What If the College Experience Has Nothing to Do With College (The Hannah Maruyama Show #8)

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:00]:
If you're a parent and you're not really sure that college is the right move for your child, maybe your child doesn't have a clear direction yet, then you're not really convinced that spending all that money on a degree is actually going to pan out. But the main thing holding you back from being sure that you can help them find another direction is that you're worried they're going to miss out on the college experience. And this is something that I've heard from parents over and over again, and it's something that I can speak to really personally. But what a lot of parents are worried about is that Their children might not make friends, they might not meet their spouse, or they'll miss out on a network, or they won't mature or grow up. So there's a lot of myths around the college experience, and I wanna break them because I got every single one of those things and way more without ever stepping foot on a college campus. So what I wanna do on this episode is I actually wanna walk through how my life looked after I broke out of college. I dual enrolled when I was really young, so I got into college at 16, and it's not that hard to get into college. They'll take anybody's money.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:51]:
I always say that. Ended up writing for the university paper. I was the youngest paid writer they ever had on staff. That experience was really helpful because it made me realize how much I didn't need to be there. And I made lifelong friends. I met my husband and I grew a professional network, and I did all of that after leaving college. And a lot of the maturity that I gained afterwards was because I was not being crystallized or infantilized on a college campus. I actually had to pay bills.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:16]:
I actually had to go to work. I actually had to be responsible for my own actions in the real world. Now, college has been the default for so long in America that we've forgotten how people actually grow up, how they really meet people. How they actually form professional connections. Colleges have done a great job preying on parents and making them fear that the only place that this can happen for their children is on a college campus. But that's not true. Everything that you're scared that your child will miss out on isn't from college. It's actually from the age that your child will be while they're in college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:42]:
I'm Hannah Maruyama. I worked in AI and machine learning software for years without ever buying a college degree, and then I found a degree free. I also wrote The Degree Free Way, which is a workbook set for parents and young adults that has helped 18,000 families nationwide guide their kids to the right career. And then we've placed hundreds of young adults through our launch program. So what I hear when parents tell me, oh, but they'll miss the experience, this is what I actually think they're saying. But they're going to meet their lifelong friends there. They're going to meet a spouse there. That's where their network's going to get built.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:07]:
That's where they're going to grow up. But all of that comes from being 17, 18 to 22, 24. Campuses just take credit for something that has nothing to do with them and will happen whether or not your child is there or not. People remember meeting their best friends or their spouse between those ages because that's the age that humans bond and form deep friendships in their lives because they They have a lot more time. They're available to meet people freely. They don't have a lot of commitments yet. So the campus is just incidental. And I actually had a mom in the Launch program.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:35]:
She was a licensed clinical social worker, and she told me that she doesn't actually call this age range college age. She calls it a transitional age range because that's actually what it is. There's a lot of things changing all at once. This is usually for the first time for young adults when things aren't regimented. Like for me personally, I clustered my classes so that I had a lot more time, and that's because I was working. But high school is very regimented. You have to be here, you have to leave. Whereas college, you have a little bit more flexibility in designing your schedule.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:01]:
Even homeschoolers to an extent are more regimented. Like the days are still a little bit more controlled. So this might even be your child's first time on their own. Like they might have moved out or they might be managing their own schedule or they're working full-time maybe for the first time. And by and large, most young adults at this point are healthy and it's socially acceptable for them to try things and do things and be a little bit more adventurous. And then they have time because they don't yet usually have a family of their own. So colleges, as they always do, take credit for something that happens to human beings completely in spite of them, which is just being alive and available between the ages of 17, 18, and 22, 24. And this happens anywhere with or without going into $108,000 of student loan debt.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:39]:
And not only can you have it off of campus, usually it will be a great deal richer and much more permanent, which is something I'm gonna talk you through. So colleges are just charging you and they're not really doing a good job of delivering any of the college experience as they say that they are. So if you're the parent of a 16 to 20-year-old and you wanna have a real conversation about what's going on with the college experience, hit subscribe because this show exists to give you the actual data so you can help your child make a better decision than school counselors are trying to push you into. So I moved out at 18 and I found roommates, a lot of them actually, and I worked full-time. So the girls that I lived with ended up becoming really, really close friends of mine, and I have such good memories of those days. Of just hard work and game nights and movie nights, and we all cooked and we all did chores, and we just did life together in general. And I really, really treasured that time, even though the house was small. It was built in the '50s.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:31]:
I lived in a room that was probably—it was a tiny little room. It was really only big enough for a full-size bed and nothing, and one of those cube shelves from Walmart. And I have such good memories of those days because I had very little. But I was working a lot, I was learning a lot, and then I became such good friends with these girls that I lived with that they ended up actually moving to a different state. They moved across the country with me because we were such good friends and we had such strong bonds. And then I ended up meeting my husband while I was living with them in a different state before I even turned 21. So this is all inside of that same transitional age window, the college age window, but none of it happened in college. So the friendships I made between 18 and 21 are the same relationships.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:12]:
It's the same friendships of people who went to college. And they'll tell you that they made them at the same age, in the same way, usually for the same reasons. And these are the people who are my dearest friends in the world. I consider them family. We've known each other all for well over a decade, and that's exactly why this bond runs really deep. They made it through this transitional time with me. That's the same thing that's true of college friendships that make it out of that transitional time. It's not the campus, it's not college, it's that you were the right age.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:40]:
You were just available to be friends because you had more time because you were no longer in high school. And you were trying things. So let me tell you what this actually looked like, because I think it's not far off from how a lot of parents actually picture the college years. Like I said, I lived in a 3-bedroom house, not even 1,000 square feet, lots of roommates, one tiny little bathroom. We all cooked together. We watched movies together. We took each other to work. We got our cars worked on together.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:03]:
We had a little fire pit in the backyard. We had friends around. We spent a lot of our time together. People joked that we were joined at the hip and we could not be separated. The difference is that we all worked while we did this. So paying that rent was a formative experience. Dealing with the landlord, we had good landlords, but that was a formative experience. Learning to deal with conflict with the people I live with was a formative experience.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:23]:
And it's different when they're your actual roommates, not just college roommates. We had short cleaning rotations. We had to hash out interpersonal issues with the groceries or the laundry room or anything. We had to hash out disagreements as a group because we lived together. There was no RA to escalate to. There was nobody who you could just get to the end of the year and they would just leave. And because we were all working, I personally had a lot less time to get into the party scene, even though I worked at a restaurant and a bar. I think I was spared a lot of the poor decisions that tend to happen on college campuses.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:53]:
My roommates were a few years older than me and kind of already out of that phase of life, so there was a little more maturity in the house. And then frankly, they just weren't as dumb as I was at that age. So I was living with 2 people who loved me and didn't make me dumber, and that spared me, I think, a lot of pain in my later years. The only part of my experience that I was missing Was I was missing tens of thousands of dollars in debt that limits every single option that, uh, somebody with a college degree who graduates at 22 has afterwards. The age, again, it's the age that's the college experience. So kids have the college experience and the way that you tailor what they do, but I didn't go into debt for it and my life was a lot freer as a result of that. So the college is where they meet their friends. That's a sales pitch that I think kind of deserves a little bit of a closer look.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:35]:
So your child is gonna make friends regardless of where they are. The question is what kind of friends? And if what you want for them is to make all 18-year-old friends who are lonely and anxious because they're away from everyone they've ever known and they're going into debt for something they don't need to get a good career, then sure, that's definitely something a campus is going to offer. But honestly, I don't really think that's the best environment for a young person to start their life. And when I hear a lot of talking heads speak about college now, they are leaning really heavily into, oh well, it's the experiences, the network, because they know it's not educating people and they know it's not getting them a job. So now they're leaning really heavily on the experience part. And recently I even saw somebody leaning really heavily on the, that's where they'll meet their spouse. It's for matchmaking, essentially. So for a really long time, online dating and dating apps have been how most people meet their spouse.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:20]:
This has not been a short thing. The next way that people, most people meet is friends, and then it's work. Statistically speaking, your child is more likely to marry a kid from your neighborhood than marry somebody they meet on a college campus. Stanford has actually been running the same survey since 2009. In their most recent combined data set, it was 2017 to 2022, and then they released this in 2024. Only 0.74% of U.S. couples now meet at college. That's less than 1 in 100.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:47]:
College is no longer, and, and just really hasn't been for a long time, the social engine that parents picture it as. Only about a third of college students report that they're flourishing. 64% are not. And that's before you count in the ones reporting crippling anxiety and depression, because honestly, They're starting their lives in the thing that causes most people the most stress, which is a bad financial situation. And then I do want to talk about the loneliness because it doesn't end with graduation. A lot of times graduation often starts it, and there's names for this phenomenon. I've heard it called graduation depression or senior dump or so many things. But when kids leave campus, a lot of them get really depressed because they no longer have that fake curated bubble of people around them.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:23]:
So let's just kind of walk this through. So your child spends 4 to 6 years on a campus Some of those people become friends, some don't, and then graduation hits. So the friends move to whichever city offers them a job, or they move home because they can't find one, which is more likely. And then that shared schedule that produced the friendship in the first place, it just ends. So now at 25, your child's in a new city and they're working 60-hour weeks and they're lonely. So the college friends that, you know, you paid $108,000 to meet now live in different time zones and they aren't present physically at all really in your child's life for the most part. On the flip side, when you are degree-free and at 18 you move out, you get roommates, even if you don't move out and you start getting a job and you just start building connections and making friends that way, you're gonna make 'em in the same window for the same amount of time, but you're gonna be cash flow positive and you can build other relationships around that. And they don't scatter in 4 to 6 years because you don't have to leave.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:17]:
So it's not like people just leave. The network is continuous and all those friendships and all that, that professional connection just gets deeper and it just builds and it compounds. And it's really hard to quantify what that does in your life later on when you start building it so early. But you can see how people who are younger and just start working in the right entry-level job, strategic entry-level work is what we call it, they're going to have a much easier time, a much more solid foundation of family, of friends, and of professional connections because they were just there and they continually had that trust, built that community around them. If your child is between 18 and 22 living anywhere in America, they actually have more access to community than they will ever have. And it's free or close to it, and it's available the minute they walk in. And because they're young, adults and professionals will just bend over backwards to teach them, to open doors for them, anything that they know. That is the way that people treat young people.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:05]:
It's the advantage of youth. So the first one, and you guys know this about me, but I will never stop talking about Toastmasters. Local chapters are basically in every metro area and every small town. These build public speaking skills, which is the most undervalued skill I think going into the future. There's about 14,200 of these clubs nationwide. It's hard to throw a stone and not hit one. Most of the meetings are free, but if there's an annual membership, it's about $100. It's not a lot for the amount of skill, the amount of learning, and the amount of professional connection your child will get.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:34]:
Number 2, and this is my boomer hot take, we don't dance enough as a country, and I think it's made everybody sad. But salsa, swing, ballroom, country, like whatever your town has, these rooms are full of people that become friends because of shared interest. And I personally, I went to West Coast Swing, I went to East Coast Swing, I did bachata, I took salsa, I did every kind of lesson I could find. And I'm not a good dancer. I just did it for fun. A lot of times these lessons are $7 and you get to dance for 3 hours and then you stretch the muscle of being uncomfortable and of learning, of moving, and you always feel better after you leave. And what I found there is people are really willing to teach. They're really excited to share what they care about with other people, and there's always other beginners, so you never feel like the worst person in the room, even if you are.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:11]:
And I usually was. Number 3, this one's a little bit harder to find, but still possible, but maker centers. And these are a great option for kids who are less interested in the dancing, which is understandable, and then moving into building stuff like woodworking or metalworking or electronics. There's sewing classes, there's knitting groups, there's quilting groups, and most towns have these, even small towns. I live in between like a small, medium-sized town and a very, very small town, and more of these are actually present in the small town. Now these are cheap, recurring, and there's already skilled adults in the room. And what's cool about it is many of them own small craft artisan businesses. And that's something that I find to be really neat as well.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:43]:
And you never know what that will lead to. It could lead to apprenticeship. It could lead to work. It could lead to your child eventually buying one of those businesses just due to the age of people who own them. So there's a lot of side effects here that I think are really, really worthwhile. Number 4, and this is language meetups. A lot of people, and I think you probably will be shocked if you look up the number of free language meetups out there. I personally, when we lived in Hawaii, I went to Chinese and Japanese and Spanish meetups.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:06]:
But there are so many depending on where you live. There may be even more, but whatever language your child is curious about, there's a coffee shop or a table at a food court somewhere that people are meeting and they're doing that. And it's usually free. And that is something that I cannot stress enough, the value of the discomfort that you'll experience when you try to do that, but also the amount that people are willing to teach you. That was the thing I really wanna drive home about this, but the kindness of people in these rooms is very, very serious. Most people are so willing. To teach anyone who's willing to learn. And the thing is, I was already self-conscious going cuz I don't know any of these things.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:37]:
So of all of these things, and all of these things, by the way, I did when I was between 18 and 22 years old, I never knew what I was doing. I was never good at it, but no one ever made me feel bad. That's the thing. Most people are just grateful that you're there. They're glad that you came out and people are so willing to just help and teach and lead people. And that was the thing that I found was really cool about it. In the same vein, number 5 is gonna be the Chamber of Commerce. Again, this is something I talk about a lot, but a small business Chamber of Commerce in particular is a direct line to local business owners.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:04]:
And by the way, small businesses again make up about 80% of the job postings in this country. So if you want your child to land strategic entry-level roles, like the ones that college grads are struggling to get, this is how to do it. This is a who-you-know kind of thing. And as somebody who never, never, because I moved around so much as a kid and because I moved out at 18, I never had, oh, my parents knew somebody. I never had that. The only way that I was able to get work was I built connections doing these kind of things. Or I just applied until somebody told me no, or somebody told me yes. So this is a way that you're like, my kid doesn't know anybody.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:36]:
We don't know anybody. We don't have connections. Neither did I. I didn't have any prior connections. I didn't have any prior family connections or anything like that. This is how I did this. And I want to stress that because I want people to know that this works for everybody. It just takes doing.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:49]:
Number 6 is going to be small business as an employee. So the strategic move here is picking the right strategic entry-level role. So if your child wants to go into interior design, then there's a receptionist seat somewhere at a design firm or a construction company or remodeling company that will help her get connections. That's what we do in the Launch Program. Actually, we help young adults who are over 18 figure out strategically where they need to start working. And this is where adults will form workplace friendships and then meet people who introduce them to the people who will give them their next role. Number 7, this is not really in order because oftentimes I could see these actually being a lot higher on the list. This is just the order as I was thinking about them.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:23]:
But religious or community organizations. So if your family is in one, this can help a lot. But volunteer pools, young adult groups, this is where your child will get real wisdom because it's not just 18-year-olds and then professors who don't really talk to them, but it's actual adults who do things and want to invest in your child because there's a shared interest and a shared goal. And then number 8, this is kind of my bonus here, but this is just hobbies and volunteering. A lot of people would be surprised if they looked. There's book clubs, there's chess clubs, there's Dungeons and Dragons, there's volunteering at the local thrift shop. There's libraries, there's art galleries, arboretums, hospitals, Rotary Clubs. Every one of these rooms is full of adults who would be delighted to know your child and to help them and open doors and, oh, have you met so-and-so? Or, oh, have you thought about this? And that is really what's going to help them so much.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:06]:
The Rotary Club is an unsung hero for that, by the way. This is what I'm trying to show people when people say, oh, well, yeah, if your kid just does XYZ on campus. Yeah, but if your kid just does XYZ, period, they don't have to go pay a college to do XYZ. They can just do these things. So if your child picks 3 or 2 of these, that is enough to build community and build connection. And in 6 months, they will have more community than most college grads have in 4 to 6 years. And that community won't just disintegrate when they stop buying paper. It's the age that they're at that is the college experience.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:33]:
It is not actually being on a campus. So these years that produce these super deep friendships and a future spouse and a real start in a career, it's not a campus. It's just a pattern. Then the pattern is just being in motion around other people who are connected, doing new things with enough free time to be involved and say yes when people offer you things. And your child may experience that on a college campus, even though the numbers right now say that's not super likely. So if you really are worried about the experience your child can have in college, then it would be better to curate that pattern now by getting roommates and then getting a job at a place that actually helps them learn. So again, strategic entry-level work, as if you listen to us, you know that this is really what we think. A lot of things hinge on, but then a calendar with Tuesday game night or Thursday Toastmasters or Saturday Habitat for Humanity.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:21]:
It's the same pattern. It's the same age. And they're actually going to get a better outcome because again, their community is not going to disintegrate as soon as they're done paying. One of these versions costs $108,000 to $156,000, and it ends with a piece of paper that the labor market doesn't really care about. And the other costs almost nothing and then oftentimes pays your child while they build it. And the key here for parents is remembering that less than 10% of U.S. jobs legally require a college degree. 9.5%, basically, of all 154 million U.S.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:48]:
jobs. And that's from our Degree-Free Case Against College white paper. The you go for the network argument really loses force when 90% of the economy isn't gating around the credential, the paper, that this whole network was built on. The transitional age range is the college experience, but where they get it is up to you. Quick word from our sponsor. Just kidding. There's no sponsor. It's just me.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:08]:
If you want a neutral third party to help your child build the intentional version of these transitional years, that's exactly what we built the Launch program for. The entry-level role, the strategic community involvement, the 12-month plan that lands them somewhere they actually want to be at 22. 4 weeks. It's a very intense, custom one-on-one work with career strategists. The application link is below or go to degreefree.com/launch. So let's look at the numbers and see what parents are paying for with the college experience. So version A is the college experience, $108,000 to $156,000. Students will carry an average $31,000 of debt at graduation.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:40]:
And then there's a 17-year average loan repayment horizon, and then 4 to 6 years out of the workforce. And then their friend group is going to scatter at graduation. And as we know, only 22% of grads end up even working in their field of study. And half of the kids that go to college won't even end up graduating. Version B is the transitional age experience off campus, which is roommates or a full-time job and a few hundred dollars a year in club dues or dance class drop-in fees. Friend group lives in the same city by year 2, and then they get paid usually the whole time. So they have $0 in debt. That's the real comparison.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:11]:
A lot of people think that this choice is so binary. It's they go to college, they get this network, or they stay home and they get nothing. But that's just not true. All your child has to do is the exact same type of activities that college students do, and they'll get the exact same result, but they'll just get it with no debt. So what you're scared of them missing out on isn't gated by campus. Colleges don't own it. And it's understandable that you're worried about this. There's an $848 billion marketing machine that is throwing millions of dollars into convincing you that if you don't buy They're going to miss out and they've been training you for a long time to make this purchase.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:42]:
And that's not on you. There's a ton of money aimed at you and aimed at your child to push you off this college cliff. What is on you is the next decision. You can hand your child the campus version and then pay this $100,000 for it. Or you can spend the time and the energy to curate what your child will experience as they are launching their life and help them to find strategic entry-level work and help them to narrow down what activities they're going to participate That will build them community and network and skills, and then watch them build a life while they're also earning and learning real skills. So their friendships, their networks, the partner, the growing up, all of it just comes with the age that they're at. And you can help them to create that experience because the college experience is really just a transitional age range. And you can help your child to have not only the exact same thing, but a much better experience that is custom tailored to them.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:27]:
And I hope this takes a ton of fear out of it for you because I had a Great, wonderful, wonderful experience moving out when I was 18 and then building this life with my friends during this time, working, building network, trying things, learning things, and even meeting my spouse all during this age. And what helped me a ton and allowed me to take real opportunities was not being burdened by debt. So I hope this was helpful and I hope this was really encouraging. So please subscribe and share it with another parent of an almost 18-year-old. The application for the Launch program is in the show notes or go to degreefree.com/launch.