The College 'Experience' Isn't Real (Degree Free #200)

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:00]:
Today, we are going to do what no one has done before, which is really address the college experience. This is something I'm very passionate about because personally, I have a lot of opinions on the subject, because this is the experience that I lived. And it's one that often when people talk about this online and they talk about what I missed out on by not going to college, I explained to them that, one, I did go and then I broke out, and then, two, I didn't miss anything. And that's because the experience that most people attribute to college is really just the experience of being 18 to 22 years old. And that's what we're going to talk about today, because so many parents send their kids to college because they're worried they're going to miss out on this experience that we're about to argue occurs no matter where they are.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:42]:
Yeah, I'm excited for today. I'm excited to dispel this myth. It is something that you and I have talked about a lot, and it is one of the number one things that we hear from both parents and from young adults themselves about why it's a good reason to go to college. And it is everything to do with, oh, you're going to meet more people, you're going to become cultured, you're going to go do more activities, you're going to meet your future spouse, all of those things. And today we are going to talk about why that is not the case.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:14]:
This took me a really long time to put into words, and a lot of it is just because parents, a lot of times ask about this in roundabout ways. They don't say specifically, do you think my child's going to miss out on the college experience, though? I have definitely heard that before. But most of the time, what they say, well, what about sports, or what about their spouse, or what about their friends, or what about them growing up? They ask about different factors that are all just kind of globbed into this nebulous college experience, which means different things to different people. And so today I want to pull out a few of the things that people tend to talk about and attribute to the college experience that really they're misattributing. Because what's actually occurring is your child is going from age 18 to age 22 or 24, depending on when they graduate college. And that is what people are mistaking for the college experience. It's the experience of growing up in that transitional age range. And I have a personal stake in this because I have everything that people tell you that you can only get from a college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:11]:
I have very close friendships that I made during this time. I also worked a ton of jobs and learned a lot and got a lot of experience during this time. I also met my spouse, I met you during this time. And I was able to try and do so many things that I know for a fact young adults are not able to do on college campuses. Because during this age range I was very free to do so. I had roommates just like you have in college. I learned interpersonal skills just like you learn in college when you live with people. And that's because during that age you learn these things.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:42]:
And the thing that I learned that a lot of college students don't learn is I learned a lot of professional discipline because I had to work. Not only did I learn that and gain that experience, but I also made money instead of losing losing money. And that's something that had a lot to do with the opportunities I was able to take later in life because I did not have debt. So I moved out when I was 18. I moved out of my parents house when I was 18 and I had already left college at this point, so I was working full time. So I moved out, moved into a little three bedroom house that I shared with two other roommates and then we got another roommate. So this is now a three bedroom house with four roommates. Was a lot of times when people talk about, oh well, you know, what about them moving out and having roommates, how are they going to do that? And I just go, well, you just have them, you just meet them, you just find them, find them.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:26]:
I personally met mine at church. So you can meet them at work, you can meet them at volunteer organizations, meet your roommates wherever there's people that you have something in common with that you might want to live with and do a little bit of life with. I didn't work with any of the people that I lived with, but I had just met them and we were all working different jobs. We moved in together and I continued to work, during which I learned a lot. And these girls I moved in with, I also became very, very close friends with. So much so that then we moved states together, which find me some college friends that are so are such good friends that they'll move across the country with you. And they did. And then I met you right before I turned 21 years old because we were working together, which statistically is way more likely than meeting you on a college campus.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:08]:
And then those same friendships that I made at that age I still am very, very good friends. They are my best friends in the world are the people that I met during that time. And it was just the time in life that I was going through that made me very free, made me have a lot of time so that I could invest in friendships. And that's why. And where I made those friends, it was not because of college. So the driver wasn't. The. Wasn't being in a dorm.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:34]:
It wasn't being on a college campus. The driver of these friendships was just that I was in this age where I was very free. I had a lot of time that I could say yes and do things that people were doing and go to different events, and that's the actual experience. So you can do that on a college campus, but it's very expensive to do so. And because I didn't spend so much money on a college campus, I was able to spend my money on things that were actually interesting to me and curate experiences and hobbies that were more interesting to me. And if you were to ask my mom about this, what she would tell you is that I moved out and I was independent, and so I took over. You know, I was paying my own bills, and I was covering my own expenses. And because of that, my decisions were a lot more in line with what I was actually earning.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:19]:
And then the work I needed to do in order to earn more and build my career. And I was also able to try a little. A few different things. I painted and sold artwork to pay rent. I worked multiple different jobs, and I got exposure to a lot of different things. And my mom didn't go into debt for that, and I didn't go into debt for that, which didn't close doors later in my life. I say this all because it's very important that college as a default is just not a good choice. It's too expensive.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:43]:
It doesn't do what it says. It. It doesn't. It doesn't do socialization. It doesn't do critical thinking. It doesn't do employment. And so using it as a default is just not wise unless you actually need to do it. And that's why I bring up a lot of this stuff, because it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:55]:
A lot of parents send their kids for these social reasons and not necessarily for even employment. And that might be secondary to some people, but they believe that their kids will miss out if they don't do this. People will just say, oh, you know, you're just an exception to this rule. Don't. Young adults who skip college aren't they More lonely, Don't they not meet their spouses? All this kind of stuff. And so I want to get into the numbers a little bit because this is something you don't care about this as much as me. And I think it's because I just think it's a lot more of a sticking point in people's minds than a lot of people realize. And it's the spouse thing that's such a sticky myth that you're going to meet your spouse in college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:27]:
And a lot of it, to be fair, is because more people used to meet on college campuses. So a lot of parents maybe met their spouse on a college campus because online dating was not as common. So now about half of people are going to meet online and the rest, a lot of people go, well, surely college is the next bracket that you would meet. So it's online, but it's not college next. Not at all. All right, so you walk into a room of 100American couples, less than one of those couples will have met on a college campus. It's just not common anymore. And people are sending their kids to college thinking, oh, well, that's going to.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:00]:
That's where they're going to meet their spouse. And that's not at all what's going to happen. In fact, your child is more likely, statistically speaking, to marry somebody who they know from your neighborhood, a child, you know, a peer from your neighborhood, than they are going to meet their spouse on a college campus. And they're more likely to meet their spouse at a bar, they're more likely to meet their spouse at work, they're more likely to meet their spouse volunteering, literally anything. College is the bottom rung of where you're going to meet your spouse. That's just kind of how it is now. And a lot of people just think, oh, my child's gonna just go to college, they're gonna grow up, they're gonna meet a spouse, they're gonna get a good job from this. And just none of those things are panning out.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:35]:
I just think a lot of parents just don't understand. The landscape has completely changed for not just employment, not just education, but also the social aspect. It's just not there anymore. It's not getting those results.

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:45]:
Yeah, I definitely agree with you. I don't, not that I don't care about it, but I don't care about it as much as you do. But this is interesting. We speak with parents of 18 to 20 plus year olds, college age, quote, unquote, kids all day, every day. It's literally all we do. And you hear it all the time. Oh well, they still might go to college. I still want them to go to college.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:10]:
Whatever. They went to college because possibly and it was always for maybe not to meet their spouse, maybe not to meet somebody, but to be socialized. It's like literally so that they can meet connections, so that they can go make friends, so that they can have lasting relationships. And at least on one axis here, which is your life partner, your most important relationship. That's just not true. Yeah, it's just not true. And I think that you are right. I would like to.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:40]:
And I don't know. This data set is from 2023 here. I wonder what it was like before. And I think that you are right. It probably has something to do with online dating. Possibly. I mean, 61% of couples have met online. And so I would like to see before the Internet, I think that all

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:01]:
of the generation, it was eharmony. And I remember this, that I feel like I kind of remember this happening. Eharmony used to be like the one. And then you had eharmony and then he had match and then he had like plenty of fish, I think with plenty of fish. And then Tinder. I remember when Tinder. I remember when Tinder came online. I remember those days.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:17]:
You and I talk about this a lot because we're like, we might not have met if we hadn't met before that happened because it totally changed the way that people meet. You know, we. We did meet like the old fashioned way, I guess, which is like we were just at work and we met each other. But all of that date online dating stuff got really prevalent and it took over. I mean, in the, you know, in that short 10 year span.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:35]:
Yeah, I think I remember this has no data behind this. This is just me thinking outline. Yeah, exactly. This was some dude with a microphone.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:42]:
Podcast equipment should be more expensive.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:44]:
Yeah, Source trust me, bro. And from source, trust me bro, I'm pretty sure that before that it was coworkers. It was like coworkers. Grocery store was like, yeah, grocery store. But I think coworkers is like one of the highest. And it was just because spend more time. Spend the most time with coworkers. Exactly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:07]:
Yeah, I think so. That makes a lot of sense. And also if you think about it too, you're working on a common goal. Like you have shared interest and so it shared shared activity rather.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:16]:
So I mean, for. For me, this definitively says if you are trying to send at least on this one axis if you're trying to send your child to college because, so that they can meet their spouse, of which we've had conversations with parents, they're

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:29]:
like, I met my wife in college or I met my husband in college. I never would met him. Like, yeah, but, but that was a long time ago.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:33]:
It was almost always, Almost always a conversation is like, not so much we're sending them so that they can meet somebody. It is more like if we don't, if we don't send them, where are we, where are they going to meet them?

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:47]:
Which is valid question, right?

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:48]:
Exactly. And so it's, it's almost never. It's not, not like, okay, we're sending you to college so that you can find a bride.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:55]:
Yeah. What's the, what's the movie? A Fiddler on the Roof or Seven Brothers or Seven Brides or Seven Brothers or whatever. Like, we're not in, we're not in Russia right now. We're not doing bride price. Like, it's just a lot of people do, do have that as some motivation for what they're saying.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:09]:
And so it's always, if not college, where are they going to meet somebody? And definitively right here, not. There's no offense to anybody listening to us. I'm, I am also this. But like, you're old and like, when is the last time that you've met somebody?

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:23]:
If for some reason they are trying to go back on the market right now, they'll realize quickly that the only way to meet people for the most part is online. Actually, this is just. I have a bone to pick. So I'm going to pick it really quick and then we'll move on. But people are like, why are you talking about that? I'm like, because. Because that's a huge part of why people send their kids into $100,000 worth of debt.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:38]:
It's part of the trance.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:40]:
Yes.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:41]:
It's part of the quote unquote complete package that you think that you're paying for and that like they're charging you for, like they're charging you a pretty penny for these things. Like all of these things are the amenities that you get when you send your child to college. You get all of these things. One of those things is meeting people potentially and then, you know, slice that down a little bit further. Potentially meeting the person that they're going to spend the rest of their life with.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:09]:
Yes, potentially, yes. My sub bone to pick here is that as somebody who's interested in the market and who's interested in what people are doing. I believe that within the next five, 10 years, some bright person is going to create a matchmaking service because it's obvious that's what online dating is. Online dating is just matchmaking. It's by an algorithm. People are sick of the Internet. They're sick of AI, they're sick of it. They're just going to go back to human matchmakers.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:30]:
Like we're going to go back to like Mulan, where you go to the matchmaker and then she matches you up with somebody of similar, like, goals. There's a tiktoker who she does this for like a specific demographic and they're older, obviously, but she does this. And when I saw how the type of traction she was getting, I was like, oh, this is far and away going to take over. And parents have shifted now where they don't view college as the most important thing anymore. And once they realize that it's not even career, a lot of the times, like it can be career, but actually your relationships are more important. And once people realize and they get the priorities back in order, which is the thing that can change your child's life, is who they end up being with long term. And once they realize that the money that is going to go out of colleges because the funding has changed, that money is going to go back into matchmaking. I'm going to say this on record because when this does happen, and it will, I want to be the first person who predicted it anyway.

Ryan Maruyama [00:13:17]:
But now let's talk about friends. Because that's the thing they say even if they're not worried about a spouse, they're worried about friends. They're worried about friendships. Like if my child doesn't go to college, how are they gonna make friends? Which is just a funny thing to say. But that said, we need to talk about it because people are very worried about this. But Gen Z is incredible at creating what's called third places. And these they are, by and large, Gen Z is doing what's revolutionary, which is they are going back. The future is the past.

Ryan Maruyama [00:13:47]:
They are going back to the way things used to be. They're playing intramural sports, community sports. They are joining gyms, they are holding dances, they're literally. They're literally having dances. They are doing crochet clubs, they are doing D and D meetups, which is, for those of you listening that don't know what that is, it's a. It's a board game kind of. Maybe I'm.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:05]:
Yeah. Is that you're trying to inform people about What Dungeons and Dragons is when you have no idea what Dungeons and Dragons is.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:12]:
It's a board game. It's a board game. It's a strategy game. It's a strategy board game, et cetera. There's a catan with like. With like pyrotechnics. Anyway, whatever. It's.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:23]:
It's a game. People like it. It's fun. It's. Those people are a lot smarter than me, and so I'm gonna leave that to them. And so people. People get together to play these games. They do book clubs.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:32]:
They do book clubs. I've seen people, young Gen Z kids at our library that are quilting. I have seen that. I've seen it with my own eyes. They go to sewing classes. Like I said, the dancing is a really weird thing that's come back. Not weird in a bad way, but weird in a cool way because they're trying to just meet people in real life. And then a lot of Gen Z are going back to church because it's just the third place that exists.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:50]:
And so this is going to give rise, I believe, to a lot of people making their friends as they currently are in real life instead of online.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:57]:
Yeah. Well, you got to think that young adults in college, now, they were Covid babies, or not babies, but they were Covid kids and they were in high school while Covid was going on, or at least like the tail end of COVID And it just. Depending on where you are from and depending on where you lived at the time during COVID it was a lot longer and a lot more stressful or a lot more isolating. For some places it was literally two weeks to stop the spread, and for some places it was two years.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:30]:
And ruin everything.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:30]:
Yeah, exactly. It took forever.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:32]:
Yeah.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:32]:
And so they are going the exact opposite of that now. They're out of that and they want real connections with real people. One of the things that I also think, just like everything else, young people always want to go counterculture, counter everything that their parents did and everything that their parents are doing. And so largely for Gen Z, their parents went to college, A lot of them went to college, and they got into student loan debt. A lot of them went to college, got into student loan debt, and are still in student loan debt to this day. Having a child who is now about to enter and do this and go into college age, and they're like, no, I don't want this for my life. And so they have to think about, like, what to do now. Whatever it is that you did, whatever it is that you're doing.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:19]:
Probably going to do the opposite because you probably did the opposite of your parents as well.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:23]:
To bring up the Cicero of our generation, Tim Dillon. He did say this. He did call this. He did this long rant where he was talking about. He said the kids are going to rebel. They're going to rebel by moving back to small towns and getting stable jobs and getting married and going back to church. And it's like. Well, it kind of does look like that's what's going on.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:39]:
And you know, honestly, good for Gen Z, because like I said, there's just so much out here. And I think a lot of parents don't realize this, but I do have some experience with this because when I turned 18 and I moved out, I didn't stop learning things. That's ridiculous. I went to public speaking meetups, I went to bachata classes, I went to salsa dancing classes. There was. I've taken both east and west coast swing classes. I went to Japanese language meetups to try to learn. Japanese language meetups exist all over the place, by the way.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:06]:
I went to small business chamber of commerce meetings. And again, there's just so much like, there's chess clubs, there's maker spaces in some places, you know, they have prototype fabrication machines and you're making friends or you can just play sports. You know, community sports is huge too. There's soccer, there's run club, there's yoga. There's all this different stuff. And a lot of people just underutilize, I think, resources that are in their local area from just a lack of knowledge. They just don't know that this exists. And your child can build a thriving social life with just a couple things.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:34]:
And I didn't even talk about like volunteering, which is a really easy way to have a sense of belonging, make really good network. Usually people that volunteer are older as well. And depending on where you volunteer, that's a really good place for your child to get the type of exposure that they'll need to eventually get a career and just network. So that's a huge thing. But also, if they pick something that they really do care about, what a rewarding way to live and what a good purpose that that can give them as well. And so there's just so much out here that can give your child a much more vibrant and complex and also varied in age and better habits than just binge drinking on a college campus. Because I'm sorry, but the social experience, and I'm like, the social experience of college is not one that I would pay for. That's definitely for sure.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:17]:
Again, I'm old, but it's not what I would pay for. It's not one that I would pay for for a child when I know that with the slightest bit of just looking, you can find things that they're actually going to be around wise people, they're actually going to be around professionals. They actually are going to meet people their age that have similar interests, which they're much more likely to be friends with and. Or get married to. And that's something that I think is really not talked about a lot. I want to make one final point about this too. But if you think that sending your child to college is going to get them a thriving social life and the only time that they are going to have this is while they're on a college campus, when they leave, it evaporates, by the way. They have no ability to do this themselves because it was curated for them, it was on campus.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:00]:
And so you go. And many college students experience this. They. There's different names for it, but they call it like grad depression because they leave and they suddenly, all their friends just leave and they have no ability to naturally go find these connections themselves. And now they're all of a sudden, they gotta move, they gotta go to a new city and they have literally no idea how to make friends. Whereas for me, and this is just my story, it's very easy for me. You've seen me. It's very easy for me to make friends.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:24]:
I just, I'm like. I don't know, I'm going to a strange. I'll go. I'll go somewhere by myself and I'll do whatever and I'll just meet. I'll just meet people there. I'll just talk to them. Why? Because that's how you meet people. And it's a skill that you kind of have to build.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:36]:
I wasn't good at that at first, but you just go places you're uncomfortable and you just try new things. And because I did that so often, it's not really difficult for me to do it now. And it probably never will be.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:45]:
Yeah. You're saying that it is because they've met people through college and that the through line or the shared interest, the fact that they were together in the first place was college. And when you remove college out of there via you graduating or breaking out, deciding not to go anymore, then you're no longer friends.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:08]:
Yeah. As student athletes are a really good example of that. Because when they go to college, they're there to play sports. And so because they've, they've even got that team aspect into college when they leave, a lot of them feel that, that lack of, of social structure very keenly because there's nowhere else to get it really outside of college unless you go pro. Right. You just don't have that many kids who are not like they're on full ride scholarships that are not trying to go pro would be much better served Instead of going to college to play sports, to go play a sport locally where you're actually building network in the community that you're intending to live and build your life in, instead of just having the rug pulled out from under you and then having this identity crisis at 24, with a ton of debt, with a degree that there's a 22% chance that you're even going to work in that field and not even that's going to make your money back, but just a 22% chance of working it. It just doesn't make a lot of sense the way that we do this now. And it's a lot of it is under the presupposition that you can't have a social life unless you go to college and, or that college is the best place for young people to build a social life.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:03]:
Which is just silly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:04]:
Yeah. For myself, I actually went to college four years, four and a half years it took me. For me, this totally rings true, exactly what you're saying here about not meeting people from college. Because to this day I don't have a single friend from college. Not a single friend. And I went to college, I went to all my classes or you know, at least, you know, I went to some classes, I took the same classes with all these people going up, you know, ensure I worked full time. And so maybe I wasn't the most like social being there was. Like, I didn't, I didn't have too many clubs or anything like that, but group projects, all these things, you know, texting people for this class, notes here or you know, hey, we have an exam, this, this or we have a group project due here.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:53]:
All of that, I participate in all of it. Only one person I can think of that I ended up talking to outside of college. And that person, it was only because I saw him, he was a couple years older than me, we were in a class together, we were in econ class together. And then I saw him when I got my internship. He was actually working at the place I got an internship that was like the only person outside of college that I've ever seen. All of my other friends from that time were from other activities, whether it's from work or a lot of my friends, like, to this day, a lot of my friends I actually know from like high school or middle school.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:34]:
Again, that's funny, because that fits into the. You're more likely to marry somebody who you knew in elementary school or high school or lives in your neighborhood than you are in college. I think a lot of parents don't realize now, too. Even with the prevalence of phones, it's really different from when they went to college. It's very easy. Even when I was in college, before I broke out, it was very easy to slip on and slip off of a campus and never really talk to anybody. It's like, not that hard, actually, at all. You can go onto a college campus, not talk to the professor, not talk to anybody in your class, and then just leave.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:04]:
Even if you live on campus, you could go to your dorm. Especially now, you know, phones and the Internet and just everything. You don't have to talk to anybody. And I think if you go on a college campus now, what you'll see is a lot of kids are just. Yeah, they even. They meet on dating apps on campus. They don't even meet, you know, that's how little they meet each other.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:22]:
From my high school friends that I still keep in touch with to. Till today, I can only think of one of them. Not that I have a ton of friends from high school, but I can only think of one person who has any friends still from college, from college. Just any of them. All of them. They either met them at work, like, while they were in college, or after they finish college or from high school, middle school. Like, I know these people because we grew up together type of thing. But all the people that we.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:51]:
That I don't know, other than this one friend from that one friend. I've met two friends of his that are from college. Other than that, not a single person hangs out with anybody from college.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:03]:
Right.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:03]:
And I think it's exactly to what. To what you're saying, which is it. Is what you put into it also

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:08]:
the age that you're at. Because if you think about the friends that you made, you actually do have a lot of friends from that time in your life.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:14]:
No, I have a ton, but they're just not majority. Majority of the friends that I speak to to this day. Like, the majority of the people that I still choose, like, not work, not. Not work friends. And those people are my friends too. For sure. But like, you know, we have something in common, that type of thing. But I'm talking about totally casual, just friends.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:32]:
Majority of those are from this time of my life, but they were from work, they were from, I worked in a restaurant and I met these people and we are still friends, are still friends to this day.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:45]:
And that's just because of the time in life. It's because you were between the ages of 18 and 22 and that's, and you meet and make friends during that time. So I'm not arguing that the time's not important. I actually think that it is quite important. However, I think the fact that, and I'm about to say something that's going to sound really stupid, but your child is going to make friends, make connections no matter where they are. Because before people were mostly on college campuses right after high school. They still did that, they still made friends, they still got married. In fact, they made more friends, had closer relationships and more people got married before we were sending all of our high school seniors onto college campuses.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:22]:
It's pretty incredible actually that colleges have co opted the idea that they are the gateway to socialization because it looks pretty clear that they've done a bad, if they are, that they've done a real bad job of it. And if they're not that, then people are paying way too much for what they think they're going to get.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:37]:
Now this is a really interesting stat where if it were true that we meet our friends and that our children and that college age kids meet their friends in this period of time in college, then why is it that 57% of college students say they're lonely?

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:55]:
That's kind of what I was just saying is if colleges are going to claim that they are the place to get socialized to meet people, then why do the majority of students on campus feel alone? I would argue it's because they're away from home, they're away from everybody they've known, they're away from their current friends and their family, they're with a bunch of strangers, they have very little shared experience, they don't have a lot of direction, which you and I both know from the launch program. Most college students have no idea whether on a college camp they have no idea what they're doing there. Like, I don't know, I need a degree to get a job, I guess. And that's about as far as it goes. As we just said, it's very easy to not meet people on a college campus. But that said, even if you do participate in the clubs and stuff like that. When college stops, you're going to lose all of that. So all of that four to six years of relationship building for the most part for most people is going to just evaporate overnight.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:42]:
And then you have to move or you have to go back to wherever you were. And now you're starting all over when you could have been building. That's all. You know, that's like half a decade. That's not a small amount of time. And you could be building relationships, friendships, meeting people. And now that I think about it, this uprooting of young people and then moving them around like that seems like a recipe. It does seem like a recipe for loneliness.

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:03]:
No wonder so many of them feel that way. I've never really thought about it until I was talking to somebody recently and they just said, yeah, and then when college is over, you lose all of that. And I was like, oh man, that's true. And I've seen that play out in people's lives where all of a sudden they have nobody and it's very lonely and then they have to go somewhere and start over with nobody around. Whereas you don't experience that if you just start building your life and your career and your friendships and your relationships in a place where you're planning to live.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:29]:
I guess I did want to be a little bit more accurate here. This is from Active Minds reported in Inside higher ed. In 2026 of this year, February 2026, 45% of respondents said sometimes they feel lonely. 12% said always. And so that's where we get the 57% reported feeling lonely.

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:47]:
So how this could look instead for your child is they could be wild, not going into debt. That is going to alleviate a ton of stress and anxiety, by the way, and make it easier for them to make friends. But if they just pick a couple local meetups or clubs or activities they're going to do in a given week and then they get a strategic entry level job, they are not going to lose their entire network and all of their relationships and friendships in four to six years. And more than that, they are going to build strong ones where they are. And so they will be far ahead of young adults who are going to college and doing this. And then they just uproot their lives. They have to move for work or whatever. Now they're starting all the way over in their mid-20s, which is a really hard thing to do, really isolating thing to do and unnecessarily so.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:29]:
And it's Starting to become really obvious in our society that the loneliness is not. It's. It's. It's killing people. And with no exaggeration, it is the worst thing for you. People are not supposed to be lonely. They're not supposed to be isolated like this. And it's making people crazy, it's making people nuts.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:45]:
It's not adding anything to our lives. All right, so hopefully what you took away from this was that your child does not have to go to college to have a rich social life where they are learning, where they are being challenged, where they're building real relationships, gaining network that will help them to move up in their career, that will help them to build a life that they actually like. And that's the thing, the picture I want to paint for parents is like, what if your child didn't have all this depression, didn't have all this anxiety, didn't have to do any of this? What if this, all of this was optional? It is. It is all optional, by the way. You do not have to do these things. They can stay, they can move to a town that they actually want to live in, and they can start building relationships by going to meetups, by going to Toastmasters, learning skills, volunteering, going and playing sports. They can play sports. They can do literally every single thing that a college student can do, and they can do it without going into a hundred thousand dollars worth of debt.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:29]:
And it can give them this life that has a lot more depth, a lot more variety, and a lot more meaning to it than this existence that these poor college students are having right now. And they don't even have to be doing it. And what they think it's going to get them on the other end is what your child can get now without having to do any of those things. And so I hope that's really empowering and encouraging to parents, because if you look, when we do this in our launch program, we'll kind of look around and see if there's some. Some social aspect that matches a young adult's interest that they can then start going to that will help them to build those connections and start building and doing the things that they actually want in life. And that helps a ton with their friendships and their relationships and all of the social aspect that colleges promise and then don't deliver.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:12]:
Yeah. So stop optimizing for, you know, wondering if college is the right fit, and instead optimize for. I mean, like, it sounds silly, but, like, optimize for is like, is he or she in the room with humans? On a regular schedule, ideally with something in common with these people. When you are outsourcing it to college, and we've had conversations with the parents every week about this, when you're outsourcing this to college, that's effectively what you're saying. You're saying, okay, college is going to put my child around people that are like minded, going into the same place, etc. Why don't we just tear that piece off and go find that in their personal social life?

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:53]:
Yes. And the thing is, your child is going to go through this transitional age range anyway. Your child's going to have the college experience because they're going to be between 18 and 22 years old. So they are going to get more mature. They are going to meet friends, they're going to build network, they're going to meet probably their spouse. The question is whether they're going to spend $108,000 on a degree that they don't need to do that exact same thing. And the thing is, colleges are not even delivering those things now. So if you're going, wow, this totally changed my perspective about this and this feels very empowering because I didn't realize that we're not trading out these things.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:25]:
Actually we would gain a bunch back and we do it for way less. Which is going to free up your child to take more and better opportunities and not start their adult life in debt. Then degreefree.com launch. What we help young adults do is figure out what they need from their work, what exactly careers will fit that, where they are and then what skills they need to learn and then how they're going to learn those skills and build a 12 month plan that helps them to launch and start that career.

Hannah Maruyama [00:31:49]:
Yeah. And that's pretty much it for this week, guys. Until next time. Aloha.