Your Daughter's Backup Plan Is the Trap (The Hannah Maruyama Show #12)

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:00]:
Okay, this show today is just going to be kind of a rant. I saw this clip from George Campbell, which is one of the Ramsey personalities, and we all need to talk about it. But before we talk about it, I need you to watch it with me so you understand why this is so important, especially if you have a daughter between 16 and 22. There is so much here that if we just talk about this, it may prevent someone's daughter from making huge mistakes about her future or help equip them with the clear understanding of what they need from their life so that they are not making these types of mistakes. Just watch this clip with me.

George Campbell [00:00:27]:
What's your plans after high school?

Teen Girl [00:00:29]:
Go to college, I guess. I'm not really sure yet.

George Campbell [00:00:31]:
Maybe college, maybe not, or for sure college, but you don't know what?

Teen Girl [00:00:34]:
College, don't know what yet.

George Campbell [00:00:35]:
So why for sure college if you don't know if you even need to go to college?

Teen Girl [00:00:39]:
Because I have to have a job.

George Campbell [00:00:40]:
And so you're saying without college there is no job?

Teen Girl [00:00:42]:
I mean, yeah, but you just don't get paid as good.

George Campbell [00:00:44]:
Is that for sure?

Teen Girl [00:00:46]:
Pretty sure.

George Campbell [00:00:47]:
What about someone who is in the trades and now they're an electrician or plumber making $80,000?

Teen Girl [00:00:52]:
Some kind of like degree behind their name.

George Campbell [00:00:54]:
Sure, there's some training, some education, but not a 4-year degree from Do you have any inkling as to what you want to do?

Teen Girl [00:01:01]:
Sonography.

George Campbell [00:01:01]:
Sonography. Tell me about that.

Teen Girl [00:01:03]:
It's like the ultrasounds where you tell which organ is which, but I want to do peds.

George Campbell [00:01:08]:
Oh, that's— so you, you know exactly what you want to do. That's cool. How much will that cost, you think, to get that kind of degree?

Teen Girl [00:01:13]:
Like money-wise?

George Campbell [00:01:14]:
Money-wise, yeah. I have no idea. What amount of debt would you be willing to go into in order to get this degree? I don't know. Unlimited?

Teen Girl [00:01:21]:
Yeah, sure.

George Campbell [00:01:22]:
But you'd be willing to go into $300,000 of debt to get this degree?

Teen Girl [00:01:25]:
Yeah, because if I get my degree, then I can pay it off.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:27]:
I think this clip is actually so culturally significant. because it really encapsulates the lack of information that high school students are equipped with as far as what careers are out there. It also shows that the way that they answer these questions oftentimes when adults ask them is in order to get a, oh, well, that's cool, or, oh, that's really good, not because they actually have a concept of what the career is and then how it's going to help them get what they want out of their life. And then deeper than that, it shows that adults who now have finally realized that college is not the answer for the vast majority of young adults, which we at Degree Free say about 90% of young adults in our country do not need to be in college at all. The people who used to have the knee-jerk reaction of go to college now have the knee-jerk reaction of go into the trades. And that's such a narrow view of what careers are out there. And it's also such a turnoff for these young adults who do not know what else is out there and believe they must go to college to have a good career of any kind. And then it also really shows how financially illiterate a lot of young adults are when they are making these decisions.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:23]:
There's a lot I wanna talk about today, and some of this people are not gonna wanna hear, but I'm specifically gonna talk about young women because I feel very strongly that young women are some of the most affected groups by this because women by degrees More frequently. We also buy the most degrees, and we also get the lowest ROI out of them. And it's not necessarily because of some innate gender bias. A lot of it has to do with the types of degrees that we buy and the excess of those types of degrees that we buy, and then the careers that we are funneled into in high school based on things that most teenage girls will want to do that is socially acceptable, which is work in healthcare or work with kids. Let's just do a review of the clip. So George Campbell, who is a Ramsey Finance personality, goes to a high school and he's talking to young adults in this high school. So he finds a teenage girl, looks to be about a senior, and says, what are you going to do when you graduate? And she says that she's probably going to go to college. She's not sure really why.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:11]:
She's not really sure what for, which is probably the real answer. She hasn't gotten enough time to then find the right career to get the right response from an, from an adult that's like, oh, okay, that's good. Oh wow, that's great. Wow, that's so amazing. Which is what a lot of young adults will do because they do just want people to approve. And most young women, if they say they're going into social work or psychology or healthcare, will get positive social approval from people, which is a huge trap. But then she says, oh, okay, well, I have to go to college because I have to have a job. And then basically she implies that she won't make money unless she goes to college, which is not true.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:42]:
And then he asks how much debt she'd be willing to take on. She says, I don't know. And then he says unlimited. I mean, again, he's kind of guiding, he's kind of guiding the conversation a little bit, but then he says, you go $300,000 into debt for this? And she says, yeah, if I get my degree, then I can pay it off, which is not always gonna be the case. In fact, rarely will that be the case. This is not unusual. We run a whole team whose entire job is to just help young adults who are in this age range find the right career for the life that they want. This is very normal.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:10]:
This is not crazy at all. This is what most high school seniors in this country who are about to go to college feel. This is what they think. And she just said it out loud. Now, why would you listen to me? I founded Degree Free, which has helped hundreds of young adults find the right career for them through an actual person walking them through what they need from their work, doing a real-time job market analysis to find what fits. And then breaking down what they actually must do to get those careers, and then a 12-month plan for how they're going to do that. By the way, this process takes weeks. This is not a quick fix.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:36]:
It takes a lot of time and a lot of work, which is why so many schools just default to funneling young adults into things that do not actually fit them. Now, I've also written a book called The Degree-Free Way: How to Help Your 16 to 20-Year-Old Build the Life They Want, and this has helped over 18,000 families nationwide guide their kids to the right career for the life that they want, so they can be excited about their future and know that there's more options out there than just college. Way more. And then what do I know about the job market? I worked in AI and machine learning for years at the corporate level, and I do not have a college degree. So aside from my work with Degree Free, before that, I had a lot of experience and inside knowledge about how the job market was working from that level, which is a very competitive part of the market. Now here's what this young lady actually did. She named one of the probably 6 to 8 careers she's heard about, and it was the one that's gotten her the most positive response when she says it to other people, to other adults, because it's more so, it's a good socially acceptable career to say. And then she said, well, I'll pay whatever I have to do to get it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:30]:
Even though not even 30 seconds earlier, she had no idea what she was gonna go to college for or why. And she also has an incorrect and inaccurate idea of whether or not she needs to go at all, because that's what schools teach, because their job is to sell student loans. So she picks an answer that gets a, wow, that's so great. You gotta be really careful about this. And especially young adults who have really good grades. This is what I've noticed. If you have a high SAT score, if you have a high GPA, if you did really well in science, If you say that you just want to help people, young adults who say those types of things, and usually this is girls, will always be pigeonholed into social work, healthcare careers that get a, wow, that's great, which is exactly what she did. And there's nothing really wrong with that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:15]:
It's a natural result of the way that we teach young adults to pick work, which is completely backwards. It's based on whatever gets everybody to go, oh, that's so great, instead of what's actually going to help her get what she wants out of her life. And this is how so many people end up in jobs they hate. This is why so many women end up trapped in careers that drain their energy and do not pay them enough, that don't actually lead them to a life that they wanted. And part of the reason I'm so passionate about this is because I've seen so many of my friends and peers experience this exact thing. They did this, they sounded exactly like this when we graduated high school, and then they ended up being stuck in careers and not only stuck in careers, but stuck with student debt that kept them in those careers because it was stable enough. To earn them enough money, basically just to pay their loans and do nothing else because the interest is so high. This is key because we spend a lot of time worried about young men falling behind.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:00]:
And to be fair, they're definitely right now in worse shape, but a lot fewer people are looking at how we're funneling girls into careers from high school. And here's what probably a lot of parents know is girls are the ones that drive college enrollment. This is not a recent development. Women surpassed men in buying college degrees in the 1980s. So it's been this way for a very long time. As of the most recent number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024, nearly 7 in 10 recent female high school graduates went straight to college. More women go to college, more women buy degrees, and more women buy degrees that they cannot afford. Women hold 2/3 of all US student debt, so $929 billion of the $1.5 trillion of student debt.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:42]:
Women borrow on average more than men to buy the same degrees, and they take longer to pay it back. So when your daughter's like, I have to go to college, she's walking towards a very heavy debt burden. And she has very little information about whether or not she even needs it, or if it's the right fit for her life, because those questions do not get asked in high schools. We just go, oh, what is available? Oh, what are you interested in? Oh, what does your personality say? Go do XYZ. We do not think about the schedule they need, the work environment they need, the income they need, and where they want to live and build their lives. None of that is addressed. It's just— Oh, you like to help people? Okay, here's XYZ. Oh, you like kids? Here's this.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:19]:
And this is what happens. And the thing is, when I talk about this, a lot of parents know this is true because if it didn't happen to one of their older kids, it happened to them. And I know it happened to me. Oh, you're good at writing. You're good at English class. Go be a lawyer or an English professor or a journalist and go buy a degree to do those things, regardless of what I wanted my life to look like in the long term and the fact that several of those careers would have actively kept me from the things that I really cared about. Many women are now suffering, and suffering is the correct word. Because they are now suffering because they cannot change the circumstances that they are in, or if they were to try, it would be very, very difficult and a monumental difficulty to do so because of the choices that they made under-informed at 17 or 18 years old.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:57]:
And that's what we're trying to prevent here. So if you have a daughter and you want the real numbers about what's going on with college and the job market, please subscribe because the show exists to give you what's actually happening so you can help your daughters make better decisions than maybe the ones that you made or the ones that your family has made. In the past. So what does this young lady have wrong? Fumble number one is I have to go to college to get paid. This goes back to what she's saying in the clip. George Campbell asks her why she has to go to college, and her answer is because I have to have a job, as if you can't get a job without going to college. And then she said without college you just don't get paid as much. That's not true.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:30]:
And I'm not talking about averages, which is what people love to quote, but there's a reason that so often averages are used to talk about degrees, and that's because Very few high-earning degrees typically that are legally required for a licensure to do a specific job like petroleum engineering or brain surgery. So this high school senior says, without college, you just don't get paid as much. And that belief is the whole reason that 7 out of 10 of your daughters will enroll in college. And it's wrong because fewer than 1 in 10 jobs in the US legally require a college degree. And just because a job does require a college degree does not mean that it has positive ROI. Worse, it also does not mean even if it does legally require a degree and it does have positive ROI, that that career is going to help your daughter live the life that she wants. High schools are not helping young adults think about what they want their life to look like. They're using current information about their high school personality and interest to pigeonhole them into a degree program that they hope will lead to a job.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:24]:
It's a wish of a wish of a wish of a wish. So 90% of the jobs in our country do not legally require the paper that this young lady is about to borrow $300,000 for. And here's what the school counselors are never going to say out loud. The highest paying careers in our country are disproportionately in sales and technology. Not only do those tend to be the highest earning, they also have the highest degree of flexibility, typically in schedule, as well as the quickest in. And there are no jobs in either of those industries that legally require a degree, not in the entire country. Sales engineers, for instance. And if you'd like to listen to episodes about that, we've had 2 sales engineers on the Degree Free Podcast, Jean Torres and Jen Hoskins.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:01]:
I would highly recommend going to listen to their episodes. Not only are these jobs high earning, but they also have options to be flexible and remote and then location independent, which is very useful if your daughter has a goal of eventually having children and wanting to be either a stay-at-home mom or a work-from-home mom, because it allows her to have a skill set that eventually she will be able to pick back up or continue on in a part-time role the entire time she is raising children, if that is a goal that she has. And this is something that nobody wants to talk about. Your daughter's school is not going to address this, and that's because it's not socially acceptable to do so. But for some reason, it is socially acceptable to say to a 17-year-old girl, oh, you want to help people, or you like children? Here, go buy a college degree for something that will then not make you enough money to pay off that debt so you can work around children, or so you can work in healthcare and then not be able to pay off that debt. And then you will be on that treadmill for the rest of your life, even though you made this choice uninformed at 17 or 18 years old. That is what I'm not willing to let stand anymore. That is not how young women should pick careers, and it will keep them from the things that they want if they choose incorrectly in such a high-risk way as buying a college degree that they are not fully informed about needing at the beginning of their lives.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:07]:
Nothing is as dangerous as your daughter making a bankruptcy-exempt one-way purchase without having thought about what she wants out of her life, and then being absolutely sure that she must make this purchase in order to get a license, in order to do a job that will then allow her to live in the way that she wants. If it is not that sure, it is the wrong decision. And the thing is, she can make it at any point. And that's why this is so important. If she gets this wrong at this age, it will do a ton of damage. If she just waits and measures this out and thinks, or even doesn't go until she's 25, it is not going to have the same level of irreversibility. And in fact, it will have quite the opposite effect. And the young women that do go and get degrees at this point will be absolutely sure that they need one and is going to help them to live the life that they want.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:53]:
Instead of being barred and having doors closed on them by their debt. Debt will always close more doors to your daughter than a degree will open, and that will always be true. Because once you have student debt like that, because it is bankruptcy exempt, it now controls you. It now dictates what you may and may not do versus having no debt, which means that you are much more able to take risk, you're much more able to say no, and you can leave and try things in a much more free manner because you do not have debt that's due every single month. But again, there's cybersecurity, health informatics, software, inside sales. All of these pay well, and then they gate on skill, not degrees. But most 17-year-old girls don't even know that these jobs exist. So she thinks she's making a choice between college or a terrible life, and it's not a real choice.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:35]:
Now, fumble number 2 is not the 17-year-old girl. It's actually George Campbell. And that's because everybody does this now. As soon as she mentions college, he reaches for the traits immediately. Well, what about a plumber or an electrician? And you can just watch her face. Like, she's not interested. She just shuts down because in her head she's like, so I can go to college and get a degree, or I can go into a trade like plumbing. And in her mind, the trades are the 2 he just mentioned because that's all of the guidance she's probably received.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:01]:
And of course she's gonna pick college if she's not interested keenly in one of those 2 things. And this move I just cannot stand because it backfires every single time, especially with young women. Because they don't know that there's lots of different types of trades and they don't all involve being plumbers or electricians. There are even health— high-paying healthcare adjacent trades that are artisan work that are not plumbing or electrician work. They're definitely skilled technician work and pay about the same. But you're going to tell her, go be a plumber or an electrician, and she's literally thinking of Bob the Builder. She doesn't want to do that. And I say that understanding that some young women will, but statistically speaking, young women are not interested in the trades.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:35]:
And telling them, oh well, you can make $80,000 by going to do This job that you definitely don't wanna do is not going to help her see that there's more options out there. Women are about 3 to 4% of electricians and plumbers. The trades are good work and they're good pay and also lead to business ownership. And the small number of women who want to do them should absolutely go, but only if they've thought through what they need from their work and that is a match. But so many young women are not interested in that, especially when it's presented that way. And I say that my own sister was a structural welder for years and excellent at it. But when the only alternative that anyone offers a girl who thinks that she needs to go to college is a trade, and she has no interest in it, she goes, well, then of course I'm going to go to college because I don't want to go into one of those two trades. And she's probably only been made aware of one, two, or three of them because that's all that the high schools have to offer.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:22]:
The trades are not the answer to college. They are another path. There are thousands. And if they fit her correctly for the life that she wants, then that is the correct path in the same way that college is the correct answer if it is legally required for her to get a career that fits the life that she wants. But naming a specific trade career before you know what she needs from her life is just as ineffective as telling her to go to college. If anything, all that does is cement in her mind that it's work in the trades or college, and those are the only options. Then he asks her what she wants to do. You don't ask them what they want to do.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:54]:
They don't know. They're going to pick an option from this very small 6 to 8 menu of jobs that they have. They're usually going to pick the one that adults or teachers just say, wow, That's great. So pediatric sonography specifically. And you can tell how she does this because she says sonography. Sonography is actually, uh, like court reporting shorthand, but sonography is what she means. And she says sonography, and then she says, and I want to do peds. And that's because it's— the sonography always gets a wow from adults, and then when you add in working with kids, it also gets a wow.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:24]:
Here's what I know after years of doing this with teenagers. This is also why you can't do this in public. Like, you can't do this with a group of young adults. Because they will all do this to try to get the most approval. That's just kind of how they are. It's the age that they're at. You have to do this one-on-one. You can't do this in front of a camera, in front of people like this, because they're always just gonna say whatever they think is gonna be the most socially acceptable, is gonna make adults, like, approve of them the most, because of course they would.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:48]:
Like, people are— adults are like that too. But a lot of the times when you ask a 17-year-old what they wanna do, they're not gonna tell you what fits them or what they really wanna do. They're going to tell you whatever they think is the right answer or will make whatever adult is asking them that question impressed. And that's also why it's really difficult a lot of times for parents to have these conversations with their daughters, especially if they have good grades, 4.0 GPAs, whatever, because usually they're going to tell their parents whatever they think they want to hear. And it works. And he says, oh, so you know exactly what you want to do. That's cool. Because it kind of gets him off of her back.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:17]:
Like, you can watch it in the clip and she gets the reaction that she was looking for. That was, that was what she was looking for. And it has almost nothing to do with whether or not the ultrasound work actually fits the life that she wants to have. And I'm not knocking her. It may be that sonography, if she were to think this through, actually is the right fit because whatever she wants out of her life lends itself to that. I haven't talked to her. I don't know. But we've done this hundreds of times.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:39]:
And what we have seen is that we train young adults to answer in this way. We reward the impressive answer over the honest one. And we do that for 12 years straight. And then we're all surprised when they pick a major to impress people. And then they leave after a year, or I don't know, half of them don't graduate, and then only 22% of them work in their field of study, and now they have student debt. And so here's the brutal part, and I want you to stay with me for this because this is how we teach young adults to pick work, and that's why it's backwards. But she says $300,000 and a 4-year degree, and then what she says and what he kind of leads her to is that she'll pay $300,000 for this and she's going to go get a 4-year degree, but Sonography doesn't take a 4-year degree. It takes an associate's degree.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:20]:
And depending especially on where you live in the country, it does not cost that much money. But again, she needs to make sure that it's the right fit for her life. But a diagnostic medical sonographer typically needs an associate's degree or certificate, not a 4-year degree. And the median pay is good. It's $89,000. Pediatric sonography is a certification on top of that, not a secondary degree. So the exact career she named, the one where she would go into unlimited debt, Does not require $300,000 or 4 years. She could be working in it for the price of an associate's degree.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:50]:
She could probably be chipping away at credits while still in high school, but she didn't know that because nobody actually worked through what she needed from her life, what careers would fit that, and then what she should be doing now, and then what she will need to do when she graduates. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This planning beforehand can save tens of thousands of dollars and so much time and energy, but she just picks an answer because it got a wow, and she might end up paying 6 figures because she didn't have a clear plan or a clear why. Now, there's a reason why so many high school girls land on a healthcare career, and pediatrics especially, the second that they're put on the spot. When young women are asked about themselves, they will typically give the same answers. They'll just say, yeah, I'm a really good listener, I can fix my friends' problems, I really just want to help people. And they say these things over and over again, and then they're told to go into medicine. It sounds kind, sounds good, but it's often terrible advice, and that's because it skips every question that actually decides whether or not that's a good fit for the life she wants.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:43]:
My 17-year-old daughter loves kids and wants to help people, so she's going to go into healthcare. But the truth is that loving kids tells you nothing about whether or not she's going to survive the schedule or the environment or the emotional load of the job. Your daughter loving children and wanting to help people and then thriving under fluorescent lights for 12-hour-long shifts around sick and suffering children and their terrified parents are two completely separate things. And for someone who genuinely loves children, That environment can be the fastest way to burn them out and quickly turn into a nightmare. And let's talk about this a little bit. And I do wanna put a disclaimer here. My mom was an ER nurse, so this is not knocking nurses. This is not knocking teachers.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:20]:
This is not that. This is about making sure that people understand what their career will get them and that it will help them live the way they want. Because if people have thought that through, they will never be disappointed by their career. They will always be content and they will be glad and grateful for the career that they choose because they went into it fully informed. And we should want everybody to go into their careers fully informed. Fully informed. Otherwise, people will burn out, they will be unhappy, and they will eventually suffer in their jobs. And we do not want people to live that way.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:47]:
But let's just talk about the nurses. 74% of nurses are emotionally exhausted multiple times a week. 53% have seriously considered leaving the profession. And then 60% of them report feeling very burned out most days. And honestly, I've seen surveys as high as 8 out of 10 nurses saying that they've considered quitting multiple times that week. And it's not because they don't earn high. It's because we pigeonhole people into careers based on their personalities and not based on what they need from their work. And I've personally watched healthcare careers drain the life out of women who've walked in wanting to love their job, but they didn't get asked what kind of schedule they wanted or where they wanted to live or what sort of daily environment they could actually sustain day in and day out.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:22]:
In high school, they were like, oh, you want to help people? Okay, great. Go into nursing. And that was the whole career plan. This is picking a field off of a feeling and then skipping the 4 questions that actually matter. So here's what should have happened in that interview. And then what you should do tonight with your daughter. Before we go into what do you want to do, what career, what college, what trade, you ask 4 questions and you figure out which of those things is priority to her. Schedule: what does she want her days and weeks to look like? When does she work? Income: what does she actually need to earn to make the things that she wants in her life happen? It does not matter what those things are.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:55]:
It doesn't matter if it's low income, high— doesn't matter. What does she need to earn? Environment: where and around whom does she want to work? Location. Where does she want to live and build her life? Only after these 4 things are on the table and you've figured out which one is the biggest priority to her, do you start looking for careers that actually deliver that. If there's a secondary thing she needs and a third thing, great. Remember that the more filters you use, the less results you're going to get, but that will help you find a job, a description of what career is actually going to work for her. Then you find what entry-level role she can start with now, how you need to rearrange her classes, and then you map out the real costs and the real time to get to that career based on what she really must do to do it. Not, I'm going to go to college to get a 4-year degree so I can then get a job that actually only requires a certification and I can knock out a quarter of it if I just rearrange my classes at my local high school. So let's run through the sonography example if it's used properly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:46]:
So then you map out the careers that actually fit what she wants— schedule, income, work environment, location— and then you say, okay, here are a list of careers that actually fit that. Oh, this one's the most interesting to me. Oh wow, this only requires an associate's degree and a certificate, and then I'm going to start around $60,000 and my mid-career is going to be about $89,000 a year. And it's shift work, how great. That's how we do it. It's not, what do you want to do? And you just have high school girls rooting around at trying to figure out what's the most socially acceptable thing to say and then going into debt to do that because they said it and then they got social approval for it. There's nothing wrong with the girl in this clip. She's 17 and she's trying to get a wow response and she's just never gotten asked what she needs from her work.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:25]:
For a lot of parents, they were never asked that question, which is why they don't know to ask it now. I hope that this was helpful. The takeaway here is please talk to your daughter about what she needs. And if the idea of trying to help your daughter to figure this out is overwhelming, That's understandable. It takes our team weeks to do it one-on-one. If you want that kind of support and planning for your daughter, degreefree.com/launch.