College Won't Save Your Son. This Will. (The Hannah Maruyama Show #6)

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:00]:
If you have a son between 16 and 22 right now, you're probably a little bit worried. The economy looks absolutely crazy and young men are not doing well. And like a lot of parents, you're probably worried that he's lost or that he's aimless because he doesn't know what he's doing or what it's going to get him in the future. And when young men get like that, they get really discouraged or sometimes they get angry or sometimes they just kind of shrink into themselves. It's like they start to disappear. Like they disappear into a screen, they disappear into their rooms, and you feel like you don't know how to help them.

Clip [00:00:27]:
1 out of 3 young men is living with their parents under the age of 25. 1 in 5 are still living with their parents at the age of 30.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:34]:
Scott Galloway is constantly pointing out that young men are in trouble from every stage that he can climb on. 1 in 3 young men under 25 in this country still live at home. The problem is that he doesn't talk about why, because that number didn't just come out of nowhere. It came from decades of telling young American men that there was one path to a good future, but that path stopped delivering results. And you're still being told that that's the answer. It's college. Just get them into a 4-year. He'll be able to get a good career.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:59]:
His life is going to start. He's going to be successful. That's the story that parents get told. And I want to walk you through what the data actually says, because right now almost 10% of young men who graduated college are unemployed. And that's not talking about the 45% who are underemployed and will remain that way 10 years later. And that very clearly means they didn't need to go to college at all. And you think, well, surely young men who get into college on full scholarships, they're probably okay. No.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:20]:
NCAA male athlete suicides have doubled between 2012 and 2022, which is the last time we measured. Now, before I go any further, what do I know about this? I worked in AI and machine learning software for years without buying a college degree, and then I founded Degree Free. And our book has helped 17,000 families nationwide guide their young adults to careers that actually fit their larger life goals. And then through our launch program, where we work one-on-one with young adults, we have personally helped hundreds of young adults, many of them young men, find and start real careers. So when I say I've seen what's happening with young men in this country, I'm not speaking theoretically. I'm saying that My team and I work one-on-one with these young adults and we hear what they actually want out of their life and we hear what's stopping them and we hear what careers come out that actually fit their life goals. And then we watch them successfully execute on those and then get those jobs. And I want to tell you about one of them because this is one of my favorite stories.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:07]:
His name is Aiden and he was 19 when he had left an engineering program at Texas A&M. He left because he had no idea what he was doing there and he did not see what career was actually going to be able to get him to the life that he wanted. And that's because he was lacking direction. 62% of young adults in our country go to college and almost none of them know what they're doing there. They have no idea what career is waiting for them on the other end, if there is one at all. And that's why you see so many young college graduates now completely unable to get work because they go by degrees and then they try to find a place to fit that degree as opposed to doing it the wise way, which is figuring out what career is actually gonna fit their needs and then determining whether or not they should just go to apply for entry-level work or get a cert. or get a license to do something and then do that before ever buying a degree at all, because the chances are they will never have to. What happened when Aiden figured out what he needed from his work was we were able to correctly identify entry-level positions for him that he could immediately begin applying to.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:57]:
And then when he did immediately apply to those jobs, he was able to get hired within 3 weeks. And that's the power of a plan and knowing what you want. And by the way, the job that he got, field service engineering, which is something that his peers are going to be applying for when they graduate, but they're just gonna have a ton of debt and they're gonna be much less attractive hires because Employers are no longer hiring recent grads for these entry-level roles. They prefer to train young people. And why am I telling you this story? It's because of what his mom said at the end. She said that when he came home from college, there was some relief because he didn't know what he had been doing there. So at least there was a little bit of relief because he was no longer just paying money for something that had no result for him that he could see. But the problem was that now he didn't know what to do, which is the same place he had been when he got into college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:39]:
And once he was able to go through and figure out what actually met his needs after working with our team, he was suddenly a totally different person. Whereas before it was so hard to get him to do anything. So the thesis of this whole episode is that sending your son to college is not going to keep him safe. It's not gonna help him start his life. It's not gonna help him get a job. For most young men, it is the most expensive way possible to keep them lost, to keep them discouraged, and to burn out all of their energy and momentum at the freest time in their life. Now let's start with the numbers that are not on the college marketing brochures. The largest mental health study of US college students is the Healthy Minds Study out of the University of Michigan.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:14]:
It surveyed more than 350,000 students across more than 400 campuses every year since 2013. And here's what it shows. In 2022, depression among college students peaked at 44%. And really, I want to talk about this because is it any surprise that college students are depressed? If any adult pulled from everybody they know and love and put with thousands of strangers would also feel depressed and anxious, especially if they were going into debt every year to do that. So basically you're looking at 4 in 10 college students being depressed and you're looking at about a third of them also being anxious. I'm not sure if these are the same kids, but it's likely that if you're depressed, you're also anxious. So why does this matter for your sons specifically? Because men underreport depression and anxiety on every major survey. They test at about half the rate of women on self-reported scales.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:56]:
And that doesn't mean that they're doing better. It just means that they don't say that they're doing badly. The male crisis hides. Young men have a 4 times higher suicide rate, and that's because they're not transparent about what they're going through. And arguably, there's a lot more pressure on them to do well professionally. Your son's more likely to come out of college with a mental disorder than he is with a job. If you're the parent of a young man right now and you want real information instead of just what colleges are selling you, please subscribe. I do want to put 2 numbers next to each other, and both of them are about your son, and they are well documented.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:23]:
These are peer-reviewed sources. Number 1, a male college graduate today has a 57% chance of screening positive for a mental disorder. Number 2, a recent college graduate has a 52% chance of being underemployed in their first year out of college, and then 45% of grads are still underemployed at year 10. And this is really bad when you zoom out a little bit and you see that we're sending 62% of high school seniors to college, and then only about half of them are actually going to graduate. So of those who do graduate, not 1 in 5 kids that go, but 1 in 5 graduates will end up working in their field of study. And that doesn't actually mean that your child got into a high-earning job. It could just mean that your child got a finance degree and then works as a bank teller, which is a job that very honestly they could have just applied for right out of high school. You see how college is causing this.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:04]:
It's not helping it. Fewer than 1 in 10 jobs in the entire country require a degree. The exact number is 9.58% out of all 154 million US jobs. There are states in this country where less than 6% of jobs require degrees at all. And you're maybe saying, where does the figure come from? It comes from my own research, the Case Against College report. I pulled every legally gated occupation and sub-occupation in the Bureau of Labor Statistics database and counted every job. The answer was 9.58%. So the American economy enrolls high school graduates as if the number were closer to 50%.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:34]:
So you put your son in college thinking he's going to get a job, he's going to get an education. This is the only way for him to do that and get a good job and earn high. The actual outcome, the most likely outcome for a male college student today is that he comes out with a screenable mental health condition and does not come out with a job that his degree was supposed to deliver. And that's going to cost you $108,000 to $156,000, and it's going to cost him 4 to 6 years. Now let's talk about the debt for a second, because the average BA borrower is going to have a 17-year loan payment horizon. 17 years. So they're going to be in debt before they earn a single paycheck. And then 7% of borrowers owe over $100,000.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:06]:
So many people are avoiding this, but when you're young and you have a ton of debt, what gets pushed off? Marriage gets pushed off. Buying a home gets pushed off. Starting a business gets pushed off. Having kids gets pushed off. They don't have cars that are reliable. They can't take trips. They can't do things that they want to do. All of it gets pushed off.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:23]:
And that's the biggest reason that young adults feel like they can't get ahead. Let's talk about the 3 things that parents will say to defend sending their kids to college, even though the data is telling you that it's one of the absolute worst things you could do for your son. But my son matured so much in college. Well, yeah, I mean, he got 4 to 6 years older. You know, he went in a boy and came out a man. College made him grow up. But the truth is he went in at 17 or 18 years old and he came out at 22 or 24. So he literally got 4 to 6 years older.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:48]:
So the same kid living with roommates, working between 18 and 24 also matures. And if anything, I would argue that young adults who are in college mature significantly less than young adults who are out and actually working because they do not have the same amount of responsibility and they don't get the same life experience or work experience. The male brain supposedly finishes developing around age 25, and that is going to happen regardless of whether the body is sitting on a college campus or actually working. But that's where he'll meet his spouse. Actually, less than 1% of US couples meet on college campuses now. About 50% of them meet online, and then through friends, about 20%, and then at work, about 12%. In college, depending on the study you're looking at, is between 4% and less than 1%. So sending your son to college cuz you think that's where he's gonna meet his wife is just not accurate.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:33]:
And this one I hear a ton, but my son wants to be an engineer. He has to go to college. Well, not really. Only about 20% of working engineers in America hold a PE license, which is the only credential that legally gates engineering work in the United States. So the other 80% of engineers— hardware, software, manufacturing, sales engineers, HVAC, industrial engineers, even mechanical engineers— practice without any sort of legally mandated degree. And the best way for your son to get into engineering is to get entry-level work. The same thing is true in finance or in business or in economics. Let's say your son is interested in tech or finance or business or engineering.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:06]:
I wanna talk to you specifically because this is where the most expensive misunderstandings actually happen. So the parental instinct here, because we've been taught this, is to say, okay, fine, the broad college argument is iffy, but STEM, STEM is different. STEM is a guarantee. It's not actually, and I'm gonna give you the numbers on it. 74% of STEM bachelor's grads do not work in a STEM occupation. That's from the Census Bureau. So only about 5% of all college students are both STEM majors and then in STEM jobs after they finish. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that STEM job growth is gonna grow at roughly 7% for the next decade, and the country's producing about 3 million STEM degrees a year.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:40]:
So the supply has been outpacing the demand for a while, and the gap is widening. And for those entry-level roles, guess who employers are looking for? 18, 19, and 20-year-olds. They don't actually want new college graduates because new college graduates believe that they're going to get a better job and they're not willing to start in entry-level roles. And because they are unwilling to start in entry-level roles, employers know that if they do take them, they will leave. And so employers are avoiding hiring that demographic because it's too expensive for them to deal with the churn. So what actually works for young men who do realize that a STEM career is going to fit their needs the best? Well, help desk roles are fantastic. Get 'em inside an actual company before you pay any tuition. These jobs are competitive, but he can get them.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:19]:
It just takes persistence. And then he'll learn whether or not he wants to be in tech, which is not gonna require him to get a degree at all. Now, if he's looking towards engineering, Manufacturing floors, lab techs, field service techs, aerospace, like sub-tier suppliers. He needs to learn by doing. The kids that we find careers in field service engineering roles come out knowing way more about industrial machinery than degreed engineers do at graduation. And on the plus side, because they're so excited to learn, they tend to excel. And also what that does is it allows them the opportunity for the company to pay for their degree if they even need one at all. Now, if your son is interested in finance or business or economics, Then get him into an ops role at a small company, inside sales, bookkeeping, working at a bank.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:59]:
Real numbers, real customers, real P&Ls. He will learn more in 8 weeks than a finance major learns in all 4 years because he's actually doing it. Finance, according to ZipRecruiter, is one of the industries with the steepest decline in degree requirements overall because there was a brain drain into tech. And what happened was all of these finance companies, even big investment companies like Vanguard, removed degree requirements and then opened entry-level programs so that they could apprentice the people they need. Because those people stay at a much higher rate and because they're able to train them. And this includes roles like financial advising, which is really just a sales role. And then if a credential is really needed, a degree is really needed for the next step, then a company will pay for it. Now, if you want some concrete examples, SpaceX is hiring an avionics harness technician right now in 2026, and this post requirement is high school diploma and the pay is $77,000 a year.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:45]:
SpaceX software engineering posts read degree or 2 years of professional software experience. The degree is one of 2 paths. It is not the path. Apple's US hiring is about 50% without a bachelor's degree. IBM's New Collar program has a 90+% apprentice to full-time conversion rate, and they have doubled down on hiring entry-level roles. If your son needs to have this big, successful corporate career, the best thing he can do is get in. So before I tell you what actually works, I want to hammer home this one piece of information that should just permanently change how you look at this conversation. Fewer than 1 in 10 jobs will require a college degree.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:18]:
That means that 90% of the American economy does not require your son have a degree. We are enrolling young men in college assuming that they are in the 10% of the economy that does. By the way, not all of those jobs have positive ROI. So let's reverse engineer the flow for young men. So it starts with one question, and it's the only question that matters: what life does he actually want? Because that is what success is. It is your son getting what he wants out of life, not his life looking the way other people think it should. This is not what major, this is not what degree— what life? What does he want his week-to-week, day-to-day life to look like? And from that, you work backwards. This takes identifying careers that deliver that life to him— schedule, income, work environment, and location— and then it's finding the entry-level role that he can start today.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:59]:
So he can get apprenticeships or internships or help desk roles or manufacturing floors or lab bench roles or field service engineering opportunities. This is getting him into strategic future-level work, meaning there is a promotion path where potentially the employer will pay for a certification or for a degree. When and if it's ever needed. By the time he's 24 or 26, he has real income, he has real skills, and then a fully developed brain, which will happen whether or not he's going into debt on a college campus or just working. But your son will be ahead of 50% of the population because he will have no debt. And I'm just talking from a monetary perspective. That has nothing to do with the emotional confidence wins that come from actually working and having real experience when your peers graduate and all they've been doing is nothing for the past 4 to 6 years. Quick word from our sponsor.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:41]:
Just kidding. There's no sponsor. It's just me. If your son needs help finding direction, what life he actually wants, the careers that fit that, and then what entry-level roles he should be starting in, that is exactly what we built the Launch program for. 4 weeks, one-on-one with us. We sit down with him, we help him figure out what he actually wants. We identify the skills he needs to learn and then what entry-level roles he's gonna be applying to. The application link is in the show notes, or you can go directly to degreefree.com/launch.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:04]:
It's crazy that I still have to say this, but I'm not anti-college. I am anti-doing things that do not make sense and do not get the desired result. And if you want your son to get a job, a good job where he is able to provide for himself and have a good life, college is the worst way to do that. So here's the trick that the system doesn't want parents to know. One, by his mid-20s, his brain is fully developed. He actually knows what he wants, and that's not what he was told to want at 17. And then 2, if a degree is genuinely required for the careers he's chosen, his employer may pay for it, or he'll be absolutely sure he needs to get one More than 60% of large US employers offer tuition assistance. We actually had a young man on our podcast and his name is Quinn, and he was 21 years old at the time, working as a financial analyst, degree-free at a Fortune 100 company.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:46]:
And his company was paying to go to school so he could get the required hours to become a CPA, and he was not paying a dime of his own money for that. And then the third thing is the FAFSA. The Federal Financial Aid Form stops counting parental income once the student turns 24. Which means need-based aid is calculated on his income now, not yours. So working-class adult students often pay almost nothing for college. The aid system is actually very generous to them. The system is just very unfriendly to teenagers whose parents have a check to write. Interesting.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:14]:
It really should make parents a little bit suspicious as to why the price is so high right here, but later it becomes much cheaper. So 4, once this FAFSA is dependent on him, the cost collapses. If he wants to pay cash, he probably can. He's been working and saving, compounding for 6 years by then. Tuition stops being $100,000, and it's something that even an average family may be able to give a check for in cash. The pressure to push your son off the cliff at 18 exists because that is when the college can charge you the most. The system needs you to buy when it costs the most, and that is not a coincidence. It's very much on purpose.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:47]:
So I just wanna be really clear. If your son is like, I don't wanna go to college, or I wanna leave college, that's not a failure. That is a correction. And he is accurate in realizing that it's not a good use of his time, money, or energy. It's a good thing he doesn't wanna be there or need to be there. It's a good thing that he's not gonna burn the freest, healthiest years and strongest years of his life doing something that's gonna start his life on the back foot. These are the years when he's supposed to be free to try things, free to find the right work for him, not learn a fear of failure. He's supposed to do hard work, sometimes physical, sometimes mental.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:15]:
He's supposed to earn money. He's supposed to make friends, have coworkers out in the world, not inside the bubble of a dorm where everything has been designed to keep 'em on a campus buying. He's supposed to find a problem worth solving. He's supposed to find a career that's going to fit what he wants out of his life and then start working towards that. And that's not going to happen on a college campus. Here's what's going on on college campuses right now. 73% of bachelor's degree holders do not work in a job related to their major at all. And even those who do, not all of them have positive ROI on the degrees that they bought to get those jobs.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:43]:
28% of bachelor's degree programs in this country have a negative return on investment, meaning the grad would have been financially better off if they had just not gone at all. That number comes from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity in 2024. Public confidence in academia in the United States is now at 36%, which is down from 57% in 2015. So the country is figuring this out. American parents are being told to ignore what they can see with their own eyes and hear is going on with their friends' kids and with their older kids. This is your shot to stop this. College is chewing up American young men, and I want to tell you something very freeing: you don't have to participate. Your son doesn't have to go.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:16]:
So the goal now would be to help him find direction for what he wants his life to look like, what careers are actually going to help him get that, and then help him find strategic entry-level work so he can start building the life he actually wants. American parents have to start saving their sons. If this helped you to understand what's going on and why you feel like college is not the right next step, please share it with another parent of a young man because they need to hear it too. And then if you want one-on-one multi-week help for your young man to help him figure out exactly what career is going to fit his needs, and then what he needs to learn to get it, and then how he's going to actually execute. The application for the Launch program is in the show notes, or you can go to degreefree.com/launch. Help your son build the life he actually wants.