Her 19 Y/o Son Needs Work (Not Therapy) (DF#198)

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:00]:
Welcome back, everyone. Today we are going to be talking about saving your sons from college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:05]:
Specifically, if you've got a son who's 17 or 20 years old right now in the US you're probably pretty worried about them because it is tough right now to have sons. They're very discouraged as a whole. They see that home prices are high, they see that inflation is rampant. Everyone's scaring them about AI for some reason. Even though AI has not materialized in any way, that's really removing jobs from the market. So I really don't know what that's about. Probably just a lack of education in general about the subject. So they're really worried about that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:34]:
Everyone's yelling at them not to go to college and to go to trade school, but then their parents are still pushing them to go to college because again, still 62% of high school seniors will go. And they're kind of just shutting down. Like they're depressed, they're anxious, they're really uncertain about the future and they are discouraged because they don't see any way for them to get the things that they care about, which most of them, if you listen to what they say to our team, they tell them they just want a stable job that they don't hate and they want to be able to do a few things in their life at the end of the day. Most people have similar goals. Like they want to be able to be with their family, they want to have a family for one. They do want to have a home. You know, they want to have a little bit of room, they want to be able to travel, they just want to have a decent life. They want the American dream at the end of the day.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:15]:
And the thing is, they've been told that the only way to get it is to go to college, and it's a lie. But their parents are still by and large pushing them to go. And then they go into college depressed and anxious and then it doesn't work out and then they're getting terrible results. And that is what we have to talk about today. The fact that a lot of the crisis our young men are in today is completely self imposed and avoidable. If parents make different decisions and stand in the way of their sons getting pushed off a college cliff for literally no reason. Because right now, if your son goes into college, it's actually going to affect him negatively. The outcome of most young men going to college is not a good one.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:50]:
It is mental, it is a mental disorder and it is unemployment. Those are the two things that are most likely happen when you send your son to college right now. It's not employment and it's not a good mental state. And that is something that really needs to be talked about before we get into this episode too. It's amazing to say that someone has failed out of college to me. What other product do you know of that we sell to 17 and 18 year old children that is bankruptcy exempt? That when it does not help to do any of the things that it promises, which is socialization. Most kids are depressed and anxious on campus. They're not socializing to get them a job.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:21]:
It doesn't do that or to educate them. And it's not doing that either. It doesn't teach them critical thinking, by and large, which the Collegiate Learning assessment proved. And then it's not teaching them very basic stuff. They're coming out of college unable to read, unable to do basic fractions. Harvard currently has a remedial math class that is pre algebra. They're not even, we're not even doing calculus at Harvard in remedial math now. It's not going well.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:43]:
And it's, it's amazing to me that as a society we don't hold colleges accountable. These are billion dollar institutions and we allow them to say, oh, you shouldn't have been here in the first place. And then we failed to do the things that we promised. Oh, and we put you in bankruptcy debt for that. But you failed. We didn't fail. That's not our fault. It's not, it's not in our control.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:01]:
But then if you do well, they will say that that's their fault and that was in their control and they are the ones that are responsible for that outcome. Not you, not your labor, not your parents. 18 years prior raising you. Colleges have failed multiple generations of young men at this point. And it is pastime that somebody just said, hey, you guys are really bad at this and we're going to stop paying you. And that's really why, as so many parents nationwide now have no faith in academia and enrollment is dropping through the floor.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:27]:
When people are saying failed out, are they saying it because of failing grades or is it because they decided to not make a purchase decision anymore? Because one of those is largely different than the other. Like if you just decided that you're not going to go because you're like, dude, this is not going to help me. This is not going to help my future. I just don't see myself here. I don't see how this is going to benefit me. I'm spending Too much money, I'm spending too much time and I don't see where the ROI is going to come in and therefore I'm going to leave. Do people consider that failing?

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:00]:
That's a really good point. And I bet from the college's perspective, they don't separate that out. And I know for a fact there's a middle ground too, which is that they're not failing. A lot of young men will fail out because their parents won't let them leave. And so they fail out on purpose because that's the only way to get out. And they are being made to do nonsense things on campus. I had a mom tell me her son left college because they were making him do interpretive dance in class. Like, no lie.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:28]:
This is a young man who wants to work full time. He, he wants a good career. He wanted to be engaged at the time. And his mom said he failed out because he was just tired of doing nonsense and to the point where he just refused. He had this class with this professor and she was making them all do interpretive dances as part of a class assignment for like a normal class. It wasn't like he was an interpretive dance class. It was a regular gen ed class. I think it possibly was a psychology class that was required for his gen eds.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:53]:
And he was just like, I'm not going to do this. I'm just not going to do this. Which is totally justifiable because it's like a humiliation ritual at this point. We need their energy, we need their labor, we need them to build stuff. Our country is not going to do well if we are taking our young men, putting them into debt to do nonsense when they just want to work. And that is something I see a lot. So I, and I do know that a lot of young men, they fail out on purpose so that their parents will let them leave because they wouldn't just let them leave if they said, I want to leave. And I don't think the college differentiates really between they leave.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:23]:
You know, they leave because they're, they're done. Also, naturally, if you're done and you see something is pointless, your grades are probably not going to be stellar once you've mentally checked out.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:32]:
That is definitely a cohort of people that I think is very real. Those that have already seen the signs but don't have the balls to just tell their parents or don't have the balls to just tell themselves, really, even if there is no familial pressure, like, yo, this is not a good use of my Time and I realize it, but instead of just saying it and then just taking the W's and literally withdrawing or incomplete or whatever it is and then just leaving, I'm just going to continue doing this and just do it poorly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:03]:
Yep, it seems there's a lot of factors going into this too. It's very largely not, I'm dumb, I can't do these classes. It doesn't seem that that's very frequent at all. It very much seems more like something I hear a lot is the professors are all foreign. And when I say that, I mean they're not Americans. And that creates a literal language barrier where it's very difficult oftentimes to understand them.

Ryan Maruyama [00:06:24]:
Well, not, not only just not Americans, they're just don't speak English well, you mean? Or if they do have a good command of the English language, they have a very heavy accent of which is. Makes it very difficult to understand them.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:37]:
Well, there's two reasons I say foreign in this way. It's not without intention. I say foreign because, yes, what you're saying, if they do have a good command of English, their accent's very heavy to the point where it's hard for students to understand them. And that I remember someone telling me that in a class it would sometimes take them a week to get through a module that was supposed to take a day because it was so difficult to understand the professor because they just, even though technically they spoke English really well, but their accent was so heavy it was really hard to get any information. And then secondarily, because they're foreign and also in academia, they have literally no concept of American business practices. And so if you're going into something that is STEM related, a lot of times, unless you're talking about like pure math, you know, which the language barrier still might be present there. Unless you're talking about pure math or pure engineering or something that's very rigid, it's difficult for these people to have any concept of like what is going to help these kids actually be employable at the end, which is why you're getting kids graduating with STEM degrees or design degrees that maybe are a little bit technical and they're still not employable. Because I remember one young lady coming through and she was in an interior design program which did have a CAD element to it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:44]:
But the professor, instead of teaching them cad, was teaching them an Egyptian. This was an Egyptian professor who it was very hard to understand. Nobody could understand the professor and is teaching them to build portfolio in an Egyptian software which is completely unusable is not used anywhere in the US and they now don't know how to use the technology they'll need to use to get work. I just talked to a reporter who was getting a little bit of information from me about the job market and he was saying that his youngest brother is a mechanical engineer and is not employed because a lot of what he learned is not widely applicable. And the types of jobs he's applying for are going to be entry level technician jobs, which you could get at 18 or 19 years old and then be trained up to the point where he's now applying.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:26]:
You know, when you say mechanical engineer, you mean he's a mechanical engineer graduate. Like that was what he got his undergrad in, correct?

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:32]:
He's not an engineer. He's unemployed.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:33]:
He's unemployed, right?

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:34]:
Yeah. I think a lot of parents think that if they go into stem, it's going to be fine, but that's not protection. It's not a guarantee. It's not going to. It's not going to save them. I think the real core of it is like parents do not understand who's teaching on college campuses and what they're teaching them on college campuses. And then all they see because they're not physically there, is they see the bad grades like they see the poor grades and they see the depression and the anxiety. That's it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:56]:
That's all they see. And one of the first stories I wanted to tell here was actually one of a young man who came on our podcast. His name was Quinn and he was 20, I believe, when he applied and interviewed for a financial analyst job at a Fortune 100 company. He got this job because he had been working for a property management office prior to that. That was his work experience that got him hired. He got this job and then did really well in this job because he was young and motivated. And then they proceeded to say, hey, we think you should get a CPA license. We're going to pay for your degree and we're going to pay for you to get the credits you need in order to sit for the CPA exam.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:29]:
And that's a really good example of what I'm trying to get across to parents whose kids are going into rigid fields like accounting or technology or engineering. At this point. The key is to get entry level work. The brute force you have to do at the beginning to get them entry level work right out of high school is the work that needs to be done. It's not trying to retroactively get them a job later. It's Much harder to do that. The easiest way to do that is right after they graduate high school.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:55]:
I have a buddy who I've talked many times about on this podcast who is a chemical engineer and he's got a job now at big company and he got out of school for engineering. He got his chemical engineering degree. He was not an engineer yet and he could not find a job to save his life. And he applied to all of these engineering jobs and mind you, this was, I'm old, I guess, not that old, but a little more than 10 years ago. And he ended up getting a job as a tech. Exactly, literally, exactly what you're saying. He got a job job as a tech wearing the bunny suits on, on a line with a bunch of other people that didn't have degrees. He had to work a few years doing that type of work before he ever got an engineering job.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:40]:
And I think the point that you're trying to make here is that like if it was earlier in life, could he have gotten that other job with the other people that didn't have degrees and then had that company possibly pay for his degree if he needed it so that he could move up into the position that he's in now?

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:57]:
65% of entry level jobs in our country require two to five years of experience, which ironically enough, your kids would have if they had gotten a job right out of high school. And a lot of people would naturally say, yeah, but how would they get that first entry level job? Guess what? Employers are way, way more likely to hire an 18 or 19 or 20 year old kid with a little bit the smallest amount of hustle for, for an entry level role. Because that gamble is much more likely to pay off than hiring a college grad who expects to make way more than entry level wage, which is all that's available for an entry level job. Because college grads leave, they churn and they know that they're going to do that. And so they're no longer hiring college grads for entry level roles. That's the biggest disconnect in our economy right now. And I feel like nobody is talking about that as the actual cause, but that's actually what's going on. Because you and I know, because we work with 18, 19, 20 year old kids and we don't have any trouble helping them find that entry level role and then applying for it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:52]:
And then they get hired in a heartbeat because it's matching them with their expectations to the right company at the right time.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:59]:
The reality of it is, is that they're cheaper and they're more trainable and

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:05]:
for entry level roles.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:06]:
Yes, yeah, exactly. And that might be a bad thing to say a lot. I don't know why it would be, but for some people they'd be like, well, they're exploiting you for your work. Not really. Like when you're 18 years old, you don't have any experience.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:17]:
Yeah. You don't know anything.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:17]:
Right, exactly. So you go, you're able to take less. Your child's able to take less because they don't, they're, they need less.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:25]:
They're able to take market available wage.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:27]:
Right, exactly. Because they need less because they don't have the burden of the debt that is required, like pretty much almost required for most families to go to college to get a degree. And then they're able to do that, build up their resume and build up the resume over time. And largely they're more trainable because they didn't have four years of people telling them, this is the way that you do things, this is the way that you do things. When you go out into the market, it'll be like that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:52]:
And it's just not the amount of times that we've gotten the. It's exploit. This is exploitation. If you went and you spent four to six years and a hundred thousand dollars to get a degree, you did not need to then turn around and apply for a job that you now say is exploitative because it offers the exact same wage before you did that. How is that the company's fault? Oh wait, it's not. It's the college's fault. It's incredible to me that colleges have been able to obscure the fact that the person who's exploiting entry level workers the most is them. It's not companies, it's colleges.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:23]:
They're stealing all of this time, they're stealing all of this money and they're selling false expectations and they're selling lackluster employment preparation and they're not doing anything well. And then they've managed to brainwash an entire group of people so that when they go out to the market and then apply for the exact jobs that they should have applied for at 18, they say that the employers are the ones exploiting. When the employers are like, this was the market value wage before you bought a degree and then another degree. How is that my problem? To then pay you what you think your labor is worth when you have no skills and if anything you have negative skills because the college ruined your expectations and taught you the opposite of what is Actually true in the market. Cause the people teaching in colleges don't know what's going on. It's amazing. A little scam they got going. It's wild to me.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:08]:
And the core here, too is like the market speaks for itself. 41% of grads, and this is again, about 4 out of 10 of young adults who actually go to college. 62% of high school seniors go to college. 4 out of 10 of them will not graduate. Of those who do, 41% of those who do graduate are going to be underemployed. And so currently, 41%, 41.5% of recent grads ages 22 to 27 are working in a job that didn't require their degree at all. And even if they are working in a job that did require a degree doesn't necessarily mean they're making their money back. It just means that there's some loose correlation.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:39]:
And that's something that's a topic for a whole other time.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:42]:
Yeah. I think also requirement is the crux that you have to look in. It's kind of the fulcrum that you have to look in. Because for this. I think this is from the Federal Reserve, the Bank of New York. What does require mean? And their definition of require is still not the correct definition of require, which is legally required to do it. And this is like there's some magic or there's some voodoo in the. In the word require.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:09]:
If it was what I believe to be the correct definition of require, that number would be way less. Way less. It'd be 80%, 90%. It'd be an amazing amount. Let's just take this. Let's just take this at face value and just say, okay, we know that this is true instinctually. I mean, I know that this was true instinctually. And this was.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:29]:
I think it's gotten worse over the years. And when I graduated college, you know, what's 12 years ago, whatever it was.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:36]:
Yeah. Because 2015 is when the decline in college and degree requirements in actual public numbers. So this is the. You're right. What this is based on is the Federal Reserve bases their stuff on the bls, but the BLS has super inaccurate occupation. So we know that they're overly excited about required degrees. You have to check the actual legal requirements. And that's like you said, a whole other thing.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:55]:
Yeah. When this was very prevalent for me, I graduated college and for six months or so, I couldn't get a job. And then while I was there, even before, while I was still in college, literally all of my. I was a bartender and a server at a restaurant and a busser and all this. I worked front of the house in a restaurant. And all of my coworkers had psychology degrees. All of them had communications degrees. It was almost like it was a

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:25]:
requirement to be a waitress or a bartender.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:31]:
Like, literally, it was like, oh, Kelly, you have a. You have a degree, right? Yeah, I double majored in English and communication.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:41]:
I had a lot of marketing and law.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:43]:
Okay, here you go. This. This. This beer is. Get. Is dying. Could get it to table 63, please.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:49]:
86 shrimp, by the way. Yeah, I worked with a lot of. A lot of law and a lot of marketing Degree. Psychology is definitely overrepresented in bartending, which reminds me of this story, actually. Let me tell you this. Let me tell you this story. There is this wild video. There's this wild video on Instagram.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:07]:
I'm crying just thinking about it. This girl is going. She's telling the story about the time she went to the career center at Baylor. She goes to Baylor. Baylor is a very expensive private university in Texas. She goes to this career center and said, I really don't know what career I'm. I'm aiming for, which. You shouldn't be in college if you don't know what career you're aiming for.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:26]:
That's insane. And she proceeds to take this career test again, always freaking based on personality and. And interests, which is a wild way to pick work. And she comes back and she's like, oh, I'm excited. I'm about to find out what career I'm going to do. And the counselor says, before I flip over the first page, just know you don't have to go into this career. This girl flips over the. She flips the page over and it says, bartender.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:52]:
Wait, this is a skit.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:53]:
No, this is real. This is real. This is the career center at Baylor. They Dead Ass gave this girl at Baylor, which I think is like $80,000 a year. Dead ass gave this girl a career, a career quiz that then told her she should be a bartender.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:08]:
Amazing. Honestly, like, as funny as that is that. Is that, like, good for that? That's literally, like, good for Baylor. Like, honestly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:16]:
No, it's not.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:17]:
That is really not done.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:19]:
I'm not done. Because then the counselor says, hey, you don't have to go into this career. And the girl says, um, bartender. Well, I don't need a degree for that, do I? And she goes, well, you reacted too soon. That was too fast. You got too excited because it Wasn't. It wasn't honest at all. She was going to try to sell this girl that she did need a psychology degree to be a bartender.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:43]:
Which makes your first story even more.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:44]:
Well, you are kind of a therapist.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:46]:
That's literally exactly what the career counselor said.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:52]:
That's so cute.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:53]:
This is getting worse and worse. As I tell it to you. Then the funniest part is then the girl's like, yeah, but it's okay, guys. It gets worse. And then she goes, it's okay, guys, because I called my mom and told her, hey, they told me to be a bartender. And her mom was understandably horrified. She's paying $80,000 a year for her daughter to go to this private university. And then the girl said, but it's okay, guys, because I ended up.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:16]:
She says, it's okay, guys. Don't worry about me. Because I ended up changing my major. To what? What did she change it to? Communications Marketing. Which she still doesn't need a degree for at all. There's not a single job in our entire country that is a marketing job that requires a college degree. Not a single one. Not a single one.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:32]:
You do not need a college degree to be a successful marketer. That's insane. And anybody who tells you that is teaching at a college or working at the career center at Baylor.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:40]:
Good for Baylor. Honestly, like, I. I have no notes for Baylor. That's. That's very, very honest. That's amazing.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:50]:
Oh, my gosh.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:51]:
Yeah.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:51]:
So the core of this is that the stats say that a degree is a coin flip for your kid. And I think that's even being generous. That's being generous because the coin flip is whether or not the degree is even going to remotely relate to their job. Not even. It's going to make your money back. So if you're a parent, I feel like at this point, a degree is a very risky choice to make for your child, unless they have a trust fund.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:10]:
At the beginning of this episode, we said that we were going to save their sons, but right now we're just dogging on college. We have one more point here that we're. That we're going to make, and then we're going to tell you what you can do.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:22]:
Yes. So my last point to prove this is that Gen Z men with college degrees now have the same unemployment rate as degree free Gen Z men. And that is very much a sign that the college payoff is dead. I am not going to say higher education payoff. I refuse to call colleges higher education anymore. I'm just not going to do it because that's silly and inaccurate.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:44]:
Yeah, this is from like a Fortune headline. Gen Z. Men with college degrees now have the same unemployment rate as non grads. A sign that the higher education payoff is dead. We feel like we should like BLEEP higher education.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:57]:
But the reason that parents should care about this is because you think a degree is a safety net. You think a degree is going to help your son. It's not. It's literally actively going to hurt him. No one is going, hey, if you send your son to college, chances are that's going to do him more harm than it's going to do him good. And that's the thing that I think parents need to hear and then they need to know what to do. And that's what I want to talk about now. So if you're trying to shift this conversation at home, what you do now is you stop asking them, what do you, what career do you want? What major, what college like or what program are you going to go into since this one's not working out or what major are you going to change to not useful? What life do you want? Because this is the core of it is success is getting what you want out of your life.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:38]:
It is not getting a degree because you think that that's gonna help you get a good job that is never going to work because there's no strategy behind that and there's no goal at the end of it either. It's just go get a STEM degree and you're gonna get a good job. That's not panning out. And that is the thing that has to change. I had a conversation the other day with a dad where he's like, yeah, you know, the goal for my son is, you know, he's got into several like really prominent academic schools and the goal is for him to go get a high earning job. And it took everything in me not to say, well, that's not gonna happen. Just aimlessly by just enrolling and then hoping that whatever degree he gets is somehow gonna translate to a higher earning job that's literally not gonna pan out. And it's because there was no why.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:21]:
There's no greater goal. What's crazy about this is if you use it on any other example, it becomes very clear how crazy this is. I wanna build a beautiful house. It's gonna be a great house. It's gonna have everything that I want in it. It's gonna help me to have a good secure place to live. It's gonna Have a great kitchen, great bedrooms, all this stuff. And someone says, okay, that's great.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:38]:
Well, you know, are you gonna drop plans for it? And you're like, no, I'm just gonna build it. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna build it or I'm just gonna have somebody build it. And they say, well, are you gonna, like, do you have any things that you're gonna let them know beforehand? And you're gonna say, nope, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna pay the money. I'm just gonna pay $200,000 and, and hope that the end result is what I'm expecting. And that's insane. Like, there's no other thing that we do in life especially that takes this long, that we don't plan out before we start doing these things. And I think the planning is done now in high schools, but there's no planning in high schools. There's college, trades, military.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:13]:
Oh, if you're not interested in any of those things, good luck. If you're not going into a local VO tech school or a local community college, that gives us a kickback. I don't care. That's really what it is. This is not me saying this. These are things that parents have told me. Like, I've been told this from parents in multiple states. Like, I've been, I've heard this from Florida, from New York, I've heard this from Indiana, I've heard this from California.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:31]:
Yeah, like, you know, if my kid's not going the direct path that they think that they think they should go, that's one of the already laid out paths. They don't care.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:37]:
I think a large portion of this comes down to parents wanting action and just wanting a little bit of security or a little bit of peace of mind that their child is working towards something. And college for generations, literally four generations has been that answer. Right now we're in this very strange middle ground where the colleges have taken over and it is now they've co opted an entire age group, right? They've co opted an entire age group, college age kids. Like, that's how deeply ingrained this stuff is in our society and that is how deeply it is expected of our young and of our youth to go and do this and so to go and buy this. If not college, then what is always the parents question. And it is where they're coming from. And it is a good question. But I would argue that what we have to do at this point is just take a step back.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:45]:
Let's just take our foot off the gas pedal just for a second to figure out where is this car headed? Literally, let's just take the foot off the gas pedal and you just look up and you're just like, yo, where

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:57]:
are we trying to go?

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:58]:
I have no idea where we're going. Let's pull over onto the side of the road and let's figure this out. And once you take that mentality of like, what my son is saying, or by his actions, either, like, I don't want to be here, I don't want to go, whatever it is, or he's failing out and he's like, I don't want to do the work, this is dumb, etc. What is he really saying? Probably, or at least maybe let's just try to pull over and pull the map out and just try to say, hey, where are you going? When is the last time that we've questioned our direction here? When is the last time that we've taken a second to think about the actions that we're continuing to do every single day? I think that that is like the hardest, like the hardest thing. Once parents get over that and once they say it's okay for them to take a second, a week, month, whatever, to think about this and it's okay for us to have inaction for a little bit, then all the rest of the stuff comes pretty naturally. And you're like, yeah, why are you going there? How did we end up here? Like, oh, we ended up here because I wanted you to get a job. Then why didn't you just go get a job instead?

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:08]:
Why didn't we try that first?

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:09]:
Instead of sending Tim to college for four years and putting them into debt and putting your family into debt like you personally into debt as well, when all of this was to get a job, why didn't we just skip to that part instead?

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:22]:
Or even just try that part first? That's the thing is, it's amazing to me how if you even suggest to people, hey, maybe they should just try to go get an entry level job in that industry, they will just say, oh, that's not possible. And they're so unwilling to try that, that's such a foreign concept that they're more comfortable spending a hundred thousand dollars than clicking apply for their 18, 19, 20 year old kid to get an entry level job. That will be the exact same job that they will be trying to get when they graduate college with all of that debt, with all of that time burnt up. And it's wild to me because, like, what A good job. The colleges have done marketing to people. There's just not, it's not even a thought that people consider that, oh, they could just apply for these jobs. They can and they can get them. And in fact they're more likely to get them than college graduates.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:05]:
And no one's, no one's telling people that. I think a lot of people don't do the type of work we, we do. And so they don't see that this demographic does not have trouble getting employment. It's, it's not a thing. It's not a thing. It is very much real for the recent grads. And that's why if you look at the headlines about who's unemployed and who won't get hired, it's Gen Z grads. It's not Gen Z, it's Gen Z grads.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:27]:
Even if you see a headline that says Gen Z's not getting employed, it's not Gen Z, it's Gen Z college graduates. If Your child is 18, 19, 20 years old, now is the right time to find them. Strategic entry level work, so is what we call it. Find them, help them work backwards from the life they want to the career that's actually going to fit that, figure out what they actually need to learn and then you go apply for entry level jobs in that industry. That is the correct answer because the experience that they will gain right after high school people are willing to train and hire young adults like this. That experience is what's going to be able to get them to the point where they're then applying for the entry level jobs that grads are trying to get. But they'll be applying for the next tier up and they will get it because they will have actual industry work experience. And that's the piece that all the grads are missing.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:11]:
So one of the things I want to talk about is about a call that we had with a mom who applied for her son for the launch program. And so if you need help with this for your college age son, you can go to degreefree.com launch to apply and work with us. We would definitely love to create a plan and work towards their strategic entry level work. Talking about this conversation with this mom, it was, it was a call, like when you go to that page, you schedule a call to work with us. And we had the call and it was a bummer because she ended up not signing up. It happens. People, people don't sign up. That's fine.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:49]:
I always look back at the CRM that we have at our records. Yeah, and our records. Yeah. And that was the second time that she had applied. It was the second time that she applied in a year, in, like, eight months.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:02]:
I was like, her son has no idea what he's doing.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:05]:
This problem doesn't go away.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:06]:
Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:07]:
The whole point of this is, like, I felt bad getting off the phone because it's still a problem, and it's

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:12]:
going to be a problem.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:13]:
And it's. Which is. What I told her.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:14]:
Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:14]:
Was like, it's going to remain a problem.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:17]:
He doesn't know what he's doing.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:18]:
Doesn't go away.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:19]:
Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:20]:
She obviously knew that because this is the second time in eight months that were on the phone and the second time saying no, which is, like, fine. It's fine. But, like, not really, actually.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:29]:
Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:29]:
If you think about it, like, it's kind of a bummer.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:31]:
Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:31]:
Still no plan. Still no direction. Where is he going?

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:35]:
Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:35]:
What are you doing?

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:36]:
And I think a lot about the kids, too, because I'm like, okay. He doesn't know what to do. He's just kind of frozen. He's, like, in limbo. It's like he's on ice. Basically just hanging out, feeling worse about himself, probably by the day, I would imagine, and just no momentum. Not do anything useful. And it's a bummer because this.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:52]:
This is the easiest time to get them an opportunity and get them the right one. And. And that's what is so key. Because the worst thing that happens, too, when we get on these calls is sometimes I'll get people who I know we're gonna see again. I'm like, oh, if they apply in high school, and the parents are like, you know, they're like 17 and a half. Like, they're, you know, about to graduate. And the parents are like, oh, yeah, they like that. Like that guy I was talking about, where he's like, yeah.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:16]:
You know, the goal is for him to get into these. Like, you know, he's gonna go to one of these academic colleges and get a. And I'm like, that's not gonna work out. Cause you have no idea. Like, you don't know what career he's pursuing at all. You have no idea. And so the likelihood that you're gonna figure that out in the next two weeks because he just graduated, I was like, it's very low. I'll see you.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:33]:
You know, And I didn't say this, but in my head, I'm like, I'm gonna see you again in a year. And the worst part is that after when I see him Again in a year, his son's gonna feel like a failure for literally no reason. For no reason. And they're gonna be out that money for no reason. And they could have just applied that money to something that would have helped him get into the right position. And that's what's. It's like. It's a tragedy, truly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:54]:
And then you look at all the young men, and you're like, why are they. You know, why are they so demoralized? Why are they in such bad shape? And I'm like, because we're stealing all of their energy and we're stealing their momentum.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:03]:
You mentioned the lesser of two evils. You mentioned the money. And, like, yes, 100%. And it's the time, though. And look, the money is real. And I realize that not everybody is fortunate enough to be able to afford X, Y, or Z. It just literally doesn't even matter. Some people can't even afford groceries.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:26]:
Whatever. It's still not about the money. I mean, like, it is. It is mainly about their time. It is mainly about their time. It is mainly about the way that they. They feel, the way that they view their own life. And if they have a plan now that they can work towards that, they.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:43]:
That they can make actionable steps every single day, executable steps every single day in service of a larger goal that is. That is the life that they want. It's gonna be magic. Yeah, it's gonna be magic.

Hannah Maruyama [00:31:55]:
And it's cool. We see it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:56]:
Yeah. It's unfortunate that this mother, for the second time in a year, like, obviously realizes that last year, realized that her son had a problem. A year later, still realizes that her son has a problem. Look, he was 18 last year. He's 19 this year. You know, we'll see her again in another eight months. You know, what is he doing?

Hannah Maruyama [00:32:19]:
Yeah. Or worse, he'll just go to college. Because they think that that's some sort of guarantee. But you know what? Take heart. There's always the career center at Baylor. I laugh because it's sad. I laugh because it's tragic. But on the bright side, and if your son is in this cohort.

Hannah Maruyama [00:32:37]:
I remember we had a young man that came into our program. His name was Russell. And he came in. He was actually at Arizona State University. I think he was at asu. And he was just, like, sick of it. He was just sick of it. He's like, I don't know.

Hannah Maruyama [00:32:52]:
I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know what the point of this Is very bright, by the way. I remember getting on this first call with him and he was like, just. He was reading, I don't know, four or five books a week about electrical engineering. Very bright. Very bright, this kid. And he was just. But he was just demoralized about college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:33:10]:
He was just like, I just don't want to be. Or he falls into that cohort of like, he was just bored. He was bored and didn't see the point in it. And his parents wanted him to go, so he was just going. But he wasn't doing well because he. His way of getting out of it after saying he didn't want to be there was to fail out.

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:26]:
Yeah, I don't.

Hannah Maruyama [00:33:26]:
Because he had already said, I don't

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:27]:
know if it's a majority or not, but that's a very, very, very large cohort. It is of young men, I think young women too. But I can't really speak for young men. I'm not a woman. But I know that for myself when I was struggling in college, it was literally because of that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:33:42]:
Yeah, I think young women don't do that as much. I think young men are more prone to, like, if they especially they voiced it and it was not heard, then they just, their, their grades tank because they're like, well, this is a way to get out. You know, this is. This is an exit ramp that I can build for myself. And that's what they do. But he came through the program and I remember he ended up, interestingly, he ended up going into marketing. He chose a digital marketing and as his career path and amazing. His mom emailed me recently and she sent me, she said, hey, I just want to thank you.

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:07]:
This was a year and a half ago. And she said, hey, I just wanted to thank you. He's doing incredibly well. He's actually used the skillset from the career plan to learn those skills. And then he. He runs his own digital marketing agency now. So he's doing incredibly well. She said that he's earning very well for his.

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:22]:
He's 21 now. He's earning very well for his age. And he no longer has that sense of. Because he left, he left college. She's like, I'm out of here, I'm done. And he left and he's just thriving now. And she's so happy and she's so glad that he came through. And she just said it was an amazing change to see that he had purpose and then to see him execute on that and then do so well.

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:42]:
And that was really cool to get that email.

Ryan Maruyama [00:34:43]:
I didn't know that. That's awesome.

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:45]:
Yeah. Because now you remember him. But I forgot to tell you.

Ryan Maruyama [00:34:47]:
That doesn't surprise me. He was very meticulous. He was very. He was very meticulous. That doesn't, that doesn't surprise me. That's amazing. That's awesome.

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:56]:
Yeah, he's doing really well. And what's kind of encouraging is I, I think young men are just voting with their feet now. So enrollment's down. Enrollment's down from 47% in 2011 to now 39% of young men are enrolling in college out of high school. What's a little bit discouraging about this? And this episode's about saving your sons from college. But what's discouraging about this is that means that any enrollment spikes are gonna be made up of women. And so that's not good because women buy more degrees than they need. They buy degrees they don't need, and they buy degrees that they do need for low earning jobs, which is never a good recipe.

Hannah Maruyama [00:35:30]:
And so that's not great. But men account for nearly the entire 1.2 million student drop in college enrollment over the last decade. And so young winners just, they're sick of it. They're like, I'm not going to sit on this campus and pay somebody with no professional experience of any kind other than sitting on a college campus to have me do an interpretive dance so I can go apply for an entry level job that won't hire me because I sat here and did this. And they're, they're done. They're over it. And that, to me is actually encouraging. But what I'm worried about is their direction now, because that is the thing that I think a lot of parents are now going, okay, well, like you just said, if not college, then what? And that includes young men who are about to graduate or, or have.

Hannah Maruyama [00:36:07]:
And don't know what they're going to do next. And they're looking for the right path for them or are in college and are leaving or have left because they know that it's not the right fit. But now what do they do? Because they've been told their whole lives that college is the way to get a good job. And so many of them believe that they can't get a good job without a degree still. And that's really discouraging for them. And then the only way for them to get out of college was to fail out. So they also feel bad about that. And it's causing a lot of Friction in people's homes and a lot of stress on parents.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:34]:
Saving your sons from college literally boils down to that one picture. Just take a second to take your foot off the gas and pull over on the side of the road and figure out what his goals are and why he's doing his actions today. Figure out why are you, why are we heading in this direction, why are we doing this? Is this going to get us to that goal? If not, let's stop doing that. Let's start making decisions that are in line with those goals.

Hannah Maruyama [00:37:05]:
And I can already hear the comments too. People just will be like, oh, this is so anti intellectual. Until you have listened to these parents on the calls and how stressed out these parents are about this, how they feel bad, how they oftentimes make their kids feel bad because they feel so bad. And the young adults themselves, the young men themselves are just broken down. And when you've heard how demoralized and broken down these young men are for something that is completely 100% avoidable, we are going to continue to talk about this and we are going to continue to make sure the parents know that the thing that they need is not a degree. They need direction. They need to know what they're doing, why they're doing it and what it's going to get them at the end. And if you need help with that, which a lot of people do because they need a neutral third party because it gets really difficult to have these conversations and a lot of parents don't have, don't feel like they have the time or the knowledge to navigate this market, which is accurate.

Hannah Maruyama [00:38:00]:
It's an entire job to do that. Degreefree.com launch. We do a one on one, multi week intensive service with these young men and we help them to figure out what they need from their work, what careers fit that exactly, the skills that they're going to need down to zip code specificity. And then we help them figure out exactly how they're going to learn those things, what strategic entry level jobs they're going to apply to. And it is incredible what happens when you just put that amount of time and effort into something.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:24]:
Yep. Degreefree.com forward/launch and until next week guys. Hello.