121: Why You Shouldn't Send Your Kids To College | Hannah Maruyama

The colleges are incentivized to charge 17 and 18 year old children who are financially illiterate. We're talking $848 billion. People do not realize the scale of this. When I think about the avoidance tactic that college represents, like I'll figure it out later. Why are we disconnected from our curiosity? Avoiding that conversation with yourself for another four years is probably not going to be productive, but it's very tempting. We glamorize that and we say, oh, this group of people is educated. They're smarter. They're going to have better life outcomes. Meanwhile, we have 18 year olds who start in the workforce and they're 23. They bought a house. They're married. They're about to have their first kid. Earnings don't matter if you are in debt until you are 80 years old. Earning is not impressive if the earnings do not outpace the debt that you're going to carry. Hi and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan, and today I have created a podcast asset for you, which is sometimes what I endeavor to do, where I want to create a hard-hitting summary that you can share with somebody in your life that you love that essentially opens a portal and delivers a summary of truths that would otherwise take a lot of investment to curate. So today's guest is Hanna Maruyama, who is with her husband of the degree-free way. And what we talk about and explore and unpack in this conversation is essentially the myth of college education, why it over-promises and under delivers and what is an alternative, quote unquote, reclamation path for the 16 to 20 year old, right? So what does one do if one does not reflexively go to college? And this is something very near and dear to my heart. So I was very motivated to extract from this glorious woman all of the many pearls of wisdom that she comes ready to bear. So I hope that this is as exciting and empowering for you as it was for me. Hi, Hannah, and welcome to Reclamation Radio. Hi, Kelly. Thank you so much for having me on. I have been looking forward to this since December when you messaged me, and I have been listening to Reclamation Radio to prepare, and I am ready, ready for today. It's something to get ready for, apparently, yes. And yeah, we were just chatting offline, and I was already tearing up a bit about just sort of the later life realizations that I've had around mothering and this very humbling art form that I referenced of representing truths to our children, especially ones that we feel very passionately about, without too heavy a hand, you know, such that polarity is generated and, you know, your kids end up adopting a perspective antithetical to yours just because yours is so passionately embodied. So this subject that we're going to explore and unpack today, which is perhaps summarized as the con of college, is one that I have been trumpeting for a couple of years. And I told you, I think I've already blown it a bit. I think I've already come on too strong with my daughters because when I started to learn about unschooling and homeschooling as somebody who has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into my advanced education and training, I am potentially a living hypocritical representation of the stance that one should abandon the educational system. And my daughters will often point that out to me, right? Like, well, but look, you're still working with your degrees and and yada yada and my heart knows and can feel a dupe right and that's pretty much what I'm in the business of exposing in many different arenas and I am excited that there seems to be a zeitgeist shift that you are a part of that is revealing the college experience and I would probably especially, say, the liberal arts college experience, to be, you know, less reflexively necessary, right? Like in even my kids' generation, like they know teenagers who are not going to college. It's happening. It's happening. The edifice is crumbling. And I know that, you know, I shared my opinion a couple of years ago that I do not want them to go to college and that I will actually provide seed money for their entrepreneurial lives. I mean, these days, I'm pretty much like, I will help you identify the perfect husband for yourself. That's what I'm going to do for you, okay? So that he can provide and you can just enjoy your feminine expression. So the advice seems to be evolving over the years. But suffice it to say, today I want to unpack what you have come to conclude around college and alternatives and what that looks like as far as the way that you support folks in this arena. Before we get into that, I want to double down on your husband theory. I have a friend, Brett Cooper of the comment section. She just recently stopped working for the Daily Wire, but she and I had a conversation about what we believe, because she sees what I see as well, in that the academic industrial complex is no longer serving people. And the real reason that the zeitgeist you're referring to is simply that the cost has gone past what most people in the middle class can afford. They cannot reconcile it to themselves anymore. And that is the reason for the vehement, vehement just reaction to what's being taught in colleges, what's not being taught in colleges, who is teaching it, and then the qualifications of the people who teach. And then the not only the lack of qualifications, but the complete lack of ethics and the lack of scholarly behavior in the people who are held up as this academic elite scholar class. COVID, I think, exposed a lot of cracks here. Obviously, that was in a highly regulated system in the medical industry. And that when people start questioning people who have medical degrees, because one could argue that if there are people that should have college degrees, most people can agree that it should be doctors. And so when people start questioning the top echelons of legally required degrees, everybody else starts to be questioned as well. And so we start to question other quote unquote experts. And then this, it just creates a waterfall effect of people just being increasingly skeptical of what exactly is going on here. Who are we giving all of our young minds to? And then why are we paying so much money? And then why are these results so poor? And then why are they telling me that you'll make a million dollars more, but all of the college graduates I know are underemployed or they're employed in something completely irrelevant. But I do think that you're right about the matchmaking. I actually think a massive result and a symptom of this complete abandoning of the college industrial complex is going to be people actually spending money on matchmakers for their kids. I actually think that that is a second order effect that will happen in the next four years. I think that's going to get way more common in middle class families. I think that that is going to come back in a big way, But totally, totally irrelevant to that. I mean, there's like a mandala that you can start to zoom out and see taking form. And it has a lot of surprising ingredients. Trust me, I am often talking about my feminist recovery journey. And this was probably the greatest plot twist of all is coming to believe in traditional providership roles when it comes to caretaking the home and family as the woman's domain and providership protectorship as the man's. I mean, I would have taken great offense to that even 15 years ago. So yeah, it is humbling. So I want to start out because I've consumed a lot of your amazing content, both through your podcast and just your social media content. But I want to zoom out and start with sort of the conclusion, I guess, around how you would describe the college con. And then I want to unpack some of the myths when it comes to the social, this is a big one, because it's the greatest objection that I encounter with my daughters, the social promise of college, the vocational promise, and then even some of the developmental promises that seem to be programmed into us as available only through this collegiate experience. And then we can sort of move on to the truth of the matter as you and I see it. So yeah, what would you say in the current climate is the college con? I love that you called it that too, because I actually have a draft of a piece that I was going to submit to the New York Post that's called the Great College Con. So So really well done. Really well done with that. There are a few different myths that are perpetrated. And the thing that you have to keep in the back of your mind is that when we are talking about this industry, it is one of the most profitable industries in our entire country. It is massive. We're talking $848 billion. People do not realize the scale of this. And the other thing is that because so many colleges are nonprofits, they think that nonprofit doesn't mean it's a business. They think that nonprofit doesn't mean they're out for cash. They are, just like any other business. Just because a nonprofit has to spend all of their money by the end of the year does not make it any less of a business. They just operate differently with cash flow and budgeting. And so once you realize that the colleges are incentivized to charge 17- and 18-year-old children who are financially illiterate, that is who we want. We want middle-class kids who don't understand the implications of the debt they're signing on and the fact that it's bankruptcy exempt. They cannot get rid of it. It will follow them until the ends of the earth. This KKR, which is a credit firm they just bought, I think it was, they paid something like $80 million over market, about $800 million over market value from a bundle of student loans that they bought from Discover because they know that they can follow them and they can garnish their wages. They will get that money back. And people are just not understanding that what we're doing is, it reminds me a lot of the housing crisis in 2008. So if you've ever seen the big short, remember they go and they're looking at all these houses and they're realizing that a lot of the realtors and brokers are just writing multiple mortgages to anybody and there's no backing. It's the same thing except there's no asset that can be seized by the banks. The only asset is the time and the money of the graduate. That's it. There's nothing else backing it. And that is terrifying. There's also a secondary debt market called SLABs, which are student loan asset-backed securities. And people just do not realize the scale of this. They just don't understand. And so once you realize how much money is at stake and the behavior, the predatory lending behavior that is incentivized and the way that the colleges are allowed to make promises and fraudulently advertise outcomes that they cannot promise that they do not fulfill. And once you realize, oh, wait, of course, if you can, on average, the NCES estimates 104 to 156K is how much people are spending. Now, that is not lost wages. That is not interest. That is not any of that. That totals, the NCES estimate for that is over half a million dollars for a bachelor's degree. So we are looking at something that just massively impacts the generation that they're targeting. And when they target young people, it's on purpose because they don't understand how much money this is ultimately going to be. They don't understand how much time this is ultimately going to cost them. They look at it as, oh, it's four years. oh, it's just $20,000 a year. It's not that. They're missing time in the market. They're going to take on more interest. So quite literally, when you have somebody that starts working at 18 and you have somebody that goes to college at 18, they are switching roles. Because even if this person has very little savings and goes into the workforce, they're going to experience the magic of compound interest. The college graduate is going to experience the opposite. That's why when they talk about college graduate outcomes, they always talk about earnings. Earnings don't matter if you are in debt until you are 80 years old. That's why they're always, oh, you're going to earn. Earning is not impressive if the earnings do not outpace the debt that you're going to carry. And so a lot of this comes down to just supply and demand. So back in 1965, and we're going to go into the history of this a little bit. So back in 1965, that is when the government started subsidizing student loans. It was the Higher Education Act. When they did this, it allowed the government to get into the education game. And I hesitate to call it education at this point, but into the college game. So once they did that, they were able to access a whole new pool of people to pull money from who couldn't afford to go. Now, not even 10 years later, the amount of people who had started to default on their student loans was so high, they had to amend the Higher Education Act. So this is 1965, when the people going to college were doctors, lawyers, engineers. They were all GIs coming back from World War II who had the GI Bill, and it was going to the colleges. And they were all going into jobs that were like heavy STEM, legal requirement related. Because back then, 7.4% of all the jobs in the country required degrees. Obviously, those types of jobs paid more. It wasn't the degree. It was the fact that the job itself was higher paying because it required a legal license to do it. And so it was this artificial thing where people, oh, it's the degree. And then they opened it up to all these people who should not have been able to go. And they started loaning the money when before there weren't, it wasn't, it wasn't loans. There were no public loans. And so now you have this glut of people into the market and not even 10 years later, it had already started to fail. It had already started to fail. Not even 10 years this lasted. But when they, when they changed the law, people did not stop going because they had said, oh, it's the degree. And so I think that our system has been running on fumes since probably the 1980s, like 1980 itself. And so now what we're seeing is the amount of people who go to get degrees, the amount of jobs that legally require degrees has only increased 0.3%. So it's 7.7% of jobs now legally require degrees. But the amount of jobs that pay high that don't require degrees has also increased. But your amount of college graduates has also increased because we use social pressure. As you said, we use emotions. We use fear of loss and hope of gain, which are just basic sales tactics. We scare parents. We tell them, oh, your child won't be successful. They won't marry well. That's bullshit. Nobody meets in college campuses anymore. If you look at the graphs of how people meet, it's all online. And I'm sorry, but your children have access to the internet. They don't have to go into a college campus and pay $100,000 to have access to the exact same dating pool as all the kids on college campuses. They tell you your kid's not going to be socially accepted, which is just ridiculous. The only case where that would be true is if your child is part of this 1% class where nobody cares about the degree at all. It's just the fact that they walked through the doors and that's all they care about. If you're not in the 1%, you know if you're not in this group of people, nobody cares about them because it's irrelevant to the rest of us. So that is not going to socially impact your child. That's ridiculous. The next thing is that they're going to sell to the kids, as you said, the social experience. However, the social experience is something, one, it's patently ridiculous to sell to lower and middle class families. I come from one of these families. That's why I talk to this group of people a lot. It's ridiculous to sell to them that they have to pay six figures to have access to a four-year party. It is infantilizing young adults. It is pushing the consequences of adulthood further away. If you meet a 22-year-old college graduate, one, that's unusual because 60% of grads take five and a half years to graduate. So they're actually 23. And you meet a 23-year-old who's been in the workforce for five years, they are wildly different people. And anybody knows this because the 23-year-old is paying their own bills. The 23-year-old has an idea of how to maintain a car. The 23-year-old has an idea of how to go to work on time. You get a 23-year-old out of college, they don't know how to do anything. And it's because they're in this controlled environment and they paid a premium to stay in this controlled environment. And then what you may have seen and what I see frequently. And I don't work with this age range, but I see parents who say, oh, my child wants to go get a master's degree because the job market's bad, or they just say they want to keep learning forever What that really is is they have been upsold because the best customer you have is one you already have And so what they want is they want to continue to upsell degrees The other thing is that the loan system incentivizes this behavior as well And so what they will do is when they've glamorized and made it seem noble to just stay on a college campus forever and never leave. Oh, what a noble pursuit of knowledge where they learn nothing useful. They contribute very little to society. And in fact, often are more of a drain on society because they need public money in order to create research projects to keep themselves busy so that they don't have to leave the academic bubble. And you are laughing, I can see, because you know exactly what I'm talking about. And so you get these kids that, and you hear failure to launch and all this stuff, and they're 30 years old, and they don't have kids, they can't buy a house. And it's because they've been so scared, and they want them like that because they just want them to keep buying. Because as long as they keep buying, they don't have to pay the loans back. And so we just incentivize this treadmill. And so we've created this culture where we've put college up like this ideal. And as long as you're on a college campus, you're doing something productive, even if you're just digging yourself into unproductive debt. And it makes you feel at least like, oh, they're doing something good, I guess. It's education, so it's fine. And we glamorize that and we say, oh, this group of people, this group of people is educated. They're smarter. They're going to have better life outcomes. Meanwhile, we have 18-year-olds who start in the workforce and they're 23. They bought a house. They're married. They're about to have their first kid. I say that because I, every day of the week, will put my youngest sister up against any other 23-year-old. My youngest sister is a structural welder. She started welding when she was 18 years old. She almost has enough time in to be a QA lead. She out earns the median master's degree holder. She has zero debt. She and her husband are about to buy their first house. She's married. And they're planning to have their first child in the next year. And it's such a good example of how I would love to see, and often people get very upset about this, but when I say, how is your child doing? Because 23 is when they graduate a lot of times, five and a half years, right? And they're going, oh, well, they're thinking about going back to school for another degree because they just don't want to face the reality of life. And they just haven't learned how to be, they haven't learned how to work in a professional environment. And then unfortunately for parents, the job market has completely shifted. So if you've seen states or 17 states this last year have dropped degree requirements, my favorite statistic right now is that 7.7%, right, is the degree-free estimate for how many jobs legally require degrees. when Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, he's the governor of Pennsylvania, he went through all of the state jobs and he eliminated all of the job listings that required, that said required degree where they did not legally require a degree. Do you want to guess how many jobs were freed up as a result of that? 92.3% of jobs in Pennsylvania. So quite literally, the exact estimate that Ryan and I had, the exact estimate was how many freed up. The California 30,000 jobs just opened up, removed degree requirements, cybersecurity, fire sprinkler installers, IT administrators, jobs that pay 80 to $100,000 a year. Tesla, IBM, Accenture, Bank of America, all recruiting out of high schools. They're skipping the colleges entirely. And that's because intelligence.com just did a survey recently where it says 71% of employers admitted to hiring a Gen Z college or hiring and then firing a Gen Z college graduate within a year of starting because they can't function at work. and it's just a really a case of how the colleges are selling them something that they're not preparing them for. They're selling them an expectation. That's really where it's tough because colleges are telling them you're so educated. You are just going to walk into the market and you're going to make like an economics major estimate right now is $100,000. That's how much they're telling college graduates they're going to make if they major in economics. Ryan majored, my husband majored in economics. This is years ago at University of Hawaii. he started at $30,000 a year. We had the chief economist for ZipRecruiter. Her name is Julia Pollock. She had a PhD in economics and she was offered $31,000 a year in New York City when she graduated. And they're telling these kids they're going to walk into a $100,000 a year job for a four-year economics degree. And they're just ruining their expectations, ruining it. And they're telling them that they have to buy a degree to get these entry-level jobs and they just don't. And that's the other thing is so many of them are realizing they paid all this money to pass go. They didn't have to be there at all. They could have saved five years, but none of them tried to get the jobs that they wanted. And they also just didn't know. So that's the other thing is they're just buying time, right? They're paying for the degree because they don't actually want to go out and try anything because they're scared. Because we scare them in high school. We tell them you can't do these things. You have to buy permission before you try anything. And then we tell them that everything and we gear all of the K through 12 experience towards college acceptance, which is a crazy metric because college acceptance is just loan debt. That's it. So when I went to high school, when I had somebody recently that said they run a private K through 12 education program and they work a lot with homeschoolers. And he said to me, oh, we have 100% acceptance rate, college acceptance rate. And I was horrified. I'm like, that's terrible. You should have a 10% acceptance rate. That would be success. You have literally the opposite of a success metric. You have a failure metric. 100% of these kids are going to college. That is way too high. So many of them don't need to be there at all. And it's unbelievable that that's still the success metric that so many schools are operating under because it's measurable. So that's why they use it. But all you're telling me is that you funneled all these kids into a very limited menu of options. Like, for example, the BLS, which is the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has 867 jobs listed in it, individual occupations. Now, that is the government's version of how many jobs are out there. Our estimate is that there's 3000 plus because there's more every single day. They are not in the BLS. Colleges, your largest university only has 100 majors in it. And so you are now telling me that you're funneling these kids into one of 100 choices when there's actually even the government says there's 867 when there's actually 3000 and only 7.7% of them legally require degrees. It's a great when you start to look at it, you just go, what are we doing? And then it makes sense as to why our culture is in crisis. It makes sense as to why all of these my generation, I'm the youngest millennial you'll get what we feel like we're behind. We are behind the average loan debt for somebody my age is 80,000. thousand dollars. We can't buy houses. And then people go, I can't afford to buy a house. And I said, yes, because you spent six figures on a bachelor's degree. And I said that and I got the ton of heat for it. But it's like, you only have so many hundred thousand dollar bullets. If you use it at 18, it's very unlikely you're going to be able to amass the type of money you need to have the down payment on the type of house that you feel like you want when you're 30 years old. And then they get all upset, right? And they don't want to move to lower cost of living areas. They get upset they can't live in Orange County, California, where their family's from, because they have all the student loan debt. And it's understandably frustrating. And there's inflation and there's other factors at play. But fundamentally, nobody wants to take responsibility for the fact that, hey, that was $100,000 bullet. I know the system screwed you. I know that's what they told you. But now I think Gen Z seems to be flipping that completely. They're very suspect. Yeah, which is amazing. It's been amazing to watch the critical thinking capacity that has somehow been reclaimed by Gen Z, at least in my experience, at least with my girls and their friends. I imagine that this is so validating for so many folks listening because I told you, I think probably most of the parents listening are homeschoolers or unschoolers and are on that path of questioning the indoctrination camp that we call the educational system. I am very curious, therefore, about like unpacking the psychosocial dimensions of like, what is happening here that is is still like where does the programming still have its tentacles? Because, you know, when I think about the avoidance tactic that college represents, right, you alluded to that, like, oh, you know, I'll figure it out later, like what I'm going to do with my life. well, why are we disconnected from our curiosity? Why are we disconnected from our interests? Why do we have a very corrupted sense of access to what it is that drives us intrinsically? It's because of the school system, because of the externalization of that and how we've operationalized that and become these mini factory workers. So then this idea that you're supposed to know what you want to do, man or woman, with your life, That is not accessible because of the disconnection that's been essentially installed for the, you know, the previous 12 years. So avoiding that conversation with yourself for another four years is probably not going to be productive, but it's very tempting, right? Like, I'll figure it out later kind of psychology. Then there's this idea of like the socio-cultural milieu, right? Like the sense of belonging, you know, because I attempted to homeschool slash unschool my girls in 2020 and 2021. And if I had had a community of, I did have a community of like-minded women. However, if I had a community of like-minded women with same or similar aged children, both boys and girls, big though. I'm talking like 50 kids. I 100% could have gone down this path because I did not have that. I lost the war, you know, and my kids ended up, you know, going back to school because they had a longing to have this kind of community experience, social experience that is their birthright. Okay. So when we offer it later on, or maybe even like the peak of their like social curiosity when we say you can go hang out in a big community and you can meet all of these similarly aged kids and you can enjoy and have fun and build networks and whatever. Like how does so irresistible in part because the wound that has grown out of our fragmented nuclear family, if that, you know, lifestyles is so gaping that this seems it's like the any allopathic remedy that you can't ignore, right? So like, when I think about that, I don't know that the argument that my girls would have to go to college is like, well, I need a degree, right? So I think they probably would be able to hear you say there are very few career paths that actually require a college degree today. So you're not actually going to position yourself better than if you just get in the workforce. Plus, they see the business that I run. They know I don't even literally know if my employees went to college or didn't. I don't care. I've never asked. Like, it's literally not relevant. So they understand, especially in the digital entrepreneurial realm, that this may not be super relevant vocationally. But I don't know how I would, you know, again, because of the sociocultural programming and the wounds and all of the challenges that are built in and baked in to the structure of their experience, how I would contend with those aspects. And, you know, all that I typically say is like, well, I literally have no friends from college. Okay. I also went to MIT. It wasn't like the most like social experience, but I, you know, all of my friends are from other aspects of my life and especially, you know, aspects of my life where I have more like modern day commonalities and, you know, where we share an ethos and I don't know, it's more than just like we went to the same campus for four years. Okay. It's a more refined, like sense of overlap. But I think that that's the greatest challenge that I see, like is how tempting a bait it is to imagine that you could have an experience of social belonging. And it's, you know, it's sort of like structured in this very compact way. It's like four, let's say five your experience. And then you'll go figure out later, you know, what the hell you want to do. And meanwhile, like you and I touched on this a little bit, but the disruption of the family unit and a woman's identification and role as mother is actually well-seeded by the capture of those very specific years, right? And then programming these young women that they should be after that point focused on getting their careers started, right? So that, you know, I have many girlfriends in their 40s who are finally thinking about having kids. Okay, this is the product of that kind of prioritization that is not aligned with, you know, the kind of values that I think a lot of us as women are coming to see as primary. So is there anything else you would like add as far as the social and sociocultural dimensions of this conversation? Yeah. So there's a caution and then the answer to that. So the first thing is that I think homeschooling and unschooling parents, I think are a little bit less susceptible to this, but homeschooling parents specifically. And I say that because my mom homeschooled my siblings and I, because we were a military family growing up. That's probably obvious now that I say it. And basically homeschooling parents, especially like more OG homeschooling parents fall victim to something. And that is they're trying to show outwardly that they're not bad parents and they weren't bad educators. And because of that, homeschoolers actually attend college at a much higher rate. And that's because parents are trying to justify the quality of their education of their children. So my kid got into Harvard, my kid got into this, and then they end up still having poor ROI. They end up still wasting a ton of time. So the challenge to homeschool and unschooling parents is do not try to put your child back in the system to make yourself and the people around you think that you did a good job. You did a good job. That's why you don't have to send your child into a meat grinder. And so it's crazy to spend K through 12 educating your own child and then send them back into a meat grinder that they have no need to be in unless they're going to be cutting somebody's head open. That is it. So I just want to make sure that parents feel empowered there. Don't do that. Don't fall victim to that. That is such a big temptation. And homeschool parents, it's so hard for them to resist it because it's, oh, my child got into this. And they just brag. And they use that to show that they did a good job because there's no other metric. All right. College acceptance is the metric. And even though you spent all this time bucking the system, you go right back into it to try to show everybody around you that you did a good job. So you don't have to do that. So any homeschool parents listening, don't do that just because everybody else is doing it. Because actually, too, not everybody else is doing it. And that's the thing that should embolden people. Second is I believe that this concept of this whole large, extremely large peer group of all like-minded or all like age is not good. historically, that's not been how it is. You have a small group of like five to max 20 kids your age. Like even if you lived in a small town, you don't have that many kids that are your age. Even if you go to a small village or town school, there's really not that many kids. And so this whole concept of let me go and just be with that group of kids for four to five years just, I think, incentivizes a lot of bad behavior, a lot of infantilization, a lot of like Peter Pan syndrome, I'll call it. And then also, it's just not reasonable. I think that as a result of choosing to send our kids into that environment, as opposed to sending them into entry-level work. And when I say entry-level work, I think a lot of people picture the trades. They probably picture welding, but I don't mean that. I mean, if your child signs up for, let's say Pinterest, Pinterest has a really good software development apprenticeship program. They're going to be around people who are of a similar age, maybe people a little bit older. But if your child is young, then they're going in, they're going to be with a group of people who are about the same age as them. So their peer group is going to be people who are trying to learn the same things as them in the same way. And so, for example, I have a young man who I'm working with and he actually went through the launch program process, wants to go into audio engineering. He is going to Tokyo, Japan for audio engineering school. His family saved, I believe, upwards of $90,000 on what they would have paid for music school tuition. And he doesn't have to waste his time. He had no interest. He's been producing a ton of music on his own, very creatives with a lot of incentive, always do well. They need the right environment. And so he did not need to go to a four college to be good at that and sit through a bunch of two years of general education classes he didn need He going to Japan because Japan produces a lot of music He going to rent a little apartment in Shibuya and he going to get on the train every day and he's going to go work with a producer who's worked with BTS, which is this big Korean singing group. He's going to get his name featured on stuff. He's going to work one-on-one with him to teach him how to be really, really good. Somebody who's produced for Apple, produced for amazing, amazing companies. And then he's going to come back in nine months because that's how long it takes to learn something like that, even something highly technical with a lot of software and a lot of hardware and a lot of artistry to it. Then he's going to come back with his resume, with his experience. He's going to go through the program with a couple other people who are similar age, but not all 18. He doesn't have to be with a bunch of 18-year-olds to grow. And actually, he will grow faster if he is not around a bunch of 18-year-olds who are making poor decisions. Especially for young men, I think a degree of loneliness is not a bad thing. Not a lot of it, but a little bit is good. And a degree of being around people who are not all the same age as you. And that is going to lead to maturity. That is going to lead to learning. That is going to lead to being challenged. And so the community, I think when we talk about community, sometimes the definition of it is too large. And community is not thousands of people on a college campus. And also, it's not real. It's fake. It's artificial. You're paying for it for four or five years. Whereas if you start working with people and you start being in a professional environment with people, you have a common goal, which is to improve or produce or work on a project or build something. And so if you're to start working at Tesla when you're 18, the people that you come up with are going to benefit you and you're going to benefit them far more than a bunch of unrelated thousand, you know, thousand, 18 year olds who are in a college campus. Again, slightly outside of, I'd say maybe there's 10 colleges where the network that you'll get, if you're a startup founder, possibly, you know, if you're, if you're, maybe, I guess somebody could make an argument for that. If somebody has the cash available to do that, that might make a difference. Or someone could say that it might've been a contributing factor. I don't think you can directly link it back because I think it's the 18 years prior to going to college that makes you the way you are. I don't think it's the four years you spend in college because college is just white label kids who they think are going to succeed. They just take bets. It's like saying, oh, you know what? He's a really good shot. Who is that? Steph Curry? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll take him. I'm sure it's having him on the Golden State Warriors that made him a good basketball player. Not the 18 years prior to that. Not the 20 years prior to that. So for people looking for community for their kids, just look smaller. Don't think that college is a substitute for real community, which is going to be diverse in age, diverse in experience. And then if you're actually looking for that too, you can look at the numbers. Most college graduates or most college students have less cross-race, less cross-cultural, less cross-class interactions than they would in the wild, literally just walking around or working. So they're going to be exposed to less people. And that just leads, I think, to less wisdom in general. I just think that that's true. And so if you are looking for community for your child, entry-level work, and this could It could be anything. So have them work at a gallery in your town. Have them go to the Chamber of Commerce and see who needs an entry-level digital marketer. Your small business Chamber of Commerce, wherever you live, is a great resource. Amazing. There's so many business owners. It doesn't matter what they're interested in. If they're interested in a restaurant, if they're interested in a local services business, if they're interested in modeling, you wouldn't believe the people that go to the Small Business Chamber of Commerce, wherever you live. Even small towns have a vibrant Chamber of Commerce. That's a great way to do it. Toastmasters is another place that I highly advise everybody to send their kids. That's one of the top complaints about Gen Z is they can't look people in the eyes and they can't speak. So if you can speak well, something that I myself am trying to work on, if you can speak well in public to people, that's a huge superpower that will help your child network, that will help your child build connections. And then basically just knowing that your child doesn't have to pay to access a college campus to get married well, to have good community, to have good network. And I mentioned that outside of, obviously, churches, synagogues, wherever your place of worship as well, or even volunteering. If you're not particularly religious, but you volunteer at a food bank or a local crisis pregnancy center or anything like that, those are all good places. even a lot of thrift stores or charity shops in people's towns are great places to meet well-connected people because they volunteer there because they have time. And so it's a good way to just meet people who, again, have access to different social circles, who are able to get you locally connected in a way that you just wouldn't believe. And that could be in any industry, tourism, trades, tech, anything under the sun. And so that would be my advice. Yeah, so resonant. And, you know, considering as you were talking about, you know, the imperative to get in touch with what interests you and to reclaim that for the reasons that I already referenced and also how you can't force that. right? That is a phenomenological experience where your passions and your interests can come back to you. They do. I mean, as we have discussed, I was indoctrinated to a high degree and my autodidact, right? My intrinsic motivation was ready and raring to go as soon as I connected to my own dharmic path, if you will. And I taught myself more from 2009 until today than I could have possibly memorized in the previous decade and a half. So that process is your journey. It's like your life narrative and that should have some sort of ignition date, even at 18 if you choose not to go to college versus at 23 if you do that you need to figure out what you're interested in. So almost a lot of the support I imagine I can offer as a mother and that we can start to talk about more in this collective conversation is how do we help our children recognize what it is that lights them up? What is enlivening? What are they good at? I love this concept, which I've written about and talked about, and I imagine you've come across it that at least I've pronounced Ikigai, right? This Japanese concept of this overlap, right? Of gifts and talents and proficiencies and prosperity and service. And that is available to each and every one of us, I think is the case, whether you are a primary breadwinner or you're just playing with the expression of your creativity for a commodified product or not, right you can have this experience of that overlap but how do you get there how do you get in touch with it how do you you discover it i imagine part of it is experiential right like until you actually try something go have an internship go volunteer somewhere like see what it's like to work in a jewelry store versus you know at a at a for zoom or pinterest right can't possibly start to activate that right like there there must be something we can do what was something you were passionate about when you were 18? If I look back, right, in my education, because I was also, I'm second generation and I was also, how do I put this delicately? I was incentivized extrinsically to perform academically. And so I never had any sense of any of it being interesting to me. You know, literally any of the academics that I was like a 4.0 student my whole career. Okay. And so I had no relationship apart from one thing, which is interestingly, probably still one of my greatest passions to this day, which is writing. I've always, always loved writing. And I've always been good at writing. I've also always loved dancing. And I've not always been necessarily good at it. So I could also sort of tap into like, oh, that's a hobby. And this is something that could translate into some sort of life support. But then I was like, oh, but writers don't make money. And so there's got to be some other STEM-related stuff woven in there. And of course, my feminist self was trying to prove that I could do it. Men could do bleeding kind of a thing. So it was a perfect storm. But yeah, I would say if there was one, it was like a smoldering ember, just like wanting a little glass around it the whole time, it would probably be writing. I think that this is probably one of my more controversial takes. And that is that we are placing entirely too much weight on teenage passion. We choose one of two ways. There's two traditional ways to choose careers right now. There's passion. And I think passion and interest are conflated often. And I'll explain the difference between the two of them really briefly. And the third one is going to be career. So career, you can pick career first. I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a lawyer. I'm going to be a nurse. I'm going to be a teacher. Most kids can only name about six to eight jobs, but really, they can't really think of very many. And so actually, this is an exercise we do in our book, The Degree-Free Way, but we have people think through how many jobs can your kids actually name, you're going to be... Some of them cannot name very many. And that's all they can pick from. They don't know a job exists. They can't go after that career. And then they definitely can't work backwards and figure out what the entry-level version of that is. And then if they can't do that, they definitely shouldn't be buying a college degree too. So if you can't go through that exercise with them, they have no business spending money buying a degree, none, until you guys figure that out. That's a huge problem. But then picking, I think, passion and interest, especially with parents with creatives. And I'm going to say this, I myself got into a chartered art school. I'm a fairly decent, I'm a fairly decent sketch artist, not police sketch artist, but just charcoal. I took some lessons. I, you know, I was, I was, like I said, I got into a chartered art school for this and I did some commission painting when I was a little bit younger. And so I see this a lot. I just got an email from a mom that was talking about her daughter wants to be an illustrator. And she said, she's very talented. Parents of creatives always say that, you know, very talented. And I'm sure she's telling the truth. But then she said she wants to go to art school, because she doesn't want to, she has, she thinks she needs a degree to be an illustrator. And that is an interest, because she doesn't do it. And she doesn't try to do it publicly. Whereas in contrast to the young man I'm working with, constantly publishing music, publishing beats all the time, like collaborating with people getting like letters endorsement, that is a passion because it's action. Interest and passion are very different. So when you have your 17-year-old that says, oh, I'm passionate about this, but they don't do anything about it, that is not passion. Passion drives action. If you are a passionate writer, you are writing. You're writing. You're writing. You're publishing. Yeah. I mean, I was published first at 20 now that you say that. Yeah. That's so interesting. I actually was dual enrolled. So in Georgia, where I graduated high school, I was able to go to the local college. So I went to a, you know, I was actually in the university for a year and a half before I broke out. And I wrote for the university paper, and they paid me. So that passion, because there's action, like I took extra steps to write, right? Steps that other people don't take. Interest is I'm like, I like to write. Passion is I wrote, I published, right? So you had a passion for writing because you actually did it. So a lot of parents, when they have kids that are creative, they'll say like, oh, they're this or that. And I just, you know, I'm actually we're about to record a podcast episode answering this lady. But I said, she doesn't have it until she starts publishing or trying to trying to get work or trying to do it. She doesn't have it. And that's something that they can get. But to then base your child's entire career now and to pigeonhole them based on interest, even based on passion, is not a good idea because they're too young to know. And it will change and it might change. And more than that, the most powerful thing you can do, and it's kind of this ikigai thing actually that you're talking about. I have a screenshot of that actually right here on my desktop. So it's funny that you brought that up. But it's this intersection of passion and interest. Right. And so you're writing and you write because you do a lot of you production, but you write and you use your passion with your interests, which is, you know, which is debunking the overarching narratives in society that you think are false. That's where it gets really powerful. Your child will not have that until they're older. It's very rare to have that at such a young age with no life experience. And if you send your child to college, it will push it off so far, or the college will put a carrot in front of your child and tell them that where they'll get that is after they get a PhD. And then $200,000 later, they will realize that they have no options left. And maybe they're not even interested anymore, but it's too late because they're already so boxed in, which is something you and I talked about a little bit ago. So when parents are thinking about this question, it's very important when your child is first choosing a career or the direction they're going to take, because they can always change. Where do they want to live and do life? What type of schedule do they want to have? What sort of work environment do they want to be in? This is huge. I had recently a nurse email us and just say, like, no, I went through nursing school, young nurse. And she's like, and I hate the people I work with. I hate the environment of the hospital. I hate, I just don't like the medical community. I don't like it. And I said, well, that is a good example of why you really have to think about who you want to go to work with every day. And I have a friend who's a speech language pathologist, master's degree, hates it, hates the people she works with. They're just not nice people. That's something women really need to consider because women seem to care about work environment a lot more than men do, I will say. And then the last thing is income. If your child has goals that require money, they need money to accomplish those goals. and that doesn't necessarily have to be a lot of money, but if they want to own a house by a certain age, they're going to need money to do that. If they want to be competitive at a sport like jujitsu and they want to continue to carry that into adulthood, they need money to do that. Jujitsu is expensive. Going to competitions is expensive. There's no wrong passion or hobby or sport or lifestyle that you can have. There's only what you need to accomplish it. And so So parents need to change their definition of success to, is your child going to get what they want out of life? Whatever that thing is, publishing a book, owning a house, having chickens, traveling to Japan twice a year, right? Anything that they want and lining up the type of work that they're going to have with what they want to do. And so if they want to run a season, if they want to run a coconut water business in Destin, Florida for four months out of the year, then the other half of the year they need to go salmon fishing in Alaska so they can have that seed money to go down there to run the boat like they have to figure out what they want to do and then they need to just stack their experiences while they're young with no debt in order to do that because it's just amazing what they can bring about if they have that freedom at the beginning of their life and they're not boxed in with that amount of debt it's it's just crazy so if you're enjoying this episode i want to extend a 300 gift to you so that you can start your juvent journey Head to Juvent.com forward slash Kelly Brogan. The code is Kelly 300 to use at checkout. So I believe that movement is medicine. 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I mean, as I'm listening to you describe this, I'm thinking also about the priorities, right, that we have as women. And I know, you know, I've heard you speak a little bit about the experience that young men, boys have in the educational system and what it does. And I've also spoken to this, the emasculating effects of the educational system, even the mixed gender experience I think it like really does a number on man dynamics Yeah it very problematic But when I think about the frank assessment of priorities right I would also add the relational priorities that most women have right When you think about being 50 years old, right, and a grown ass woman, right, what do you imagine is going to feel really good? Like having a deep, intimate relationship with your children, having a beautiful marriage, Right. Maybe even grandchildren at that point, having a beautiful home and experience of like a shared project with your partner and your family. You know, what is it that feels or is it going to be having books on the shelf that you wrote? Is it going to be having products in a store window that you can walk by? I mean, as somebody who's, you know, created physical books and also created a shit ton of digital stuff, I will tell you that it feels so good to show my children these physical pages that I had something to do with. Because whatever the digital realms and the invisible realms that took me away from them as children, it's a very complex terrain. And I spoke to you earlier about like the gaslight that says my fulfillment could ever have been found there. So the careerism that is the dogmatic assumption that career is what young women should be focusing on as a default is a part of the feminist programming that I've efforted to deconstruct over the past couple of years. And I would say that your prompt to consider the lifestyle priorities is a really amazing beginning to envisioning and accessing the imaginal realm of like, project yourself into this future. More into the future, not just four years, more. Yeah, 10 years, exactly. I ask them 10 or 15. I usually benchmark and say, you know, that's how old I am because the age range I work with is 16 to 20. And when I do that, I ask the same questions of young men and young women. And there's a reason I do that. Part of that is because I wanted to see how when asked the same questions in the same way, what they said. And shockingly, they say different things. And the young women is interesting how when given the same questions and parameters will give you different answers. And that's why the beauty of this, the beauty of the process that we have created is, and And this is what's so amazing to me is every time I get a different result. And so I had one young lady who really, she just wanted to own her own business. And this is irrelevant, actually. This passion is irrelevant, too, actually, but did end up playing in, which when I can do that, I love to. But she's going to go to horology school. It's watchmaking. And that's something that, one, she can do from home. Two, she could go into a physical location, but people can ship her product. She can be home, right? Which is a huge, huge thing for women who, you know, a lot of in this economy, it's difficult to have a one income household. And so for some people, that's just not feasible if they want to stay, if one of their priorities is location. And so let's say their family is in a high cost of living area and they want to stay near their family in a high cost of living area. Well, you have to stack. Like now you've got to prioritize income so you can get location, right? If the priority is location because of proximity to family and you want to have your kids around your family and your mom and your dad and all this stuff. And so for her, that actually made a lot of sense because she does want to have a partner. And so she's not going to be alone going into the future because one of her priorities is having a spouse. And so that's a beautiful example of that. Another young gal, actually right outside of LA, again, she's five sisters, all of them nurses. And she came in going, I want to be a nurse. I said, let's make sure that's true. So we go through the process. right and she did end up still consistent at the end and she had actually shadowed and done a lot more work than most people her age had done you know shadowed in the hospital which is actually i recommend for anybody that's going into a paint collar job schools hospitals anything like that go actually look at what that looks like before you spend money to go into those fields if you go into it and you like it you know full steam ahead and she came out of it you know wanting to be an or nurse but with the understanding that she can syringe this into health telehealth because she wants to be home with her children, right? But where she lives is very expensive. And so she wants to live in her family. She has to make enough money to be able to afford to stay where she lives. And so it's all this stacking of things, you know, whereas for some of the guys, they just say, you know, my dad built a business, so he was able to be home a lot of our childhood. And so some of the guys will say, that's a priority to me too. Like, I want to be able to work, you know, to be around when my kids are around and pick them up from, you know, pick them up from school or take them to practice, go to the games. And so for them, things that will come to the top are things like sales, things like real estate, because it just makes sense because it's going to give them the type of time that they want to have, the type of flexibility that they want to have. And so it's interesting how when you stack these things, especially for women, though, usually the jobs that will come out are ones that allow them to have the time to have children, which is something that's very physically demanding, something that takes a lot of emotional demand, as we talked about. And that's just not something that ever comes into play. And the result of that is really sad. Because what you have is you have people that go into all the student debt, then feel trapped in their careers, and now can't live the way they actually want to. They're literally unable to because of their debt burden. And it is now dictating. So 17-year-old passion for medicine is now dictating what they cannot do in their life at 28 at 35. And that is something that was really satisfying to see prevented because you can always do that later. Colleges will always be there. They'll always take your money. Like he gets 25 and your brain's fully formed and you're sure, go for it. I don't think anybody should be able to take out student loans until they're 25 anyway. But that's basically the method is just stacking these priorities and just seeing where it shakes out and being really objective about it. It's hard as a parent to go, oh, don't you mean this? Just let them talk. And just see where things, you know, see what they say, see where they land. And then try to think about what will enable them to have those things, schedule, location, income, and work environment, you know, depending on which one is. Work environment is good for people who have physical disabilities. That's something that comes up a lot. I've worked with people who have been, you know, had cerebral palsy or issues where they're just not able to be too far away from their parents. And so the type of work, you know, the type of work that they have is going to have an impact. Like they're not able to physically do certain things. So work environment can kind of rise to the top, but everybody can find a fit. So if you followed my work for a while, you know how seriously I take ingredient integrity. And that's why I am so excited to partner with Equip because their prime protein is unlike anything else on the market. It's made from just a handful of real food ingredients. 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Amazing. I'm so grateful that you offer, you have books and support system and methodology for unpacking this journey and really repaving like a path, right? Because we long for that guidance and direction as like a surrogate for whatever it is that is offered by this more orthodox approach. So I want to selfishly end on this note, I'm going to put you on the spot, which is that if you had like a minute or two with my daughters, who are obviously, you know, they're very used to thinking outside the box. It comes very naturally to them. They've seen me challenge a lot of paradigms. and that they're not open. And they're also not, right? Like the folks that I would refer to you are like already baked, ready to go. They just want the support, right? Like that gentleman you supported in going to Japan. I think that is who, in the coaching world and support world and guidance world, it's always best to work with people who've already come to some sort of intrinsic realization. However, right? Like I'm not in the business of like persuading. And like if you were to talk to them for a minute or two at this like very, very vulnerable moment where a lot of the programming is seeping in about like, oh, well, when I go to college or who's going to college or where would I go to college and whatever, you know, and not for nothing, their dad went to Harvard. And so they have, you know, and so did my brother. And, you know, they have this kind of like, whatever that old world. I mean, now I think of these as like, you know, woke indoctrination camps, like that you literally pay for it. Wow. So it couldn't be less feeling. And it's fading, but it's still there. So what would you gently offer for them to consider at this moment? Like if you had their ear for a minute or two. The biggest thing that I advise parents to do with this age is to do vocational creativity in real time. And that is to products that they use. And that could be makeup products or digital products and say, oh, that's a job and figure out what the job title is for whatever that thing is. So if it's a character designer or a landscape designer for a game that they play, just tell them that that's a job that they can do. The next thing, the next step there is if they show interest is to go to the next step. So for instance, interested in illustration, that one's really common with young girls right now. Super common. I hear that one all the time. And I would say that School of Motion is a really good opportunity. So that's the other thing is I think parents need to know, go online and education. College is not a synonym for education. Never has been, never will be. Nobody owns education. Nobody can pay wallet, especially not colleges and universities and the people who run them. Most of all, they're the least qualified to do so. And so you as a parent feel empowered. It is 2025. You can find things all over the place. like, you know, they're interested in sustainable agriculture, send them to, and this is something where I don't think people realize, but the amount of money that you're going to spend and reclaiming, mentally reclaiming that educational spend, $104,000 is a lot of money. You can do almost anything with that in a much shorter amount of time for much higher quality. So let's say your child's interested, you know, in vineyards or something, you know, has some esoteric interest and your cheese, right? You can send them to Italy. I'm not kidding. for a fraction of what you would pay for a college degree. And for a year, you can send them to these really intensive, amazing... This is something that I vet. I vet these options for people, so I just know that there's a lot more. You can send them to Ireland, to cookery school that'll teach them farm-to-table stuff that they want to start on a restaurant. You can send them to... They want to learn a language. There are packages for $7,000. You can send them for three months to learn how to speak full immersion to speak a language, then come back fully ready to take language proficiency tests to be official translators. A good example of somebody I know that just hired a Japanese language tutor and then took the JLPT as the Japanese language proficiency test. And you can study enough to take that to a business level. When you get to a business level and it doesn't take that long, several years of study, especially for homeschoolers or unschoolers, your kids can go into sales. They can go into all kinds of international. It's just amazing what's out there. But just reclaim. You have all this money that you're going to spend. You're going to get a subpar result. You are going to get a subpar result for a premium. So how about for a quarter of that cost, you try to get a much better result? Because let's just take a quarter of it. $25,000. Let's say $30,000. The amount of experts that you can hire for $30,000. If you want your child to be an Olympian, go find from five years ago, find the runner up on the bronze team and hire them to coach your child. I don't think people understand what's out there that's just so far superior to college. It's just not even close. College cannot offer the type of education that is available in the private market, but you have to look for it. And so that is where you as a parent who's in tune with your child's interests. They want to learn how to paint? Go to the local gallery where you live and see if they can work. Have you ever seen those clips of Sotheby's, the auctioneers? They train those. Those are apprenticeships. You can find people. They can start go working at these art houses and be around this amazing works of art, all these collectibles, all these antiques, all this history. And they can learn that and they can be in that world and then they can move up in that world. And that's so much more interesting if they're real about it than college. and once you get them into it and you get them a taste of what it's like and the independence and the wide age range that they're going to be around as opposed to a bunch of 18 year olds that by the time they get done actually experiencing life they'll just go I don't want to do that at all that's uninteresting to me right to sit through a biology one you know 1100 class to sit through a sociology 1100 class where they're told that they're you know where they're told they're racist or they're told that they're privileged or they're told that whatever or whatever the most recent is that their tenured professor who's got $150,000 of student that is telling them that they are, it'll be insufferable to them. Even if they decide to go and you don't co-sign the loans and they go anyway, they'll just go, oh, this is not interesting to me. And so that's how you can... It's allowing them agency to the earlier allow them agency in the area that they're interested in so that they can tell if it's their passion or not. That's where you're going to get outsized results. And that's just creativity at the beginning. It's like, oh, that's this. But you know that's this. And don't tell them to do it. Just tell them it exists. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's guidance. That is guidance and support. And I have a girlfriend who has a freshman in college right now. And actually, the price tag is 90K. 90K a year. Oh, yeah. University of Miami is like, I just read it. They're 95, 95 a year, University of Miami. And do people really, and this is the thing, it's like, I'm Do you really think you're about to get half a million? That is going to that college degree all in. By the way, we've done these calculations. It's going to cost almost a million dollars. Do you think that that million dollar bachelor's degree is worth? Not you, but does she really think that that's going to get them that amount of value, even if you do have the cash, right? Because some people have the cash for that, even if you do. Also, your audience should know that if you have cracked this and you've gone, you're just starting to suspect everything's going on. You can roll your 529 plans into Roth IRAs penalty free as of two years ago. That's important information for people to know. So you do not have to feel like your child has to go buy this subpar product that's going to teach them a bunch of nonsense for no reason, make them feel bad about themselves, doubt everything, and not even be worth the time that they're going to sink into it. Instead of doing that, you can roll it into a retirement account. No penalty. So just talk to your CPA or financial advisor. You are just such a wealth of extraordinary wisdom and knowledge. And I'm so excited to have crossed paths with you and to have you as an ally. I do this. So this is my superpower. I call in exactly the right person to support me in the germination of a new perspective. So we will make sure, Hannah, that everybody knows how to avail themselves of your resources and further support. And I plan to be doing so myself. And hopefully you will meet my daughters soon. So thank you so, so much. Thank it to you and your husband for your extraordinary work. Thank you so much, Kelly, for having me on. It was a pleasure.