Your Kid Can Be an Engineer Without a Degree (Here's How) (The Hannah Maruyama Show #9)

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:00]:
I talked to a mom last week and she was telling me, oh, you know, my son is interested in engineering. He's 16 and they can afford college. She wasn't inquiring about whether or not he needed to go because they couldn't pay for it. She was talking to me about it because she just had this feeling that going to college was not the right fit for him and that maybe he didn't need to go. And she's right. She just didn't know why. So I'm kind of going to go into this because so many parents have kids who are interested in engineering and they think that the only way to get into it is a 4-year degree. But that's just not the reality of engineering in our country and it never has been.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:31]:
to talk about PE licenses, and we're going to talk about degrees, and then we're going to talk about how many engineers in the US actually have college degrees or professional engineering licenses. And part of the reason I want to talk about this is because I worked in AI machine learning software for years without buying a college degree, and then I found a degree free. Now, this is important because I worked with a ton of engineers, and a lot of them did not have college degrees, and they were degree-free themselves. And that's just software. And what's funny is people nowadays will say, oh, well, you know, software, like, you don't need a degree for software engineering. That's crazy because a few years ago, people would tell you that you couldn't get into tech because you needed to have a college degree. So, it's crazy how that Overton window has shifted very quickly in the last, like, 3 to 4 years. And I don't think there ever was a time, really, that there was a vast majority of software developers that had degrees.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:17]:
Because right now, most software developers, if they even have a degree at all, it's completely unrelated to computer science, which means that they didn't need it in order to become a software engineer. But I'm not even talking about software engineers, because I know people will take issue with that. I'm just talking about engineering, period. And a lot of people again will push back against this, but I'm going to show you the actual numbers on it today. And I'm very passionate about this because in the Launch Program, we've helped hundreds of young adults find the right career for them and then start it. And quite a few of them have gone on to become engineers. That's because there are many types of engineers, many flavors, many industries. And most of those jobs, especially entry-level jobs, do not require college degrees at all.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:52]:
They start with skilled technician jobs. And that is the best way for your child to get engineering because it is the best way to gain experience. And then get proof that that is the correct engineering field for them. And then oftentimes companies will pay for their degrees if they do need a PE, which is very rare. And that's something we're going to talk about today. The whole reason I wanted to do this episode was because most engineering work in this country does not legally require an engineering degree at all. So your child doesn't have to spend $100,000 and 4 to 6 years to find that out the hard way. They can walk in at 18 versus applying at 23 for the exact same job that they could get now.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:24]:
And I feel like every week I have the same conversation. And usually it's a parent of a 16 to 18-year-old young man who wants to be an engineer. And what's so interesting about this is if you ask the young man, and I say young man, because I would say 80% of them are young men that say this, if you ask them what type of engineering, they don't know. And so they're going to school for engineering and they don't even know what sort of engineer they're going to become. And there are hundreds of different types of engineering. There's actual PEs, there's programmers, there's scientists, and these young men are bright, they're curious. Usually they got the grades in school, so their parents are like, okay, well, you wanna do engineering? That's safe. That's good because engineering in their minds equals you get a degree and then that degree will get you an engineering job.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:09]:
But that doesn't work anymore because they need the entry-level experience and they're trying to skip it and it's not working. And that's why so many engineering students right now and so many computer science majors Are unemployed. So the script that parents are getting from schools, from their counselors, or from friends of friends and College Board emails is always the same thing. They need a 4-year degree. They need to go to engineering school. Oh, he's good at math? Engineering school. Oh, he's good at strategic thinking? Engineering school. Oh, he's interested in science? Engineering school.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:38]:
And then pick your major early. Make sure you get that paper. Make sure you buy. So the nagging feeling that this mom was talking to me about with her son, that's the gap between the script that people are telling parents and then Her actual son where she's just going, I don't think you need to do this, but I also don't know how you can do it correctly. She just doesn't have the numbers to back it up, but she could see around her that all these kids going to school for engineering, it just wasn't adding up, even though she was considering sending her son to some of the biggest engineering schools in the country. Now, we had a young man who left Texas A&M. He was in the engineering program. And by the way, that means that he had the grades to get into it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:12]:
So it's not like he wasn't able to get in. He did. It's that it didn't fit his goals. It didn't fit what he wanted to learn or how he wanted to learn it. He was incredibly bright, incredibly technical, and he was going to be a great engineer. And the thing is, after he left, within 3 weeks, we managed to help him find an entry-level engineering role. And then he was hired and started in it within 3 days of interviewing for it. And that is the power of a plan and knowing what type of engineering, how it's going to fit your larger life, and then what the right entry point is, because it's rarely college, especially for engineers.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:43]:
So currently, less than 20% of working engineers in the US hold a professional engineering license, which means they needed a degree in order to become an engineer. So 80% of employed engineers in our country practice every day without a professional engineering license, and many of them do not have college degrees. So the PE is this credential that legally gates engineering work in our country, but 4 out of 5 working engineers don't have one. Their employers don't require it. Their work does not legally require it. And the 4-year engineering degree, the script that we just keep telling everyone they have to do in order to get a good job, all it's doing is burning up their time and their money and their energy when they could prep correctly and then walk into these entry-level roles at 18 instead of trying to apply for them at 23, where they didn't really learn anything applicable in school. And now they're trying to apply this general engineering degree or mechanical engineering degree to anything that they can find at all, instead of knowing what the end goal is at the beginning. Which is first principles, which is an engineering principle.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:39]:
We should know what our goal is before we start trying to build this project, because otherwise we're going to get this Frankenstein at the end of it. And that's where so many people are now trying to fit a degree into whatever job they can find, as opposed to saying, oh, I actually don't need a degree at all. I need to start in XYZ industry as quickly as possible. Here are the prereqs that I can get in high school that will then help me to apply at 18, get an entry-level role so that I never have to scramble with everybody else. At 23 or 24 years old. Now, if you have a 16 or 22-year-old who's thinking about engineering or has wanted to be one, and maybe they left college, but they still have that desire, hit subscribe because the show exists to give you the math behind what we tell young adults about careers. Because a lot of times the people telling you the right answer don't know what's going on, but we do. And we're going to tell you what is so that you're informed and your child is informed when you're making these decisions for their future.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:27]:
Let me walk you through where this 20% number comes from, because it's really important. And this will also be cited in our College Sense report, The Common Sense Case Against College. This is the quick version for the show. The NCEES is the council that administers the PE exam, so Professional Engineering Exam. As of the last full count, there were 931,640 personal engineering licensees in the United States, but only 494,542 unique individuals who hold them. And that's because engineers often carry licenses in multiple states. So, the BLS tracks engineering employment by occupation. So, the total US engineering employment sits around 2.5 million across mostly architecture and engineering.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:08]:
Now, the individual PEs, the about half a million of them, divided by roughly 2.5 million working engineers comes out to about 20%. And that's the same number that the National Society of Professional Engineers, which is the trade body itself, has been publishing for years. The vast majority of working engineers in our country do not have professional engineering licenses. And no, they don't need them. So, picture 10 engineers walking into the same office on a Monday morning. 2 of them will hold PEs. The other 8 of them don't. They're software engineers, they're hardware engineers, manufacturing, field service, industrial engineers, HVAC engineers, sales engineers, lab engineers, and every one of them is an engineer.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:44]:
They get paid to engineer. None of them needs the license to do their work. Now, 5 out of the 10 got their first engineering job before they were 25. So, some of the field service and manufacturing engineers got hired right out of trade school, Or right out of high school. So parents are told that all engineers are in this first group, like they have to go to college and they have to buy a degree before they can ever apply for an engineering job. But the data says that that's wrong. They can walk in and apply to these careers and get entry-level work at 18 years old, and they should. The other thing that I think is hard about this is a lot of parents and, and their kids also don't really know what types of engineering there are.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:17]:
And this is just a lack of vocational creativity. A lot of that is because the people who tend to be in charge of helping young adults pick their careers do not know what careers are available to them. And the resources that they have to navigate them are also subpar. Like they just don't have a wide variety and they're not able to niche down and they're not able to look by locality. And so because of that, there's just not really a good comprehensive way to do this, which honestly, and that's why in the Launch Program, the only way that we think this can be solved is by a human doing research for every individual child at the time in which they're trying to enter the market for the specific career they're trying to enter. That's how we solve the problem. There's no cheap fix for this. You just have to do the work.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:55]:
You have to do the searching. People have to look, you have to call, you have to email, you have to get information and then make informed decisions. And it takes, you know, it takes us 4 weeks. For families, it'll probably take, you know, between 2 to 6 months depending on how complex, because it's our job to do it. So we're a little bit faster. But basically the core of this is that most people just don't know what types of engineering jobs are out there. So they just say, oh, well, you need to go get a degree to become an engineer, but you don't because engineering is huge. Like there's categories that most parents have never even thought about.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:23]:
It's never occurred to them. And then for their young adults, often they've never been exposed or even heard of a lot of these types of engineering. Most of the engineering jobs that people will end up in, they did not know before they went to college, which means they probably didn't know to need to go to college to do it at all. A few good examples of this would be industrial engineers. They optimize how factories and warehouses run, or manufacturing engineers, which figure out how to actually make things. There's field service engineers, which they install and repair complex equipment in the field. And that's actually what we helped Aiden find. It was a field service engineering role for medical device repair, which is a huge, well-paying, fast-growing engineering job in our country.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:00]:
Sales engineers, which are people who translate like technical things into customer terms so that people are able to buy technical products. This could be hardware, this could be software, just depends. And then HVAC engineers, which are very high-paying careers, and almost none of them are PEs. All of these are real engineering jobs. They pay well. None require a 4-year engineering degree, and you can get entry-level work that will help you get the experience to get promoted into it, or your company might even buy you a degree if they do want you to get a PE. And that's one of the things I'm a huge fan of because then it completely takes all the risk off of your child. So the script that's run on parents is very much built around like these 2 visible engineering jobs.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:37]:
It's going to be architecture and then civil engineering with rare exceptions outside of that. So the labor market is built around the other types of engineering I just talked about. And your child has been pointed towards the smallest, slowest, and most expensive door in the whole Building of engineering. The actionable way to start thinking about this at home is to run through what we call the Degree Free Four. And these are the core 4 things that every young adult needs to do before they choose what they're going to do after high school. What schedule does his life need? So this is the 9 to 5. Is he self-directed? Is he on the road? Are they traveling? What environment does she want to work in? Does she want to work in an office, in a factory, in a lab? Is she working on site? Is she traveling and doing fieldwork? Is she working from home? What sort of income does his life require? So actually run the numbers of the life he wants and then what he needs to fund that. And then where does she want to live and build her life? Big city, small town, near family, anywhere? Because all of these factors matter.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:29]:
And once you figure out which one is the need and which one's the want, you can figure out what need needs to be satisfied by their career so that their career serves them getting the life that they want and not the other way around. Your career should map to your life. Your life should not have to mold itself around a career. We shouldn't be picking schools or picking majors or picking job titles until you've figured out what your child needs from their work so that you're sure that whatever they need is satisfied by the work they get so that they're able to cover their needs, whatever those are, because every individual will have different ones. And the beauty of this, and this is what we believe at Degree Free, but there's— every young adult has a different set of needs. And because of that, there is a good spot, a good place, a good career for all of them. It just takes time and energy to find these things, do the appropriate research, ask the hard questions. And again, if this is something that you're like, this is overwhelming to me, or it would be hard for me to do this with my child, degreefree.com/launch.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:22]:
It's a 4-week program. It's very intense. They get a one-on-one career strategist who works with them through this whole process and helps them figure out what they need from their work, what careers fit that, exactly what they need to learn down to zip code specificity, and then how they're going to learn it over the next 12 months to start that career. If the schedule that your child wants doesn't tolerate 60-hour shop floor hours, then manufacturing's probably out before you start. If the income that they need at 23 is 6 figures, well, HVAC field service is gonna beat lab tech. If they wanna live in a small town near home, then maybe sales engineering or field service open up while big tech software might close down if more of those opportunities are in a big city. So choosing a path before you've figured out what they actually need is not wise because they're gonna end up in the wrong place Without their needs met. And this is what schools tell people to do when they just say, go to college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:09]:
And just because they're going to school for engineering, if they have no goal, it doesn't make them wiser than a psychology major. It's the same problem. And the best evidence for this is about 70% of STEM majors don't even work in STEM. So obviously it's not translating. And that's because people are not figuring out what they need before they start these degrees. So we should never be starting at, well, he's interested in engineering, so he's going to go to school for engineering. You start with what life are you trying to build so they don't end up pursuing a job that's going to actively keep them from the life that they want. And I just wanna illustrate like how this looks side by side.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:37]:
So Kid A goes to a 4-year engineering program, probably takes him about 5 to 6 years to finish because most kids take 5 and a half years. He's gonna pay $100,000 to $200,000, and then he's going to be job hunting at 23 with no real work experience and competing with everybody else who did the exact same thing for the same jobs. Kid B figures out what he needs from his work and he pins down the entry-level skilled technician role that actually fits him. He gets in at 18 or 19 in the same role that the 23-year-old paper candidates will be competing for after they have all this student debt and are 4 to 6 years older. He's going to be earning money and learning the insides of an actual engineering job. If 3 or 4 years in, his specific path turns out to legally need a PE, his company will probably pay for it and he will get a guaranteed raise and a career path he already knows fits him. And this is very binary because young adult A, Is not in a good position. And young adult B went into this in the least risky way possible.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:30]:
And that's always going to benefit them because they're cashflow positive and experience positive. Whereas college graduates are outlaying all this time, all this energy, and all this money, and not getting the required experience they will need in order to get the exact same job as 18-year-olds can get. And we see this because we see young adults who come through our planning program have much more success when they're younger than when they're older, especially if they have college degrees. It's really, really tough to get hired if you're a college graduate. And that's exactly what happened with Aiden. He was at Texas A&M for engineering and he was bored and he couldn't see how getting this engineering degree was gonna get him the earnings that he wanted to have a family and career that actually mattered to his life. So in the Launch Program, we figured out what he needed from his work, and then we identified field service engineering as a role that fit him, his interests and his schedule and his target income. And he could enter without having to buy a college degree.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:16]:
Then we built him a 12-month plan and then helped him find the right entry-level roles so that he could apply for. He applied and then Was given an interview 3 days later, immediately hired as an engineer, no degree at all, within about 3 weeks of starting our launch program. And again, this is what happens when you execute a plan. We don't do placement, we do planning, and this is what the plan did. So his peers at A&M in 4 years will be trying to land the exact same role he already has. His mom talked to me afterwards, and then before the launch program, she didn't recognize her son because he was so discouraged about not going to college. But then he came home from successfully having this interview and said, I got my uniforms, I'm gonna go get my haircut, I gotta go to work. And it completely changed his life.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:57]:
But the fact is, he could have done that right when he graduated high school because there was no need for him to go to college at all. And that's the thing that so many parents whose kids are interested in engineering are missing. It's that entry-level role, and you wanna shrink the distance between them graduating high school and getting into these entry-level roles. And that is the whole goal. So on June 8th, of this year, Meta announced the America's Workforce Academy. This is a $115 million first-year investment, and it's free for participants. So there's guaranteed full-time employment to every graduate, and Meta is calling this basically the largest private sector skilled trades job guarantee in the US, which is definitely accurate. So this is covering like fiber optics, welders, plumbers, electricians, and other skilled trades that are feeding Meta's AI data center buildout.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:40]:
So grads can earn construction certifications plus an America's Workforce certificate, And both go with the worker as they now apply to different careers no matter where they go. So they're doing this in Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, and Texas. So basically every state where Meta has data center projects. This is a really great example of those entry-level technician opportunities that this is where your kids who are interested in engineering should start. Because at any point, a company will pay for them to become a PE. At any point, they can go back and buy a degree. The older they are when they go back to buy a degree, the cheaper it's going to be. If they wait until they're 25, 26, it's no longer tied to parents' income and it will be very inexpensive for them to do this.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:19]:
And not only will it be very inexpensive, but the type of degree they will choose will likely have a direct correlation and they will need, or it will just be useful in order to help them advance their career. And that is the correct time to do that. Not at the beginning when they're interested in engineering, we're going to go buy a degree and then hopefully that'll get them a good job because that's just not how it works anymore. So the 3 things parents can do if their sons are interested in engineering is sit down with them and do the Degree Free 4, figure out what schedule they need, Work environment, income, or location. And don't let the conversation go into like, what should you major in? Where should you go? It's, you need to figure out what they need first. And so do they, before they even think about what they're going to be doing. What's the goal here? Where are we trying to get? So the next thing you're going to do is then figure out what category of engineering fits that goal, if at all. So this is not just, oh, he's going to become an engineer.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:06]:
It's, are we going industrial? For what company? Like for what, doing what? Field service engineering, manufacturing engineer, security engineer, automation engineer, HVAC engineer, sales engineers. What type of engineering are we doing here? And then tailor any remaining years of high school around that. So certifications, shop classes, internships, part-time work, anything to make him resume ready so that when he graduates, he can get entry-level roles that his peers will be applying for when they're 23 or 24 years old. And yes, they can do it. And how do I know? Because we do this all the time. The best way to see if what I'm saying is true is to test it yourself. Help your child find and apply to these roles and see if they get calls back, because you will be shocked if there's a slight bit of strategy applied here. So many people are unwilling to do this very simple thing.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:50]:
If your child says that they are interested in a specific career and you think that they need to go to college, try to apply to entry-level roles first when they are 18 years old, right after they graduate high school. And what you will find is that they will be more likely to get entry-level roles at that age than they will when they graduate college. If people did this, they would quickly realize that college is completely unnecessary for their kids to start almost any career, but especially engineering. Skilled technician roles are the entry-level roles in engineering. That is where you start. That's where you get paid. That's where you learn real skills and figure out what specific niche of engineering your child might wanna go into or potentially build a business in, in the future. In this country, we plan almost everything.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:28]:
We plan retirement, we plan taxes, we plan for college. But we don't plan for careers. We just assume that college is the plan and it will translate into a career and it doesn't. That entire bridge is broken. It's destroyed. AI didn't even do it. This has been going on for a very long time. Since 2010, this has been going on.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:47]:
If you look at the Burning Glass Institute and they studied 51 million job listings over that time, the degree requirements started 16 years ago. This is not new. But the 4-year degree script is just not working. That's why when you look around and you see families that are like, ooh, my son's back at home, my daughter's back at home. Or they're going to get master's degrees, they can't get a job. It's because it doesn't work anymore. And it's been like that for a while. The thing that you have to do now is figure out what your kids need and then shorten the distance between them and the correct entry-level work that will help them get to their goals.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:17]:
And that is the recipe. Ironically enough, this is something that we used to do a long time ago, but we're now back around to the— the future is the past. And so we're back around and that is again the way to do it. But to take a lot of the fear out of this for parents, college will always be there. It will always take your money or your child's money or their grandparents' money, because that's the largest growing group who's taking out student loans. Now, the longer your child waits, the more sure they'll be about whether or not they actually need a degree. So if they do end up going, they'll show up with real work experience that makes that paper actually mean something. Please share it with another parent whose kid might be interested in engineering.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:53]:
Now, if you want third-party help with that, I get it. It's pretty intense. Again, it takes our team who's trained to do it 4 weeks. So for you to do this amount of research and do it correctly and know that it's right, It's probably gonna take you several months. So if you don't have several months or you're like, you know what, they could really benefit from just having an outside third party do this, application for the Launch program is in the show notes, or you can go to degreefree.com/launch and we would love to help your child launch their career.