that you meet in colleges, they are on the up and up just like you. And because you're on the up and up together, you guys can go ahead and look like a rising tide lifts all boats type of thing. Or if we just sail together or if we're standing right next to each other, we can help go in that direction. That's the thesis and that's in the professional sense.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:57]:
Some parents do want their kids to go there for friends and for relationships and for the quote experience. I think for the most part, we're not talking to those people because if you believe that your kid needs to go there for their college experience, you're not listening to this podcast.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:12]:
Or you think it's worth paying that amount of money for the party aspect.

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:16]:
Maybe not the party aspect of it, but just the, oh, I was in a sorority. I was in a fraternity.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:21]:
Yeah. Party. That's what I said. Well, I

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:24]:
didn't, I mean like parties. There are fraternities and sororities that don't party. I mean, most of them do look at all the people in my life and all of these people and whatever, whatever, and look how much I've kept up with it and so on and so forth for those aspects of it. Like I said, I just don't think you're listening to this podcast.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:39]:
Not super relevant.

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:40]:
Not for us. I think that's not a good argument either for all the things that you just said, but for most people just coming at it from the professional network standpoint here and from the professional network standpoint, and I'll talk about my own experience for a second. I don't talk to anybody that I went to college with. I don't talk to a single person that I took a class with at all.

Hannah Maruyama [00:28:00]:
You have a lot of friends from high school though.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:01]:
I still have a lot of friends from high school and I have a lot of friends and colleagues from work. And that brings me to my next point, which is if you're worried about creating a professional network and you're worried about creating professional connections, where do you think is a more effective place to create professional connections? It's probably in a professional environment. It's probably at work because exactly what you were saying. You're not learning how to tap a keg and you're not doing keg stands and you're not sleeping.

Hannah Maruyama [00:28:29]:
Do they even do that anymore? I don't even know if they do keg stands anymore.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:33]:
I mean, or something. They're not

Hannah Maruyama [00:28:34]:
doing that escalated really quickly.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:38]:
I'm sober. I'm only on pills, which is wild. This is a conversation that I've had with a multiple people in this age range, just because we work with these people in this age range. And I remember that boggles my mind. And then the same thing with like, oh, I'm sober. I only smoke weed, which is also

Hannah Maruyama [00:28:53]:
a wild thing to say.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:54]:
Yeah, exactly. But anyway, it doesn't matter. Yeah. I don't care what you consider yourself or what you don't. Cause it doesn't affect my life. I just thought that was a very interesting thing. But the chances of your child finding somebody that is of the like mind that is going to work their way up in the same industry or an adjacent industry and going to keep in touch with these people is very, very small,

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:16]:
extremely

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:17]:
where it's better placed to meet somebody, especially in a professional sense is at work, because at least, you know, you have one thing in common, which is you are both doing this job right now. And you can draw an assumption that just says maybe eventually you'll have a similar pathway because you're at least at whatever starting point you're at right now. Let's say that you're both staff accountants at a firm or whatever. You know what I mean? Like you're a staff accountant at a local hardware store or something. There's two of you and you're there. You're not sure where your career is going to go from there, but you both have a similar, if not the exact same starting point, regardless of how old that other person is.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:52]:
Yeah. And I have here too, this is something that I did a little bit of digging on and I want to talk about this because this happens so often with the network thing. And this is just something that I want to say, oh, if my kid doesn't buy a college degree, then they won't have a network. Hi. A network is not thousands of other in-depth teenagers and professors who are professors now have never, N E V E R, worked in the industry that they are teaching your child to go into. Only 30 to 40% of professors have ever worked outside of academia. This includes jobs like barista. They have no professional work experience outside of the artificial academic bubble.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:29]:
And this gets worse for more college graduates because the college professors who do have any professional experience, the way that they have it is also tends to be like consulting later or collaborating with companies once they get in their post doc. So if they're a PhD or something like that, and that's the only circumstance in which they have been employed again, outside of academia, they have no experience that can help your child, unless your child is trying to be a tenured professor, which good luck with that. 30 to 40% of these people who you think are a professional network for your child have never ever worked the way your child is going to work.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:01]:
That's congruent with my personal experience of the professors that I've had in college. And that's also of the people that I know right now that are my age in their thirties and they are still trying to become professors. A lot of them still have never held a job. They did their first six years and then they did a master's and then now they're doing their PhD and they're in their early thirties. And then some of them in their mid thirties and they are still aspiring to be professors. That's what they wanna do. I wanna be professor in whatever. Bro, don't you wanna do whatever that is?

Hannah Maruyama [00:31:33]:
Because of the trajectory of their careers. And this is from a 2017 study of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that had a lot of this information in it. The point where they actually get any work experience outside of academia is typically 40 to 45 years old. So they don't even get to the private sector to the world your child is going to be in until they are 40 years old. They have no shared understanding, most of them. And it gets worse because if your child is going into their specific categories. So if they're going to engineering business or applied science, there's a higher proportion of professors that actually have worked. Typically it's for three to five year stint.

Hannah Maruyama [00:32:07]:
And it was usually either right after graduated with bachelor's degree or right before they go into a post doc program. And the estimates on that are fifty to seventy percent have had work experience. The problem, and this is where it really falls off a cliff. So again, professors of business engineering and applied sciences, fifty to seventy percent of them have had professional work experience for a short amount of time. And it was ten to fifteen years ago that they've worked in their field. If your child is going in to humanities, any type of social sciences, which account for 70% of college degrees, there are only 10 to 20% of those people that have ever held any kind of job. Again, including like a barista outside of academia. They have no outside of academia.

Hannah Maruyama [00:32:52]:
And for those people also. So for that humanities, social sciences group, anything that's not business engineering or applied sciences, their work experience was typically fifteen to twenty years behind their current age. So if they even did, it was typically an internship or a part time job. Those are the types of work that they had. And now the reason this matters is because I want parents to think really critically about this. If it didn't have the college label on it, would you pay according to the NCES, dollars one hundred and four to $156,000 to have your child be around a bunch of other 18 year olds and 10 adults were maybe one or two of them had ever held a job outside of the program that your child is in. Would that be worth it?

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:32]:
And then to this point into what we're talking about, the network is thinking that these people that your child is going to be around is going to help them expand their professional network and whatever it is that your child wants to do.

Hannah Maruyama [00:33:43]:
There's one exception, I guess, to this, where I could see an argument. The exception would be for those business engineering and applied sciences. If you are at some institution like MIT and the professor that you have as an adjunct, who's still actively in the startup or angel investing world. But I just want to benchmark this because now I can see people whose kids are interested in any sort of engineering, just going, Oh, okay, well, it's not me. No, no, no. I want you to understand these are the things that didn't exist when STEM professors actually worked in the industry circa 2014 to 2015, which is the estimate for when most of them last worked in a professional environment that was not academia, AirPods, Slack, Alexa, Kubernetes. The iOS ability to scan QR codes was introduced in 2014. AI tools, Ethereum, the cryptocurrency, TikTok, quantum computing, cloud computing in their current forms, as well as it can be defined in Figma, which is the UX UI UI design software.

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:35]:
The conclusion of this that I just want people to understand, because especially because I've seen so many comp sci graduates going like, oh my God, I can't get a job. That's because the people who are teaching you literally have no idea what you need to learn. They don't know because a, they never worked in it or B it's been so long since they did. They have no idea, not even the communication tools, literally the tools you use to communicate internally in a team they have never even used. That's how far away they are from the work environment and the market that you were going into. And that is, they believe, a huge reason for the disconnect.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:05]:
I will say from the communication tools from the I think you're talking about Slack there. A lot of universities use Slack. A lot of professional environments outside of companies use Slack.

Hannah Maruyama [00:35:12]:
What I'm saying is they never used it for any job outside of academia. They never used it to work at an actual company. It didn't exist. And I just wanted to show the type of technology that we view as like, oh, that's came out a long time ago. Yeah. That's when your STEM professor probably last had experience in the industry. If at all.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:28]:
Yeah. For me, it goes to exactly what I was saying, which is you're making a massive gamble that for the price that you're paying, that they are going to happen on and happen into a clique of friends that are all gonna come up together and hopefully be useful to your child in a professional sense from here on out where you're much better taking that reasoning and just say, Hey, go get a job. And those relationships are probably going to be much more useful if only for the fact that you guys are working together. And then on top of it too, that person can vouch for you now. And that person can say, Hey, in the future, when your child is like, Hey, in their thirties or something like that, I need a job. And they go out to their professional network, somebody that they've already worked with, you know, they can vouch for his professional work ethic and what he does professionally. And he can say, Hey, look, my friend is looking for a job. Do you have any jobs open for them? And then he taps his network and it goes on and on, but you're just saying, okay, I'm going to basically take a gamble.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:28]:
I'm going to play the slot machine on this whole networking thing. Now that was the second one. The third and final one is something that we actually run into a lot.

Hannah Maruyama [00:36:36]:
It's something I've wanted to talk about a lot too.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:37]:
It's something that we haven't gotten into too much. Whereas like the last couple of things we talk a lot or at least like the first thing we talked this with the entire podcast about, which is getting a job. And the second part we talk about a little bit much more than this third one. But this third one is your kid won't find a spouse and it's something that we hear all the time.

Hannah Maruyama [00:36:56]:
People will comment that too. Like I would have met my wife in college, or I wouldn't have met my husband if I hadn't gone to college. I'm like, well, that's because that's where you were when you were 21 years old and dating. That's true of anybody. If you met your spouse at the YMCA when you're 21, it's because you were 21 years old, single, and at the YMCA. It's a silly thing to have to explain. I was like, well, yeah, but that's when you were single and dating. So wherever you were single and dating is where you're going to meet yourself.

Hannah Maruyama [00:37:20]:
Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:37:21]:
This is something that we were just talking about off camera when we were looking at this is I was thinking about the girls that I dated. I dated girls from literally two places. I dated them from work, and then I dated them from a bar. That was literally it. And the reason why, and you and I were just talking about this is because when I was dating, those were the places that I went. I went to work and I went to a bar and then I went home.

Hannah Maruyama [00:37:49]:
Sometimes you went to a ramen shop. So I guess theoretically you could have met somebody there.

Ryan Maruyama [00:37:52]:
You're absolutely right. Subway ramen shop, but I wouldn't want to date anybody that frequented the ramen shop as much

Hannah Maruyama [00:37:59]:
as I. That's pretty judge mental

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:03]:
dude. If you're in here as much as me, it's

Hannah Maruyama [00:38:05]:
not a good fit.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:06]:
Your life is on a downward trajectory, just like mine.

Hannah Maruyama [00:38:10]:
Anecdotally too. And it's funny, but like where we met was at work, we met at work because a lot of people do. And so funny when I said that to a couple of people in the comments, I said, people meet at work. And they were like, no, most people meet at college. That's not even sort of true. And I just had the instinct, the common sense and the common sense to know that just can't functionally, mathematically, that cannot be true. And then sure enough, when we looked it up, there's a video that we'll link in the show notes that shows actually the trajectory of how people have met their spouses from 1930 to 2024, which I think is fairly interesting.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:40]:
So show notes for everybody degreefree.co/podcast. Yeah. You can get the show notes.

Hannah Maruyama [00:38:43]:
It's a minute. It's interesting. I think it's a fun video. And then the point that I wanted to make, and you'll see it when you look at the graphs, nobody meets on college campuses anymore. Literally no one, approximately as of 2020, approximately 5% or less of couples met their spouse online. That was 2020. Okay. That's now five years ago.

Hannah Maruyama [00:39:00]:
So as of 2024, do you want to guess how many people meet their spouse in college?

Ryan Maruyama [00:39:05]:
Well, I know it's low. I didn't look at the whole brief. I'm going to say 2%.

Hannah Maruyama [00:39:10]:
It is 0.74%. So less than 1% of people meet their spouse on a college campus. Guess what? Good news, everybody. Your child does not need to go into 104 to $156,000 of student debt to meet a spouse the way that people meet their spouses. Now, number one is online. Your child doesn't need to pay a college to have access to dating apps. Guess what? Anybody can get on those. They don't need to pay a college to have friends.

Hannah Maruyama [00:39:35]:
Coworkers go to restaurants, have family members go to K through 12 school, which is actually interesting. That's three times, almost four times as many people meet in K through 12 school as in college, and then go to church or have neighbors. All of which are higher on the list than meeting your spouse through college. So just wanting to do that as a final one, because like Ryan said, that comes up often. And I thought it was interesting to see the actual numbers on how people meet so that if your child does go to college, there's a less than 1% chance they meet their spouse there.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:02]:
Well, I mean, that is very congruent with the things that we've experienced in working with the participants in the launch program. In order to meet somebody on a college campus, you know what you have to do?

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:13]:
You have to go to parties.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:15]:
You have to talk to somebody. Yeah.

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:22]:
Oh man. Brutal.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:24]:
Literally in order to not meet them online, do you literally have to talk to them? IRL. You know what? As the kids say.

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:31]:
I don't know if they say that anymore. I think we're already on a date, but I will say that a lot of launch program participants come in already with somebody I have noticed. And because that's representative of how they've already met, they already know them from church. They already know them from school. They already know the friends, family, or they even met them if they're already working a job and that matches the graph.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:52]:
Yeah. And so there's a couple of graphs here that will throw up on the YouTube and it is very sharp spike. And this is from the 2010s immediately as soon as Tinder was a thing, it took off like wildfire. So a lot of the parents that are coming through the launch program of the 16 and 20 year olds that we work with, they're in their forties and some of them are in their fifties and they're remembering back to their time. They're remembering back, okay, thirty years ago when I met my husband or twenty five years or twenty years ago when I met my wife, this is how it was. And that's just not the case anymore. If you've been married for the entire time that your kid has been alive, that is not the dating market anymore. And the dating market has gone completely weird.

Ryan Maruyama [00:41:35]:
I don't even mean in a judgmental way. I mean, it's kind of like showing English to a monkey. Okay. So you swipe, right? You swipe left. Yeah. But this app, you don't swipe actually. And it's just, they have to initiate and then, oh, we don't talk to each other. You just meet up and it's like, what is a whole different game out there.

Ryan Maruyama [00:41:51]:
So it's just a whole different industry out there.

Hannah Maruyama [00:41:53]:
One of my pet theories about this too. And I've talked to you about this because I did just see another set of data about what parents are looking for in terms of importance to their children. And it has been shifting before it was college degree was actually on the top job was underneath. And then spouse was last what people were concerned about. And now those things have shifted. A college degree is below spouse. Still spouse is still below career. But I think that as spouse gets more important, because there's a lot to say that who you end up being a partner with determines a lot more of your life than anything else.

Hannah Maruyama [00:42:24]:
And I think that as that starts to shift in the cultural zeitgeist, I believe that matchmaking is actually going to make a large comeback and that the dating apps are the first version of that because that's kind of what they do to a degree. It's technological matchmaking.

Ryan Maruyama [00:42:37]:
Yeah. I agree with what you're saying, but I think that is just a reflection of a greater trend from the online revolution. Particularly now in the days that we live in an AI. What I mean by that is that you're going to see that in every industry is that the lower rungs of it get automated away, or at least get technologically advanced to a point where it's very frictionless. It's very easy and whatever it is gets commoditized. So for example, if you want to hook up, the hookup culture is still alive and well, and it's a commodity now. It used to be very difficult. Maybe not as difficult for some than others.

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:10]:
There was entire podcast about teaching people how to do it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:12]:
I mean, that still exists today. I was just saying for me, and I'm showing my age here. I had to leave the house.

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:18]:
The IRL.

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:19]:
I had to leave the house to meet anybody and to interact with anybody else. And now you can just do on your phone or on the computer. I don't know. But you just do it on the phone and you're like, okay, well, that's good. I think for the lower rungs for any service, for any product, or for anything is going to be commoditized away, which is going to lead into the more human aspect or into the more premium side of the market. Whereas, for almost every industry and for every service, every product that you can imagine, the higher end of that is going to be much, much more human. The value is going to be that you have instead of you just have a bunch of filters and a bunch of AI putting Jessica in front of you or putting Justin in front of you or whatever, and you decide based off their photos or whatever the AI says, the AI might still help, but it'll get reviewed by a matchmaker that says, okay, I've interviewed Jessica. I've interviewed Justin.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:13]:
And I think that they're going to be a good fit, but I've interviewed both of them. And I actually don't think that this is going to work out. He likes to sleep on the left side of the bed and she also likes to sleep on the left side of the bed. This is not going to work out. Yeah. Something like that. And just having it go through that filter. And I completely agree with you that I think matchmaking is going to make a big comeback.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:31]:
What I mean by big is relative to where it is today. It's not going to be the majority at all. These majority of people aren't going to be able to afford it, but for the higher end tiers, it is going to eat market share at a higher rate. And you are seeing that a lot today, especially with the older adults, older men, in particular, women as well, but men that have money, a lot of them go to matchmakers because they have more money than time.

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:59]:
That's why I think that seeing that shift in what parents are actually looking for for their young adults and seeing spouse move up over college degree. I think that as time marches on and as we watch again, it seems like the culture is shifting as well. And I think the way that many cultures do that your spouse is more important than anything else to the quality and outcome of your life, which is something that a lot of people are pretty open about. But for some reason, as a society, we just kind of ignore that's really important. And I think that as people change their minds about that and realize that's the case, I think parents are actually gonna be more willing to invest in that upfront to try to help their kids meet a good match at the beginning. And so I think that's going to be a big shift, but that's kind of how it used to be.

Ryan Maruyama [00:45:36]:
Right. That gets into a whole bunch of different things though, as far as the quality of your marriage and everything like that. And then we definitely don't have time to get into that today. And that's not what we talk about at all. I think it's

Hannah Maruyama [00:45:45]:
interesting. Anyway, I

Ryan Maruyama [00:45:46]:
was actually going to start, I was gonna say, I was literally, this is what I was about to do is I would say like, we don't have time to get into it. I was literally gonna get into it, but we don't have time to get into it at all. That's not what we talk about. And then the thing that I wanted to say is that we are gonna be starting doing the mailbag episodes a lot more now, and the mailbag is starting to fill up. If you wanted to ask your question, go to ask.degreefree.co. You can ask your question there. We did open up the writing portion of it. So you can write your question for all those that are camera shy, but folks, please show us your face.

Ryan Maruyama [00:46:14]:
Please take a video. It takes a couple of seconds. It can be dark. It doesn't matter how good your audio is. We'll have our guys clean up the audio or do whatever it is that we got to do. Please, it is much, much more helpful for us as people to see your face, to hear your voice and to see that like, okay, this is a real person that we're talking to. And not that you can't write in and not that we won't take your question. If you do write in, it just, we really would love to see your face.

Ryan Maruyama [00:46:37]:
So ask. Degreefree.co. So today the three things that we went over was your kid won't get a good job.

Hannah Maruyama [00:46:44]:
Not true at all. Only 7.7% of jobs in the entire country legally require college degrees. This has been reflected in recent removals of degree requirements in Pennsylvania, where they removed unnecessary degree requirements and it freed up 92% of state jobs. So really good evidence that our research is absolutely correct.

Ryan Maruyama [00:46:59]:
Second, your kid won't have a network or community.

Hannah Maruyama [00:47:03]:
Thousands of other 18 year olds who are in debt and people who haven't worked outside of academia in ten to twenty years are not a very useful network in general. A good network is people that your child has worked with.

Ryan Maruyama [00:47:15]:
And at the very least, it's just not targeted. At the very least, you're paying a very expensive slot machine in the professional side as well. It is also a slot machine. I mean, you can be paired with and have people that you're paired with that are nothing like your child or don't have the same goals or anything like that. It's just that you're not paying to be there and you're not paying for them to be there.

Hannah Maruyama [00:47:36]:
And as we said, only exceptions to that would be adjunct professors who are currently still working, run their own companies or angel invest.

Ryan Maruyama [00:47:42]:
And they would have a much better insight of where to go for that active community. And for that active network, The third myth was your child won't find a spouse.

Hannah Maruyama [00:47:52]:
Not even true. Only zero point seven percent of all people meet their spouse at college these days.

Ryan Maruyama [00:47:59]:
Yep. And the majority of people meet online. I mean, they might meet somebody online that's on campus from the dating apps. Sure. I mean, I guess, but going to college and you could probably do the same if you really wanted to game the system like that through geolocation and everything like that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:48:15]:
Just set it to a college campus.

Ryan Maruyama [00:48:17]:
Either we'll just set it to a college campus or just have them move right next to the college campus or have roommates that go to college so that you live around the college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:48:24]:
If that's really that big of a concern and that'll get you that 1% chance.

Ryan Maruyama [00:48:27]:
And then, so you meet people. Well, I mean, you'll meet them online, but just in that same age range, because it's a more target rich environment, I suppose. But yeah, that's pretty much it for

Hannah Maruyama [00:48:35]:
this

Ryan Maruyama [00:48:35]:
week until next week.