SAT Goes Digital and Uncoupling Your Identity From Your Job (DF#141)

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:00]:
The follow your passion advice makes a lot more sense when you're tying your identity to your career. But when you're not tying your identity to your career, follow your passion kinda falls apart really quickly, at least it does for me. Aloha folks, and welcome back to degree free. I'm super excited to have you here. I am a little sick, so I sound a little stuffed up. We're gonna do our best to make this the best listening experience possible for you. A few things to note, it's really a bummer. I really feel bad for you and everyone listening to this as well.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:38]:
I feel bad for myself as well because Hannah and I had a banger of an episode planned for you folks, and we were gonna do an entire episode. We have everything ready, the outline and everything. It was going to be about one of our first businesses and the mistakes that we made. And it was going to be a lot of fun because Hannah and I have very fond memories of those days. And one of the biggest problems is that the business idea is very timely, and we will get into this later about why it was a bad idea and all of the reasons why it failed in another episode. But we had that episode planned for you, and I came back from my trip to Hawaii. I was there for a funeral a few weeks ago or a couple weeks ago, and I got sick, and I've been sick for the past 2 weeks. And our plan was to film it and record it in the few days that we had in between trips because Hannah's now she is on a death trip as well.

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:41]:
A member of our family is passing away on that side now. Anyway, she's dealing with that. We had a few days to get this done. I got sick. I got her sick. The trip was coming up. It was a mess. And it was really funny because we almost got into a fight about it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:59]:
It was like, hey. We have to record this episode because it's, like, really timely. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense. And this doesn't make sense to you listening to this, and then that's fine. Just know that it it's timely. I'll get into it later. We almost got into an argument about it and I stop and I'm just like, this is hilarious. This is so funny that we are almost getting into an argument over recording this episode.

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:24]:
And the reason why is because of the bad decisions that we had made 8 years ago when we were doing this business and because the business itself was also timely. And so it was just a hilarious, like, 8 years later that our sins of the past are, like, catching up with us again. Long story short, we are saving that episode for you because we're not able to film it. We were not able to record it. We are saving it for an entire year. And so subscribe now. This is the teaser. This is the trailer.

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:59]:
Subscribe now. Make sure to hit notifications, all that good stuff. I can tell you the exact week that this is going to be released. The episode that we have prepared for you, 52 weeks in advance, will be released sometime in the week, March 9th March 15th. We are going to learn from our mistakes. We are going to record that thing. We might even record that thing now and just release it then. I'm not sure.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:27]:
Maybe we'll record it in January of 2025. But March 9th to March 15, 2025 is when the episode is going to drop. You will have waited a year for it. And I can promise you it will be worth the wait, or at least I hope so, because we are waiting regardless. All that said, let's move into today's episode. Today, I wanted to talk about something that we really haven't talked about on this show at all, and I wanted to talk about it because I thought it was a major shift. And then also when thinking about it, it made me feel old. And the thing that I'm talking about is that the SAT is going fully digital.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:14]:
The SAT is no longer doing the number 2 pencils where you just go CC, CC, CC, CC in your bubble sheet, and then you have your test paper. No longer. It is all digital. And I think after digging into this a little bit internationally for the past year, it has already been digital. So they've been testing it. It's kinda like new rules in Major League Baseball. It goes to triple a baseball first, then it goes up to MLB. And so they've been testing it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:48]:
Apparently, it works. They are going fully digital. And by the time that this comes out, it will already be fully digital. The reason why it made me feel old, not that there wasn't a lot of computers around, it just would have been logistically tough because yes, we didn't all have, like, laptops back then. I mean, there was still a computer lab when I graduated high school. And then I guess people older than me would be like, yeah, you're still a spring chicken, which which I get. You know, you'd be like, back when I was in school, we used a stone and tablet. And with the digital change comes a bunch of other changes as well, and we are gonna get into those changes.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:25]:
And once again, this is degree free. We don't really talk about college too often or at least, like, going to college, but I thought that this was really, really interesting. And the reasoning behind it, we're gonna talk about it. What I thought was worth mentioning before we get into the changes to the SAT was that certain Ivy League schools, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, they have all recently reinstated their standardized test requirements. Whereas a lot of schools, they had removed them for a while now, and a lot of schools have also removed them. I'll link the New York Times article where I was reading this and it made me think about all of this. But according to data from Common App, the number of college applicants submitting SAT or ACT scores plummeted from 76% in the 2019 to 2020 admission cycle to 45% this year. So while a lot of schools are dropping the SAT requirement and the ACT requirement, these schools that had previously dropped them are now reinstating them.

Ryan Maruyama [00:06:38]:
Well, I think they're reinstating them, 1, because they've said why they are reinstating them, and they say that it actually is a good gauge of whether or not you're gonna do well at that school. I think they're reinstating him just so that they can filter out more people. They're okay with the SAT and the ACT being that filter because they're they don't have an application problem. They don't have an admissions problem. Or to put it in business terms, which we put it in business terms here, they don't have a problem getting fresh and warm leads. Right? Like, they actually have too many leads, and they have too many leads, and they're like, wait a minute. Once you have too many leads, what you want in a business is you want highly qualified leads. You'd rather have highly qualified leads instead of a bunch of leads that are just no good.

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:28]:
Any business would love leads and leads and leads. But then once you get leads and leads and leads, you really want highly qualified leads because then you're gonna spend a lot of time, money, and resources filtering down who is the right person for your product to then spend that money. And so for them, the product is their degree, is the thing that you get at the end of it and the classes that you get for sure, but it's the thing that you get at the end of it. And they just wanna make sure that they are filtering down, and they don't have the problem of having people apply. And so the other colleges on the flip side are having problems recruiting people. So they are lowering the SAT and ACT standards. They're getting rid of it entirely, and the reason why they're doing it is because they want to make it as easy as possible for you to do business with them. And you're like, well, ACT, SAT, you don't gotta take it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:22]:
It's a fine. Just apply anyway. And then when you apply, they'll take your money because they'll take anybody's money. And I'm going a little bit on a tangent here and this on purpose. This goes to what we talked about earlier. It was a segment that I've done on a previous episode and something that I'm going to come back to, but it's the college marketing secrets or the marketing secrets that colleges use because I think the colleges are the best marketers in the US at least. I was gonna say the world, but in the US, for sure. The academic industrial complex, the colleges at large in cahoots with the federal government, all of that working together.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:58]:
They do a really good job of marketing college and the degree to you and then making you pay for it. And I wanted to call back to that episode, and I'll put that episode and link to this article and everything that we talked about at the usual spot in the show notes, degreefree.c0forward/podcast. I'll link to the episode that I'm talking about right now. This all reminds me of that episode about where I talked about the marketing secrets that colleges use. And some of the pushback that I got on that was that AP classes is a marketing tactic that colleges are using to get you and your child to opt into college before it even starts. The pushback that I received on all of this is people got really caught up in the AP classes. They got really, really caught up on the actual delivery system and the way that you earn credits. And then a lot of people are like, okay.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:53]:
Well, dual enrollment's better, cleping, all of these things. And I was like, guys, you're missing the entire argument. And, sure, the maybe those things are better because then you don't have a test at the end. Sure. What I'm saying is that by doing all of these actions in high school, by making them do all of these actions, like AP classes, like dual enrollment, then taking the SAT, doing all of these actions prior to actually making the purchase decision makes you much more likely to then purchase the product when it's time to purchase that product. We're getting caught up in the AP classes versus dual enrollment. That argument, that doesn't matter. Within those arguments, it might matter, but what I'm saying, it doesn't.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:43]:
So think of it this way. This is an analogy that I'm starting to use now. I haven't really talked about this before. This is the first time I'm sharing with you, so please give me feedback on this and please poke holes in it. I'm pretty sure that it makes sense, but I'm just walking through this with you for the first time. When I think about a degree, I think about the marathon. Think about the degree being the finisher shirt that you get at the end of the marathon. Like, yeah, sure.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:15]:
You did the marathon, but if you didn't get a finisher shirt, like, did you really finish the marathon? How can we verify that? We can't. Where's the shirt? Well, here's the shirt. Okay. Well, you finished the marathon. If your time in college is you running the marathon, let's imagine that you really wanted to get that finisher shirt, and you went and you did 2 years of work. And that 2 years of work is in high school. You took AP classes. You did dual enrollment, whatever.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:43]:
That all earned you a way for you to start at the halfway mark. So instead of running 26.2 miles, all you have to run is 13.1 miles because you did 2 years of work to then start halfway through the marathon. How much likelier are you to finish that marathon now that you're starting at the 13.1 mile marker instead of the 0 mile marker? How much likelier? For most people, it's a lot likelier. You're halfway done or you're almost halfway there. You're very likely to finish it now because of all the work that you did prior to getting there. Because you said, oh, I did all of these things prior to the marathon. I ran 13 miles prior to the marathon. They're gonna give me that credit now, and so on a day I actually only have to run 13 miles.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:34]:
I could do 13 miles. Sure. And that's the equivalent of getting your associate's degree. That's the equivalent of getting associate's degree. So they give you their first 13 miles for free, but then you still have to pay for the half marathon. Really, you still have to pay for it. Do you get the finisher shirt just like everybody else? Sure. Is it worth it just like everybody else? Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:53]:
I think it is. Absolutely. But the marketing there is just that you've done half of the work before to then do it. Okay. So I'll just get back to this SAT thing. And the SAT is very, very similar in that the SAT, instead of starting at mile 0, it doesn't help you get halfway through. But what it does do is the SAT is just like prepping or just like training for the marathon. You're doing all of these things to train and to prep for college, for the marathon.

Ryan Maruyama [00:13:29]:
And how much likelier are you going to college, going to the marathon if you have trained? If you have trained and you've taken SAT, it is much, much more likely that you and your child go to college. Go get a degree, much more likely. Whereas think about if you're like, well, tomorrow is a marathon, but I haven't trained at all. How likely is it that you are going to run that marathon? Probably very unlikely. I've almost 100% guarantee that you're not running that marathon. By doing all these things, the college system makes it much more likely that you're going to go to college, that your child is going to go to college. Anyway, that's a little bit of an aside. I wanted to bring that up.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:18]:
We are going to talk about those college marketing secrets again, especially when Hannah gets back. I wanted to float that marathon analogy to you. That's a work in progress, but I think it's solid or at least in my head, I think I thought it was solid. Let me know what you think. YouTube comments, Spotify comments. Let me know what you think about the AP classes, the dual enrollment, the clapping thing, that college marketing thing. Oh, also, if you guys have any questions, ask that degree free dotco forward slash question. And last thing on this, do not beat me up when we bring this back up again, the college marketing thing, and then also the marathon thing because I wanna talk about it when Hannah gets back on the podcast.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:55]:
We've had discussions about it privately, and she wants to talk about it. I just wanted to give you a preview here. So talking about the changes that came to the SCT now that it's going digitally, well, it's taking an hour less. And so instead of 3 hours, it's like 2 hours and 14 minutes long. Now, What I found fascinating about the digital side of the test now is that the digital test is going to be adaptive. And most people that have taken digital tests, especially for like certifications and things like that, a lot of them are adaptive. It'll start at a baseline question. You get it right.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:35]:
You go to a harder question until you get it wrong. Then it go back and then you get it right back, so on and so forth. They say that even though it is adaptive, the scores will still be congruent. It'll still be the same. It's a massive change from what the paper test was. Paper test, it was all the same nationally. Like, all the tests were completely the same everywhere. And so if it wasn't necessarily in the same order, the questions were the same.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:08]:
And so some people, some naysayers are saying, well, this isn't gonna be fair because it's adaptive. I don't know. There are a lot of adaptive tests out there, and I'm not sure whether or not they do a good job. That's outside of my scope. I have no idea. But that is the change that's coming. The change that's also coming is that the reading portion of it is lessening and so it's becoming shorter. And so the passage is becoming much shorter rather than the page and a half or 2 pages that you have to read.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:40]:
It's like that. Once again, that has come to mixed reviews, as well as all major changes have proponents of the digital change say that this is going to reduce and prevent more cheating because when with a physical test, the test that you have, this is the same test that your neighbor has. I mean, sure, they might do a b copies. And so maybe the people right next to you have like b copies and then you have an a copy. Sure. But still there's just cheating involved. And so this adaptive difficulty test and the digital test is going to make it much more difficult to cheat. One of the things that I thought about the digital change, but back to my own experience with the SAT, although it was a long time ago now, I thought it will help to focus a little bit more for those people that just want one question at a time because the digital format is, like, one question and then you mark it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:45]:
And then, I mean, you can bookmark it and you can come back to it and things like that. You can you still have all that same functionality as a paper booklet would have. You can mark it. You can come back to it. But when each question is only, like, one question. One question is on the screen, and then you use a, b, c, d. One question on the screen, a, b, c, d. And so I thought, okay.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:05]:
Well, in that, maybe it would help me focus a little bit more. Like, this is the question at hand. Don't get anxiety over the 7 other questions that are on this piece of paper, and then I have to finish them all within, you know, a minute 45 seconds or something like that. So I thought that would be, I think, an improvement from my perspective. And finally, the proponents of this to say that this is supposed to be designed to be less intimidating, I guess, pretty much exactly what I was talking about. With features that support people with ADHD, dyslexia, and English learners, this makes it more accessible to more people. Later in this New York Times article, they do state, I thought this was interesting, 16 states now require or encourage students to take the test during the school day regardless of their plans for life after high school. In total, 1,900,000 students took the SAT in the high school class of 2023, with 2 thirds taking the exam during the school day, often for free.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:10]:
In the 2019 class, there were 2,200,000 test takers. So 2019, there were 2,200,000 test takers, 1,900,000 test takers in 2023. There's a couple of reasons for that drop. Fewer kids are going to college and then colleges are dropping what we were just talking about. They're dropping the SAT requirement to get in to apply. And so if you're gonna drop the SAT requirement, then why are you going to take it? And when I can get in without it, what I found wild about this is the allowing school time to take it. That's awesome. That's great.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:53]:
Sure. Fine. I have no qualms over that. What I found wild was that SAT is run by a company called College Board, and that's a company talking about marketing and talking about, like, the whole system. They have found a way to have high schools take time out of their day to take their exam. And so they're getting money from these high schools, and then they're requiring them to take it. So it's like, really, I mean, it's insane. I mean, it's great for them, great marketing, and that's great operations.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:27]:
I wish that I could force people to take something and then charge them to do it. This is often for free. Right? Like, often for free, but free is not free. And so somebody getting charged for it is the school system. It's a public school system. That's good for them. But I just thought that was wild. It's like, wow.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:43]:
If I was struggling as a business, I would love to get my product to be mandatory and not only mandatory in order for you to graduate, but then I would give the students time to do that. And then you just charge the public school systems. They're like, okay. Well, here you go. $10 a SAT. They would just say, here you go. And then they're just charged per SAT that they are giving the public school. So that was the first thing that I wanna talk about is the SAT going fully digital and then also do a callback to the marketing secrets and then also introduce my marathon analogy.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:16]:
Did you like it? Please let me know. Alright. Switching gears, I found an article from the Wall Street Journal, and I'll link it once again, degreefree.c04/podcast. The title of the article is Americans don't care as much about work, and it isn't just Gen z. Blame it largely on the pandemic, which weakened the hold jobs held on workers' psyches. So this article is kind of a no duh article, but I wanted to highlight a few things in it because we've talked about some of these themes before and I wanted to bring that up. So just to sum it up, the labor market, it appears similar to pre pandemic levels in terms of unemployment rates and wage growth. But underlying changes in work attitudes and priorities are completely different.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:05]:
What we're seeing is we're seeing an entire shift for the importance of work in people's lives before the pandemic and probably for 10, 20, 30, a generation before work was really important and work was really tied to our identities and people's identities post pandemic. But I think this is really just a shift that has been happening at the undercurrent and the pandemic just exacerbated it and just sped it up. The pandemic has shifted the importance of work in people's lives, leading to a greater emphasis on flexibility, family time, personal well-being, things like that. Like we're seeing in the labor market now that people are actually taking sick days. People are actually taking their vacation. When they say they need a mental health day, if they have mental health days a part of their benefits plan, like they're super stressed out or whatever, they're taking those mental health days. On the flip side of that, what's interesting is that employers are seeing that and the labor market they're seeing the trend in labor market, and so they are increasing those types of benefits. So they are also offering those types of things.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:18]:
15 years ago, like mental health day, I don't remember mental health days. I when I would go to my new hire orientations, when I worked at these big companies, I'd be like, oh, you have a mental health day. Maybe, like, I guess that's what bereavement leave is, I guess. But I didn't have bereavement leave. I just knew what it was. But you just took vacation. You're just like, yeah. Okay.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:35]:
Well, somebody died, so I'm gonna take vacation. Or, oh, I'm stressed out because and then you tell them why you're stressed out, but you don't even have to do that because you just take a vacation day. But now there's, like, mental health day. And so companies are seeing that shift in what employees want. And so the employers are starting to offer those things. We've talked about it before, but remote work is still on the rise and people want to work remotely as more and more and more businesses are having a much harder time finding people to fill In person roles for all those people that are looking for a competitive edge and you don't mind going into the office. I mean, in person roles are really a good hack, really. If you don't mind going into the office, if you don't mind commuting and you really need to make that career change or you really wanna get that first job or you're you're listening for your child and your child is, their first job after high school, and they're like, look, go into the office.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:32]:
Don't try to find remote work because other everybody else and their mother is trying to find remote work. And so just go in to the office, and now you have a competitive advantage. It was up to something like 64% of job seekers in the market are looking for remote work. You can have a leg up on people by just being like, oh, I'm willing to come into the office. Not only am I willing to come into the office, I'm happy to come into the office. They've also seen like a little bit of a spike in in person roles as well. Like as far as the wages are concerned, some of the wages in like hospitality, they're increasing the wages because they just can't find people to do those jobs, which, I mean, I get I did hospitality and service for a decade. And so, I mean, I get it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:15]:
But this is your opportunity. This is your chance right now. What I really wanted to hone in on from this article and from what we're seeing in the job market and what we're seeing from the you know, when I say job market, really what we're seeing from people, because people are the job market, is that their work isn't as tied to their identity. And I wanna talk back a couple of weeks where we talked about that fisherman and the businessman story, and I'll put the link to that episode. It was 2 episodes ago, so you can just pause this right now and go listen to that. I'll put the link in the show notes degreefree.coforward/podcast. Hannah and I have talked about it before. It's my opinion and it's our opinion.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:55]:
So when your work isn't so closely tied to your identity, your work really just fuels whatever else you do outside of work, which is your identity. So you might be a customer success manager in work, but really you're a rock climber because that's what you do. You're a CSM so that you can fuel your rock climbing addiction. And so when you're like, oh, what do you do? Well, I'm a rock climber. And then I also am a CSM to afford that hobby. The work will help you to have more options outside of work than having those options to fuel and to make up your identity. A second thing that I was thinking about when I thought about the identity piece is I thought back to another episode that we had done. This was episode 106.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:42]:
And so once again, you can pause this right now, go back and listen to this. We talked about a study that said, is follow your passion, good or bad advice as far as making money is concerned? And shocker, it's bad advice. But when talking about passion for work, to me, it seems like following your passion means that, like, okay, you're gonna follow your passion for work. Sure. It seems to me that following your passion or that advice is also much more tied into, like, oh, we're gonna be doing this for a long time. You wanna love it. Sure. That's fine.

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:16]:
But then also, that's more of their mentality of, like, tying your identity to it as well. Or, like, you're tying your identity because that's where your passion is. I wanted to recap a little bit. The follow your passion advice is much more attractive when you're also tying your identity to your career. So let's take that CSM person as well. It's like let's just say that you love customer service and then you love customer service and then whatever you're a CSM for, let's just say that you're a CSM for Salesforce or you're a CSM for HubSpot or ServiceNow or whatever. One of these big companies that needs customer success managers and you just love to help people and then you love to help people make more money to learn more about their customers and their customer experience, things like that. And you're just like, okay.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:05]:
Wow. I'm gonna go be a CSM because I love to do that. And that's who I am as a person, and that's my identity. The follow your passion advice makes a lot more sense when you're tying your identity to your career. But when you're not tying your identity to your career, follow your passion kinda falls apart really quickly, at least it does for me. Hey there. I hope you're enjoying this episode of the degree free podcast. At degree free, we wanna help everyone thrive and succeed without needing a college degree.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:30]:
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, 3rd, or 4th 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. I I wanted to recap a little bit what we talked about at episode 106. When given the advice, follow your passion, it usually ends up bad, especially for women. When given the advice, follow your passion, they go towards careers that are more arts and health related.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:13]:
And then men, when given the follow your passion advice, they go towards business and science. Arts and health usually have less money involved, and then business and science usually have more money involved. But then if you tell women to follow the money, they'll choose more business and science as well. And then if you tell men to follow the money, then they don't change their answer, or at least I think they don't change the answer. I forget what the study says, but the women do change their answer. If you can use your career, if you can uncouple your career from your identity, and then just think of your career as your job and it's a means of which you use to justify the end and whatever the end is, spending more time with your family, going on vacations, rock climbing on Saturdays, helping your family when they have medical emergencies, things, anything, whatever it is that you have, you start to look at things more intentionally and be like, what really matters? I was like, well, probably making money, probably paying my bills, and probably enabling myself to do the things that I actually wanna do and not just work or not just do whatever it is, fill in the blank crappy job that you don't wanna do, but you're passionate about or that you have your identity tied to. And, yeah, that was pretty much it for this week. I am really bummed for me.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:32]:
I'm really bummed for you. I'm really bummed for us that Hannah and I were not able to get that episode out to you in a timely manner. Like, I am really in my heart. I am really bummed about it. But 1 year from now, it is gonna be a banger. I promise. So make sure to be subscribed. Make sure in 1 year, we're gonna come back with that episode right here, YouTube, Spotify, on this podcast, whatever.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:03]:
We are gonna come with that episode and we're gonna bring the heat. Let me know what you thought about this episode, YouTube, Spotify. If you have a question, go to ask. That degree free dot CO forward slash question and ask your question. We're gonna do a question episode soon. Until next time, guys. Aloha.