What College Will Take From Your Daughter (Degree Free #201)

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:00]:
Welcome back, everybody. Today we have a show.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:03]:
We have a show. Some people are going to like it, very few people, most people are going to hate every part of the show. So let's just do it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:10]:
This is the worst advice we give young women. And this is a topic that you feel really strongly about.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:15]:
I do. And by the way, the worst advice we give young women is the name of the episode, not something that we do at Degree Free. We do the opposite of that. But I want to talk about this because recently I saw that George Camel, who is a Ramsey personality, he's been interviewing high schoolers. And it seems to me like somebody at the Ramsey team has been watching Degree Free content, which is good and encouraging to see. They finally gotten with the script because for years Ramsey Solutions, the Ramsey people, Dave Ramsey himself, have been telling people to go to college without debt. And when people talk about how difficult it is to pay for college, what they do is they help them to restructure, to buy degrees that they do not need without debt. Which is an unwise thing to do.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:56]:
Because if you think about it a little bit differently, it would be the same as watching somebody on the Ramsey team help somebody to restructure their life, pull money out of their Roth IRAs or extra jobs in order to buy a Ferrari because they don't want to have debt. It's very similar. And they have been giving that type of advice for 20 years. And I do want to say I respect Dave Ramsey a lot as a businessman, as an entrepreneur, he takes really good care of his employees. I have heard story upon story of the types of things that they do to care for their employees and the people that work for them and to care for their audience. I think that as a, as a company, the work they do is very important. It's objectively incredible that Dave Ramsey has built their business the way he has with no debt over such a long time. So I respect his savvy, his morals, his ethics, all of those things.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:39]:
However, he has always been blind on the college issue, always. And the way that he talks about it and the way that his personalities talk about it for years has been, of course you go to college, you just do it without debt. That's what they tell people to do. They tell people, oh, you go to Community College, 86% failure rate on that. They tell people, oh, just, you know, go to a four year state school, 90% of the kids going, don't need to be there at all, at all. And the reason I say this is because in high school I went through the Financial Peace University Orange Handbook that helps you do financial planning and financial literacy. In high school, I sat through this class. It was taught by a baseball coach.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:16]:
His name was Mr. Farmer. And he taught this class. And I was in this class, and we went through this Orange Handbook. And. And when they talked about college in that handbook, what they did was they talked about how to pay for it without debt. There was never a whisper, an inkling, a thought that you would not go. That was not an option.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:30]:
It was just, how do you do this without debt? That is the whole messaging of all of their handbooks. That's the way they talk about it. So they do talk about the loans being predatory. They do talk about all of that. But what they don't address is, do you need to go at all? Because the vast majority of people do not. They always presuppose that it's a good thing, that's a good use of time, that everybody should go. And recently I've noticed that they've kind of flipped their tone. Specifically George Camel.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:54]:
It seems like they broke him off and they're having him kind of go, oh, well, you know, you're going to college without a plan. Well, that's crazy. And it's like, you guys have been telling people to do that for 20 years. Like, I still to this day, when I hear them answer questions sometimes about this, they will tell people how to restructure their entire lives financially in order to put kids through college without ever asking why they're going to college. Like, I've heard them do this multiple times. I've reacted to these clips where they do this. It's wild. And so George Camel is interviewing these high school students.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:21]:
And in this clip, he kind of slips a little bit. Because the messaging of these clips in general is like, oh, you really need to know what you're doing. Like, you really need to know why you're going to college. And then he'll say, well, you know, the trades, like, pay super well, which is like the play now. Yeah. So George Campbell is interviewing this. I think she's a senior. She's about to graduate high school.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:37]:
And I think she's a little unprepared for the interview as well. So I think she's a little bit nervous. You can tell it in the clip. And he asks her, like, what are you gonna do? Or what do you wanna do? And she said, well, you know, I just wanna be a, you know, stay at home mom. And he's like, okay. And he's like, well, how are you gonna do that? Which, you know, good question, but I think it's a difficult thing to answer on the spot. And we know this cause we talk to young adults, like a lot of them do not do well when you ask them these questions on the spot. Because if you do it, asking these questions on the spot without any warmup, they will give you like crazy answers.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:08]:
And a lot of it is just because they feel like their judgment and a lot of what they think and their values and like, they need to be impressive, but they need to be right and they just can't say the wrong thing. And basically he just kind of takes what she says and runs with it and just said, oh, you want to be a stay at home wife? Oh, so you want to marry rich? Oh, it sounds like you need a backup plan. He implies in the clip that the backup plan should be college. Like, she needs to go to school is basically it. And it's just a reflex because that's been their messaging for 20 years. And I think that in general in these clips, he's done really well sticking to the script that they've written for him about, hey, like, yeah, you just need a plan. You need to know what you're doing, bud. Like, he talks to a kid that wants to be a broadcaster.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:43]:
He says, oh, well, you know, how are you going to do that? How are you going to pay for that? How much is that going to pay? He talks to some other girls like, oh, well, you know, what do you want to be? And oh, I don't know. And then how much are you willing to pay for this degree? Blah, blah, blah. Well, what about the trades? You know, didn't you know those are high earning? Which she does every time. But this particular young lady, because she wants to be a stay at home mom, he doesn't really know how to do anything except for the reflex that they have, which is, oh, you, you need a backup. Like, you should, you know, you should backup plan. And really what he means is go to college. I want to talk about this because as somebody who went through the financial peace curriculum in high school when I was this girl's age, a lot of the messaging towards young women from all different sides of society right now is if you want to be a stay at home mom or stay at home wife, you need a backup plan. And that backup plan should always be college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:26]:
If your daughter wants to be a stay at home mom or stay at home wife, she needs to go to college, she needs to have a degree as a backup plan. Never rely on a man, blah, blah, blah, whatever. All these things. And the reason that I want to address this is because college as a backup plan is the absolute worst thing you could do. If your child has clear knowledge and clear goals that what they want out of their life is not to be career oriented, that's bonkers. It's crazy. And it's going to waste their time, it's going to waste their money, it's going to waste their energy. And oftentimes what we have seen happen, and I've seen this happen with friends and I've seen this happen with peers where they are then robbed of the ability to have those family oriented life goals because of their decision to go to college, because of time, because of debt, and because now they have to work in order to justify the degree and the opportunity cost and all of these different things.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:14]:
And so I want to give to parents a different alternative that is not, oh, your child's just going to be uneducated or she's not going to be able to provide for herself or she has no backup plan. The backup plan is not college for young women that want to be stay at home moms. That's insane and irresponsible. You have to equip them with, with skills that are high earning and in demand. None of those are gonna be found on a college campus. And I wanna talk about this today because this impacted me and it impacts a ton of young women. And no one, literally nobody I think but us, talks about the realities of okay, if those are your goals, cause there's absolutely nothing wrong with having those as goals. But you have to plan then for a high leverage skill that will sustain you or help you to bring money into your household while you have small children, even if you don't use it, that you're then able to roll and then get back into the workforce if later you should want to.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:58]:
And you have to think about this stuff. It takes a lot of planning, it takes a lot of strategy and no one's willing to do that. There's all you need to backup plan, go get some degree that you won't use. It's going to cost you a hundred thousand dollars and then keep you from being able to stay home with your kids when they're little. And it just drives me nuts.

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:11]:
Okay, so there's a lot there to unpack. Before we talk about the downstream of everything that you're talking about, I wanted to back up and talk about Ramsey for a second. It's no wonder why he's Been so consistent over the years on the college thing. And it has taken a really, really long time because you can go back and find clips as recently of like a couple years ago, a couple of weeks ago, of them just reflexively saying exactly what you were saying, which is like, go to college, go to college, go to college, Figure out a way to pay for it. And it's really not even like your child go to college. It's like the parent calling in because the people that listen to Ramsey aren't Gen Z. Yeah. People that are a little bit older than us that are, that are calling in and like, oh, what do I do with my, what do I do with my college age kid? And then it's like, okay, well, you have to figure out how to pay for college because college is the thing to do.

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:56]:
It's no wonder, and it's no mystery why he's taken so long to reverse this. And the reversal, it's gonna be, it's gonna be difficult for them because it's so deeply ingrained in what they believe. Because you have to remember that Ramsey built such a large company. He did. He built such a large company. He's a billionaire from doing one thing, and he just keeps doing it. And he's been doing it for 35 plus years. He's basically just tells people, spend less than you make.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:27]:
Save your money, pay off your debt, don't go into debt.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:31]:
All good things, all true things. And you know, it's just the baby steps, right?

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:34]:
Well, possibly good things, possibly bad things. I mean, like, it's good for those people that, that it works for. Basically, he's a maniac.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:42]:
Like you mean that in a good way, right?

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:44]:
No, I just mean, like, he's a radical. I just mean that he's. I just mean that he is. There's no judgment placed on it. There's no value.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:50]:
Radical.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:50]:
He's radical. And those that know Ramsey know that he's a radical. And like, how radical is he? Well, he was on Graham Stephan's podcast, like the Iced Coffee Hour or something like that, and I'm pretty sure. And they asked him, if Somebody offered you $1 billion loan with a 0% interest rate and pay it off and whatever the terms are, it doesn't matter. At 0%, it doesn't matter. It's free money. Would you, would you take it? You know, you literally just take a billion dollars, you put it into the stock market, you put it into something. Whatever your appetite is, you know what I mean? Like, whatever your appetite for risk is.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:22]:
Can put into treasuries, something very CDs, doesn't matter. Put into something very, very safe. Get a little bit of alpha. Get a little. Get a little bit of return on it, and then you pay it back. And then you just make that. You just make the differential on the money. And he's like, no, I want to do that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:37]:
Right. Like, it's impossible not to admire.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:39]:
That's a. That's a radical. That's a radical point of view.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:42]:
Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:42]:
Right. And so here we are, we're, like, surprised that it's taken him 20 plus years to wake up to the. To the stuff that's shifting right underneath him. Right. So the thing. The thing is, is, like, he can be right about all his principles. All his finance principles, he can be right about. Sure.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:59]:
I guess I feel like it doesn't make sense because he kind of doesn't think about the student debt part from the purchase perspective. He doesn't. He doesn't really think about that here. He doesn't really plan that in. So I think that that's a. That's a little odd. But. But you can see that, okay, he's very maniacal, and he's very much in this camp, and that's what he believes.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:18]:
So why are we surprised that it's taken him over two decades to see, like, look, something that is foundational as, like, spend less than you make. Don't take out debt, Pay off your current debt. He found a formula, and that is going to be true literally forever. He based all of his ideas about college on what he knew when he was growing up. He's a million years old. He's. He's a dinosaur. He's dead.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:42]:
I mean, like, he's. He's like a dead person.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:44]:
How I feel, how I feel talking about him, it almost feels like, sacrilegious because I was raised in a Dave Ramsey household. So, like, the envelopes and stuff, my family did that. Like, my family did that. And I went through the curriculum in high school, so even saying, like, even criticizing him feels a little bit wrong to me. It feels, like, sacrilegious. But this part, it's just so unavoidable that it's a huge blind spot. And you're right, his age has a lot to do with it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:05]:
He just didn't update on a lot of parents listening to this right now. You haven't updated your view of the world and the view of the value of the college degree, the underlying asset or like, he believes to be an asset that you are Purchasing. He never updated his assumption about the value value of the underlying asset. It's no wonder why he's not a

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:24]:
guy that reevaluates because he often doesn't have to.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:26]:
You're right. He came up with this thing, right? He's. It's like the Dunning Krueger effect, right? Like, I'm very super right about this, and so therefore I'm going to be super right about that. Like, you're dead wrong, dog. You are super wrong. You're giving people really bad advice. You're putting, you're putting their family in jeopardy and you're pushing these young women into lives that they don't want. Okay, so they're coming around and that's great.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:44]:
But now to come around to what you're saying, I agree with you. That, and we've seen it, not only personally, but professionally as well. We have. People come on the phone, they talk about other people's families, they talk about their family, they talk about their experience. The beautiful thing about what we do is that everybody comes to us from a different life perspective. Everybody comes from different avenues. The parents that come to us, they're like, yeah, I didn't want this for my life. I didn't want this for my life.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:10]:
And then I went, I got a college degree. I went into debt. My child is now 18 years old. My child is now 19 years old who just did one year. I just paid off my student loans five years ago and my child still paying them off. And my child's 19.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:24]:
And more than that too, I think, at least for those parents, what a lot of them will say, they'll say, well, you know, at least I met my spouse there. But that's not true anymore. So that was one like kind of band aid. They're like, but, you know, whatever, it's cause I met, you know, I met my spouse there. That's not even going to happen for their daughters. And I just want to be clear too. We're not going to talk about young men in this podcast, in this specific episode. We're not talking about them.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:46]:
Talking about young women specifically and the way that this messaging affects them.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:49]:
To finish off what I was saying, to put a point on what you were saying, which was, yes, a lot of these young women today, they are taking out student loan debt when they have goals that are not, I mean, you said not even career oriented, but like, yes, the reason why majority of the people going to college, the reason why you're going to college is because you believe that it will Pay off. You believe that there's a positive financial roi. And the way that you get a positive financial ROI is more than likely the most direct path is that you gain employable skills or you gain an employable resume, you buy an employable credential and then therefore you get employed. And then that pays off for itself.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:34]:
And already there comes, oh, no, it's for education. Rob says, no, it's not. Parents send their kids to college because they think it's going to give them a good job. It doesn't do that anymore. That's what we're talking about and so forth.

Ryan Maruyama [00:13:43]:
The young women that are not career focused or for those that, you know, know, hey, I eventually want to be a stay at home mom, or possibly I just want to work part time, that type of thing. Eventually when I find the right partner and then when I find that person by going to college, by doing this blanket advice, say, hey, just go to college, have a quote unquote backup plan. And having spending a hundred thousand dollars and five and a half years of your life as a backup plan is a really, really terrible idea because those decisions are going to cost you the very thing that your child said she wanted.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:20]:
Yes.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:21]:
That time where your economics could literally be going the opposite way. Your child's economics could literally be going the opposite way. Instead of them paying, they're getting paid. Instead of them not learning skills, they're learning skills. And then instead of taking out debt, they're making money. And then eventually when they meet their significant other, they get married, they have to have a conversation of like, yo,

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:46]:
how's this going to look?

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:46]:
What are the bills? What are we doing? And then she's like, okay, well I have this amount of money in student loan debt. This is how much I have to pay every month. And then the other one is like, I don't want to be a stay at home mom. It's like done. Right, okay, well, that, it's much easier,

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:02]:
yes, it's much easier. If your daughter, if her goal is to be a stay at home mom and what you have done to give her a backup plan is now equip her with debt that now she is going to carry into this marriage that she's hopefully going to have because that's her goal, then when she does that, it's going to keep her from being able to stay home with her children. It's going to bring financial stress into their household. Because financial stress is the number one cause of stress. And loans are not a good. Debt is not a good thing. And so that is something that I don't think people are really thinking about. The cost of that and also just the stress that that brings on young people when they're starting their lives out and trying to build with the goal of trying to build families.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:45]:
That's not a good thing. You do not want to have people in that situation because it does not help them. It actively hurts them and it closes options, it closes doors, and it makes their lives harder than it needs to be. Now, I want to be very clear about this. The reason we're talking about this in this episode is because there's a very specific strategy to employ. If your daughter says, I want to be a stay at home mom in the future. And it is not do nothing is very much the opposite of that. I actually think for young women and have very strong opinions about this.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:10]:
And again, a lot of the reason I do is because literally nobody talks about this. It's like this taboo subject and we just pretend, oh, you know what? Young women should act like they're young men. And if they want to be stay at home moms, they should still act like young men and they should go take on a lot of debt. And then they will hopefully be able to build a career after they graduate college, which is going to take them four to six years, and then they'll be able to pay them off, you know, as they work mid career. Except for the thing is, they're not going to get to mid career because their whole entire goal, the thing that they want out of their life is to be home with young children, which will statistically happen in their mid career. They will never catch up. And we're making it so that women either make that choice where they feel like they must work full time during this time where they did not want to do that, or we are making it so that if they do make that choice, it's very financially stressful for their families while they do it. Neither of those are good options.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:55]:
Neither of them are good options. And I'm sick of seeing this play out. The amount of messages I get from moms who are like, I fell prey to the college messaging and I went and I hated it and I left and I got my degree. I don't even use it. My husband doesn't have a degree. He's a software engineer, he owns an H VAC business, He's a financial advisor, whatever, and he paid off my loans. But I would love to know what I could do to like, build a skill set that I can use to Work part time. The amount of times I've gotten that, almost literally that exact message.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:22]:
And that's because young women 10 years in the future are telling us what we should tell young women now, which is young women who want to be stay at home mothers need to be told that the way for them to do this responsibly, their backup plan is a high leverage, valuable skill. It will probably look more like freelance work or possibly even a small business. And they need to build these skills where they can do on demand work where they are in control of their schedules and the amount that they charge. That is the correct answer. And this should not be shocking to people. The future is the past. I say this all the time. Everything that's happening now has happened before and it's already kind of coming back around where you're seeing women doing things that are much more sustainable for them work wise, which is they're able to control when they work and they're able to control their work environment and they're able to control how much money they charge for whatever they do.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:05]:
They're cutting hair, they're doing social media marketing, they are doing copywriting and yes, those things are all still prevalent in the age of AI. They are doing things. They are even doing things like farrier work, which means that they are able to go out. I have heard this women who are farriers and they just take their kids with them and they go and they're able to the shoe of whores, the kids sit in the truck or whatever. This is a better choice than we are going to send our daughter to college to get a psychology degree. She's not going to use. That's going to rob her of the ability to be home with her children. Oh well, my daughter just really likes children and blah blah, blah.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:35]:
So we're going to send her to college for education. She doesn't want to be a teacher, she wants to be a mom. So you need to help her figure out what she needs from her work so that she can support herself in the near term and contribute to a household when she does get married and then later is able to maintain that skill and then go back into the workforce when she feels her kids are old enough. That is a harder thing to do. Schools are not equipped to do it at all. And nobody that works at a school is going to know how to do that because they didn't do it themselves. And so that's literally a huge thing that's hurting young women now. And again, if you're listening to this, you're like, wow, she sounds really angry.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:07]:
I am, because this is robbing people of the lives they want. This is something that affected me when I was in high school because I had clear ideas of what I wanted out of my family life and not a clear idea of what I wanted for a career. And that has always been the case. And if someone had told me, hey, why don't you just build your career around what you want from your family? That would have made my path much smoother.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:28]:
One of the problems with not going to college and basically succumbing to the degree free lifestyle, like I'm using a negative connotation here on purpose, is that there's a lack of validation and there's a lack of, for a lack of a better term or for a lack of a better question, like, how are you smart? Or are you smart? You know, like, what have you done? That is one of the things that is very difficult. I mean, this is not just for women. This is for anybody that's degree free. And we've seen it before. I mean, it's one of the reasons why we started the company is when we saw very successful people, people that are much more ahead of us in life in many ways. When you ask, oh, did you go to college? They would crumble inside and they would shrink inside and be like, no, I didn't go. And so there's that missing external validation. Not that you need my permission or not that you need my christening or anything like that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:17]:
But it's like, dude, this is your child's permission. Like, this is it, it's okay, don't go. You are smarter than them, you're smart, you're smarter than everybody else that's going for God knows why, like, for no reason, you're smarter than them. That should be the validation rather than like, oh yeah, I didn't, I didn't get my degree. You know, I don't know, it sucks that there's that societal pressure and it

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:40]:
really is too that people that decide not to do that. So degree for young adults, really what they have is they have delayed gratification because what will happen is within the time that they are spending that their peers are going to college. If they do, they will start to see the results of living your life in a way that is congruent with the actions and the outcomes that you want. They will see the results of living your life in a way that is congruent with the outcome that you want because you will start to get things that are Moving you in that direction as opposed to getting to the end of four to six years and being no closer to the things that you want and having an identity crisis, because you have not figured that out yet. And now you have debt, so you have to. On a time crunch. The reason I'm so animated about this is because this literally makes people so miserable. It's hard to explain.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:25]:
It's like they're imprisoned and there really, truly is almost no way out of it, even if they're debt free. It's the wasted time, it's the wasted energy, and it's the years that they now cannot get back that did not add anything to their life. And this. You know what? I'm gonna tell you the story. I was on the phone with a mom the other day, and she enrolled her son in the lodge program. He's 19, really good kid. He was really sweet, super respectful on the phone when I talked to them. And the mom, she was so kind.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:50]:
And she was talking to me afterwards, and she was saying, yeah, you know, when I listen to your content and I hear you talk about how this is affecting young people, she said, I just think of this neighbor that we have. She is a lawyer. She just had her third child. And this baby is, I think, six weeks, eight weeks old. This is a baby, an infant. And she said, and she just had to go back to work. She. I mean, she already.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:11]:
She already had to go back to work. And she said, and she's so unhappy. She's so unhappy because she wants to be home with her kids, but she can't be because she's a lawyer, so she has a lot of debt. And what you and I both know from doing this is that most lawyers don't make that much money. They do not make enough money to justify the amount of debt that they take on. And women, for female lawyers, that is especially true. She is now in a trap because she cannot stop working because she has to pay her loans, but she's going to work 80 hours a week, but her heart wants to be with her children.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:42]:
You think of lawyers, you think, wow, they make a lot of money. But most lawyers don't make a lot of money.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:46]:
This lawyer makes about $70,000 a year. It was funny because she said the salary of the lawyer as a guest, and she's like, Yep, that's right. 70. So $75,000 a year this lady makes. And she's now for 75k and the years that she spent in school, she is unable to do the thing that she actually wants to do.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:03]:
Yeah, she'll never be able to because she has to pay off all of that student loan debt. And the bummer thing about it really is it kind of screwed her both ways, just from the life perspective. I mean, she kept making a bad decision. I mean, not like a bad decision, bad decision for her life and for what she wanted. And so, you know, the bad decision was to continue going to law school. The bad decision was going to college in the first place. The bad decision was to continue to take out the debt. You can stop at any time, you can get off the ride at any time.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:32]:
And you know, she didn't. And now here, 250 grand in the hole, you're, you don't have very many options. So continue be a lawyer or branch out and go do something completely different, possibly increasing your earning potential, which is probably a smart thing at this, at this point. What's a bummer about this is that if she's already dreading it, more than likely she doesn't have what it takes to get to where she starts becoming the rainmaker, where she makes the sacrifices to become partner, where she works her butt off and then doesn't see her children to do that if it's paining her so much now, she probably doesn't have that. And so she's just going to be stuck in this vicious. I make 80 grand a year and I have $250,000 worth of debt. I can't leave because of the shackle that I put around my own ankle.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:28]:
This is such a painful position to be put in.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:31]:
And so that leads me to what I wanted to double click on earlier from what you were saying, is that like in stark contrast to that, if your daughter don't have any student loan debt, they've never went, or if they went, they paid cash for it later on, if the kids are grown to what you were saying, even if they don't have a marketable skill. Right. Like let's say that they, I want to be a stay at home mom. And they went and they worked at McDonald's or something like that, just as a cashier. Never went any higher than a cashier did. Shift work, met their husband there, their future husband, got married, had kids, and now in their late 20s or early 30s, the kids are all grown, at least to the point where she's comfortable enough to send them to school. And now thinking about, hey, I can get back out into the workforce even if she doesn't have a marketable skill, which is what you were talking about the ideal position is like, hey, shameless plug, come into the launch program, we'll help you figure out some things, help you figure out a plan, figure out some marketable skills to get you to that plan. You go do those things, get those skills and then become a stay at home mom.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:42]:
Maintain them.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:42]:
Yeah, maintain them. And then you have work afterwards. Plentiful, easy or easier. That's great. Let's say that that doesn't happen now, later in life. That's not as big of a deal. Because she can go back out and because of the lack of debt, she can make less money and build up her skill set from there.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:04]:
And I know we're going to get a lot of people, oh, this is like really hard to do. And a lot of it is probably because people still do not have that direction. And the thing that people need to do is figure out where they need to work and figure out work environment, schedule, income and location. Once you figure out those things, you know what you're looking for. And just to de risk this for parents, once your child turns 25, they are no longer subject to you on the FAFSA. If your daughter wants to be a stay at home mom and she's going to get married and she's going to have a few kids, maybe what you could do is if you do want to pay for her college, pay for it later because the likelihood that it's going to cost absolutely nothing. You can just cut her a check and reimburse her for it like an average family can do that now, as opposed, opposed to having to be ultra wealthy in order to be debt free. And if she does have to go to school, she'll know why, she'll know what for.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:48]:
And there is a much higher chance that that degree is actually going to benefit her if she's going to get one. Because it's probably for something that legally requires a degree like law school. She might want to go get a law degree when she's a little bit older. It also gives your daughter enough life experience that she can figure out what she might want to do. Because I know young people who, if they had been given a few more years to mature, what they would have chosen is they, instead of doing stem, they would have done something creative. Instead of doing something creative, they would have done something stem. You know, this is me, you know, coming out of high school. English degree, journalism, English degrees, communications degrees.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:20]:
That was me. And so I do want to drive this home to parents. If you're listening. Well, you know, that was a lawyer you were talking about, you know, that's a lot of student debt. Your daughter's communication, psychology, biology degree is not worth more than a law license. It's not. It's not. And so if you think that you're going to get a better outcome from, oh, well, you know, but she's not going to law school, so it's not going to be that extra.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:40]:
There is absolutely no justification for a psychology, communications, English, whatever degree that is not legally required for a job. Zero. There's no justification for it. It's like, it's silly and I'm tired of pretending it's not. And it's not just burning young women's time and keeping them from the things they actually want in life.

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:56]:
And so to put a little bit of numbers on this, women hold 2/3 of US student debt. A few weeks back we did an episode for Sons, and now we're doing an episode for the young women. And you can see here, at least about what we're talking about here, the college decision and then just pushing them towards college, they're obviously much more susceptible to just going. They're Obviously, I mean, 2/3 is massive. 2/3 is massive. 1.6 trillion in US student loan debt. About 929 billion of that is women, is women.

Hannah Maruyama [00:28:29]:
Women surpassed men in buying degrees at a higher rate in 1982. Interestingly, that's also when the government decided, using the Brookings Institute to decide to combine household earnings for measuring the outcomes of degrees. I think that was very convenient because it very much obscured the picture because women tend to buy degrees they don't need. They buy more of them and they buy them if they do need them in low earning fields. This has been going on for a very long time. And it's a meat grinder. And we send young women into this and then they come out into society. They're very unhappy.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:00]:
They're unable to get the things that they want. And that's why I'm saying this. It's because it is desperately needed for somebody to talk about this. I've never heard anyone speak about this. Never. I've never heard anyone talk about this in this way. Because this is something. I think it's taboo.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:14]:
You can't say this. You can't say, well, maybe young women do want to be stay at home moms. Maybe they do, but some of them do and quite a lot of them do. And this is something that is culturally becoming a lot more obvious because the rate of women who want to be stay at home moms has gone up 10% from 2022, from 15% to 25%. So we are talking a very large increase. And that is because a lot of women, I think, did want that for a long time, but they were not allowed to say it. It was socially unacceptable. You can't say, I just, I do want to be a mom, actually.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:44]:
That is what I want. That is my goal in life. In the same way that George Camel, it's ingrained in them. It's his, maybe it's his age too. Like he's a little bit older. And so like, you just can't do that. Like you, you can't just like let that lie. You have to be like, well, you need to, you know, you need a whatever, you need a backup plan.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:58]:
You need to whatever, whatever. But we can't just let young women say, I want to be a stay at home mom. Like, you can't, you're not allowed to just let it be at that. And then say, okay, how do we organize your life around that so that you are able to earn, so that you do. If you do want to build a skill set and maintain it while you're a stay at home mom, you can do that. And we are failing young women by not talking about those things. But then again, this goes back to who is equipping young women to make their career decisions. And the people oftentimes who are equipping young women to make this career decision would have been these women who wanted to be stay at home moms, but instead they went into education or they went into social work or whatever that put them back on a high school campus where their guidance counselors or their teachers now and they are in debt and they're earning 7% less than the US median.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:40]:
People are going to fry me for this, and I know they are, but I'm literally sick of this where they,

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:44]:
where they forgot all their dreams.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:46]:
But I'm serious, like the amount of I'm saying this because I get messages like, and you know, you've seen me in tears about this. Like you've seen me in tears about getting these messages from these teachers. Like I'm going to cry about it right now where they message me and they say like, hey, I'm a teacher. I hate it. I wish I could just be home with my kids, but I can't because I have to pay my student loans and we have to be a two income household. And it breaks my heart because what I want is I want everybody to be able to get what they want out of life. And I'm sick of seeing people who cannot get what they want, especially women because they were lied to and nobody had the balls to just say it's okay. If you want to be a stay at home mom, you need to organize your work in such a way that is flexible and it fits you.

Hannah Maruyama [00:31:23]:
And I do want to say this because I'm not going to get, like I said, I'm not going to get fried for this. But there's going to be teachers and people in the comments to say, well, you know, but I like it for my life. Okay, good. I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the women who I get messages from, who I get DMs from, who are like, what can I do? How can I fix this? And I'm like, I don't fix this. You know, we can't fix this for people your age. We fix this for young women who have not yet put themselves in that position because it's planning that we do. How do you plan to not be in that position later? And this all starts early.

Hannah Maruyama [00:31:51]:
You have to start this early and you have to figure out what the right fit is so that you can help your daughter use time, which is your best resource, and use it wisely in order to bring about the things that she wants in her life. And I just care about this so much. You know, I've had friends who, it was just so painful, like these conversations I think about, you know, these 11 o' clock at night conversations where I'll just like walk laps and they're just crying on the phone because they wish they didn't have to work, but they have to, they have to. And that. I'm sick of it, sick of it. And if I can just talk and like bring some awareness to this issue so that parents are having a much more informed decision about this. And so we're not reflexively as a society telling young women that they need to go to college as a backup plan, like no spending any time or money or especially going into debt, which I know Ramsey agrees with. That is not a backup plan.

Hannah Maruyama [00:32:36]:
That is the worst thing you could do. If your child's goal, if your daughter's goal is to be a stay at home mom, if that is her goal and she is not career focused, you do not have to push her into a position where she can be career focused so maybe she can come back around to that thing. No, family focused is the primary thing and everything else serves that goal. And the same is true for Young women who do not want to be mothers. The same thing is true for them. If they are, do not want to be mothers and they are career focused, do not try to shift them back the other way, Leave them there and then organize those things around. Right? Because you are going to have that. But I think by and large what we're seeing is that that side of the coin doesn't really need to be spoken to as much.

Hannah Maruyama [00:33:11]:
There are lots of young women and most of the resources we have now are for young women who are career focused. And we have made everybody fit into this mold and we've robbed people of their joy, of their options and of the lives that they want because we've tried to make everybody fit in this box and given them all the same terrible advice, which is you need a backup plan. And that backup plan is go to college and get a degree for something that you don't care about.

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:31]:
I think college as a backup plan is just a really horrible framing in general because there's nothing backup about spending a hundred thousand dollars and four years, the average is five and a half years of your life to get a piece of paper that hopefully gets you employed. There's nothing backup about it. No, like what are you talking about?

Hannah Maruyama [00:33:51]:
It's the first option and it's the worst option, right?

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:52]:
By making that decision, you make your backup the number one thing and you put that before everything. Your degree is going to hang on the wall of your two bedroom apartment

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:01]:
because they won't be able to buy a house because they bought a college degree instead. And the other thing I want to talk about too, because I know we're going to get this, but parents say, well, okay, well then what, like what are some ideas? And I want to preface this with these are not ideas for your daughter. I haven't talked to your daughter. Our team has not talked to your daughter. We do not give individual career advice unless we have talked to the young adult and we've put them through our very intense onboarding process which is ruling in, ruling out, figuring out what they need from their work so that down to the zip code specificity where they are so that we are matching these needs. So we don't give like these are like maybe your child should do X, Y, Z, like I don't know your child. That's why when people do give blanket career advice like going to the trades, you don't, you haven't met this child, you have literally no idea what's going on. You don't know what's available in their area.

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:43]:
That's crazy thing to say. So instead what I'm going to do is give some examples of how this has played out in the launch program. And it's so cool. I was going to tell you this. We had a young lady come through and she was basically exactly this. She was exactly this. She said, I want to be a stay at home mom. I'm thinking about going into education because I love kids.

Hannah Maruyama [00:34:59]:
And I'm like, okay, well of course you love kids. You want to be a stay at home mom. That makes complete sense. And so we go through and figure out, you know, we go through her needs, figured all this stuff, she's in Texas and ended up that what we found for her was actually drafting, like architectural drafting, which is so interesting because this was months ago. And I just saw last night that there is a national shortage of draftsmen. There's not enough. They're making like a hundred bucks an hour. It's flexible, you can do contract work.

Hannah Maruyama [00:35:26]:
And I remember there's several different options like this. And I remember like young ladies who have come through our program, they've gone into like court reporting, they've gone into a medical billing, which is still a thing even with AI, They've gone into marketing, they've gone into design, they've gone into skill sets that they can absolutely build and maintain while they have children. But even more esoteric things like, you know, occupational health and safety inspection jobs or freight brokers, things like that, that are flexible and while can be, you know, these are high paced jobs when you're young. That's good though, because that's a good job. And there was one young lady too that we worked with also in Texas and they were in Austin. She had a ton of good management experience at this local bakery and cafe. And also she was just a wonderful person. And so it was really cool for our team to work with her and helped her find okay, construction scheduling, which is something she can absolutely do.

Hannah Maruyama [00:36:14]:
Now again, huge shortage, huge shortage of these and that can ladder up into project management, which is going to give her more flexibility. But once she has that on her resume, even if she takes a break for a few years, when she comes back, those are transferable skill sets. And that's on a resume. You and I both know that looks good on a resume. If you're trying to get back into something, you're able to get back into work after that, with that on your resume, you are. Because project management translates across industries. And so helping her figure out like what do you need from your work, what's going to work in the interim and then what is your goal? And then how are you going to loop that back around later so you have something that supports you now, but then later. But this takes a lot of finesse, it takes a lot of planning.

Hannah Maruyama [00:36:50]:
This is calculus. It's very difficult. And these are moving pieces. And depending on where your daughter is and what she wants and like where your cost of living is, and then where she wants to build her life, all of these are going to be different moving parts. But organizing for this now instead of desperately wanting it later when there's literally no option is absolutely the move. Because college is not a backup plan for this. If you want to be a stay at home mom, your backup plan is a high earning, flexible skill. Like there's been a 300% increase or something like that in like high paying contract medical service jobs, which are like people that are like advocates, hospital advocates or billing or different things like that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:37:25]:
That's a good example of kind of what this looks like. And so there's just so many different careers and there's more coming online because of AI, but people do not know how to look. They don't even know these are options. The safe option is you need a backup plan. So go get a college degree in something that you think you can pass, which is going to be child development or social work or English or communications or something freaking useless that's just going to waste her time and her energy and push her goals further away. Tired of it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:37:50]:
Yeah. I think that getting those skills now and then being able to come back in, going back to what I was saying earlier about being able to take less money due to less debt or due to no debt, that is huge. And I think the future, and I'm not sure, but I think that the future is going to be more contract work anyway. And because they don't go into debt now, they can take whatever they want and it's completely flexible. They can take like especially like per project or per hour work. And it's like, okay, well you make a few thousand bucks a month. Make a few thousand bucks a month, good enough. Part time.

Hannah Maruyama [00:38:29]:
And I think people are looking at that and going, oh, that's just, you know, that's just not sustainable. Most of your female college graduates that come out with multiple degrees, they're going to make like 30 to $50,000 a year. We're not talking about an astronomical amount of money. We're not talking about earning $100,000 a year. It's not like, oh, they go get a four year degree and now they're guaranteed $100,000. That's not what's going to happen at all. They're going to end up in a job that pays less probably than they could have gotten right out of high school with this barest amount of strategy. And then they're again going to be robbed of their ability to follow what they actually want in life and be family focused.

Hannah Maruyama [00:39:03]:
And we're going to force them into this career focused path that they do not want, that goes against what they actually want out of their life. And then they're going to be unhappy because they are unable now to take the opposite direction because of the financial position that we've put them in, even if there is no debt, because now they still don't have the money to do those things. And that is the thing that is grave injustice to me. It's a, it's, it's a huge disservice we're doing to young people. And it's so easy now to help them do the right thing. Before you do this, before you're working, you know, before you're working multiple jobs, before you're liquidating your retirement account so that your daughter can get a four year degree as a backup plan when she wants to be a stay at home mom, stop doing that. It's completely unnecessary. And I know Ramsey is like finally, they're finally getting on board or they're trying to or whatever, but they do need a plan.

Hannah Maruyama [00:39:49]:
Yes. Like you and I've been saying this for I don't know how many years at this point. Yes, they need to know why they're going to college, which is a question. Again, you will still never hear them ask when they get these calls about how to pay for college, they never once ask why, for what and they never push back when it's not something that's not legally required for a job. Less than 10% of all the jobs in our country legally require a degree. I don't care what state you're in. Doesn't matter if you're in D.C. that's the highest number of degree required jobs in the country.

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:12]:
Doesn't matter where you are. Not more than 10% of the jobs will require a degree. One in four of those is K through 12 teachers. 25% of the jobs in our country that legally require degrees are K through 12 teachers. And they will earn 7% less than the US median. So it is very unlikely that your daughter needs a degree to get a job that will sustain her if she wants to be a stay at home mom in the interim before she makes that transition in life. The better thing, Gen Z is very entrepreneurial. They want to know how to start businesses.

Hannah Maruyama [00:40:38]:
The whole economy is shifting that way, as you and I both know, and especially with AI it was doing that before. It was already doing that. Like NPR had projected, by 2030, half the US workforce was going to be contract largely.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:49]:
I think this is my take on my reading of that stat or my reading of that projection. Is that exactly what you said? Which is the bar to owning and starting a business is so low now and it's only going to get lower. And so these small businesses, and small is not even what I'm talking about. I'm talking about micro businesses. I'm talking about one person, two people, three people. Those are going to start being everywhere.

Hannah Maruyama [00:41:19]:
I actually want to tell a story about that because our editor showed me the Coolest, the coolest YouTube channel of this girl who all she does is she makes. And this is such a good example of like parents do not. Don't you want for your daughter to be able to do something she actually wants to do instead of work some corporate boring job that pays $30,000 a year that you got multiple degrees to get that she didn't even need, as opposed to this girl is running a little YouTube channel and all she does is she makes keychains with little, little characters that she makes out of clay and she paints them. That's her entire business. And that is exactly what I'm talking about here. And it doesn't have to be something like that. You know, it could be like, it could be home inspections, you know, it could be drone photography. I don't know, it could be literally anything.

Hannah Maruyama [00:42:01]:
But my point is, do. Don't you want your daughter to have that sort of flexibility and something where she has a real skill set? And I can hear, I'm sure people going, well, you know, but she's not going to get an education if she doesn't go to college. Let me be very frank about something. If you are a woman and you go to college and you get a bachelor's degree and then you get a master's degree and then let's not even go to graduate programs, you now are in so much debt that you are going to go and you're going to go earn the median, which you know is not going to be very much starting your new career, you know, most people are going to be underemployed 10 years out anyway. So you're going to go and you're going to be earning not very much. You're going to have to work a second job or possibly a side hustle, you're going to have to be door dashing, you're going to have to be doing instacart, whatever, and you are not going to have time to do the things that you deem educated, like your educated hobbies. Reading, writing, painting, drawing, dancing, languages. All of these things that you deem things that educated people do, you will not have the time or money to do.

Hannah Maruyama [00:42:54]:
So I'm sick of the idea that if you don't go to college, you can't be educated. No, if you do go to college in the United States right now, and you're a young woman and you think you won't be educated, if you do, you will not have time for educated activities because you will have to work and you'll have to work hard. Jobs that you did not want to work, that you are going to resent because you feel like you're overqualified to do those jobs. And again, it is going to rob you of the ability to take other avenues in your life. It's going to rob you of the ability to buy homes, to start businesses, to have families. And that at the core of it is the whole problem is that basically this whole thing is a lie. And we've sold this to young women hook, line and sinker, and we've been doing this for decades and it's not going well. Obviously, women are very unhappy, by and large.

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:33]:
And again, we get these messages all the time. I get these DMs all the time. They make me cry, they break my heart. Like sometimes I'll be laying in bed, about to go to sleep, and I'll just think of this message that I got. And it just makes me sad for this person who I've never met, who's just desperately sending me a dm, like, what can I do? How can I fix this? And like, I don't have an answer. Because the answer is this should not have happened. Like, you should not have been given this guidance 17 years ago. That's what should have happened.

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:59]:
And I'm sorry this happened to you, but we can fix this now by not doing this to young women anymore so that they are able to have control, so they're able to have autonomy, so that they can build the skill set, that they are resilient in the workforce and they're resilient in work as their life changes. And goes through the phases that they actually choose and they actually want. If this sounds like your daughter and she's saying I want to be a stay at home mom or I don't know what career I want to go into, but I probably do want to have a family one day, there is a career path for her, but it's going to take some planning, it's going to take some thought, some work and a lot of research. Our team does that. It's a four week process, degreefree.com forward slash launch.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:32]:
You can apply for there until next week. Guys. Hello.