[00:00:00] Hannah Maruyama: Now we’ve talked about the amount of jobs that legally require college degrees in our country now is 7.7%. That’s all. That’s it. 7.7% of jobs in our country legally require degrees. Now, back then, it was 7.4%, so not a lot, and a lot of that’s just because of the amount of jobs has grown.

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[00:00:21] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to The Demme Learning Show, and this is Gretchen Roe. I’m so excited to welcome you all today. This is a conversation I have been waiting to have for almost a year. I am so excited to welcome Hannah Maruyama to have this conversation with me about what if your child’s path to adulthood is not the traditional college route? Being someone who was raised in a household where college was the ticket punch to a better life, that was the thought process I took into my own parenting with my own six kids.

Over the last 25 years, I’ve changed that tune. When I found Hannah one weekend scrolling around on social media, I fell in love. I couldn’t wait to have the opportunity to have a real conversation with her. This is the fruition of a year’s worth of my pestering the daylight side of her, and I think she finally said yes just because. I’m so delighted to welcome you today, Hannah. I’m going to let you introduce yourself, and then we’ll get going here.

[00:01:26] Hannah: Sure. Well, thank you for that glowing introduction as well. It is really a joy to be on with you after meeting you last year. I have been looking forward to this and am very prepared for all the questions today. My name is Hannah Maruyama. As Gretchen said, I am the founder of Degree Free. What we do is we help the parents of 16 to 20-year-olds guide their kids to really awesome careers. Very rarely do those require college degrees. Our company has been in business since 2021. We have helped over 16,000 families with our workbook set, The Degree Free Way, how to help your 16 to 20-year-old build the life they want, and we have helped hundreds of kids find the right career for them.

[00:02:05] Gretchen: I think that that’s very exciting. We sometimes become acculturated to a way things should be, and we forget that things change. As you and I were talking in the lead-up to the opening, AI is changing the equation all over the place. Tell us how you got to where you are. I think your story is pretty compelling in and of itself. I think there’s virtue in our audience knowing the kind of credibility you bring to the table.

[00:02:37] Hannah: Sure, absolutely. My background is that I got into college at 16. I’m going all the way back to the beginning. I got into college at 16, and I was able to go full-time via dual enrollment. I was on campus because this was pre-COVID. While there, I found a shocking lack of the supposed critical thinking teaching that everyone says is present on campus, a shocking lack of open-mindedness. I ended up, I wrote an op-ed for an economics class. I remember this now. I wrote an op-ed for an economics class that the professor had assigned us an opinion piece. I wrote this opinion piece. She didn’t like my opinion, so she failed me for that project.

I took that exact piece to the campus paper. They hired me to then write a column for the campus paper. I did that for a year. I ended up leaving college after, I believe it was in a sociology final, where I sat there, and I just went, I can’t sit here for one more minute. I can’t do this. I can’t pay these people when I don’t see any point to this, and I see no function for my future life. I tore my midterm in half, threw it in the trash, and I left. That is how I exited college. That’s how I left college. I proceeded to work a ton of jobs and live all over the country. I worked as a dolphin boat tour guide. I worked as a surf instructor. I worked at five-star restaurants. I worked at gyms. Then I ended up applying for a job at a nonprofit in New York. This job said it required a degree. It obviously didn’t because they hired me. I believe I was 22 at the time. That was really my first bit of proof, my first shred of proof that I just went, “Oh, this isn’t real. These degree requirements are not real.”

I ended up holding multiple jobs that required degrees. Fast forward to 2020, I was running a fairly successful brick-and-mortar business. COVID happened, shut everything down. My husband is from Hawaii, so we were living there at the time. We went, “Oh, I’m going to have to find a job, because I have to pay the rent on this business while it is closed.” What ended up happening was I retooled into tech in approximately 45 days using the framework that we use in degree-free, which is needs first, then careers. Then we talk about how you’re going to learn those careers. I just reverse-engineered everything I needed, which is I need this, and this. What jobs fit that? Just objectively going out, finding the right careers that were in demand, and then seeing, okay, what do those careers actually need?

Ignoring degree requirements the entire time because if they’re not legally required, they’re degree requests, which you should always ignore. I ended up getting a tech certification for about $362 and ended up being hired into the job that I had the goal for in 45 days from starting to study. I’m not a stellar student, by the way. It’s just the framework and the strategy behind this. Then I replicated those results with friends and then with family. Then we started working with adult job seekers for a little while. Then when we asked about if they needed help with their 16 to 20-year-old kids, the response that we got was overwhelming. We realized that there was a huge amount of pain that could be saved for these young adults if we focused in and developed a way for them to find the right career without going into debt, without going to college, and just getting into the right career from the get-go.

[00:06:09] Gretchen: I just recently read an article that said that the average college student changes their major four times. I was, I guess, an average college student. I did change my major four times before I got my degree. I also took a seven-year summer vacation in there between my junior and senior year.

[00:06:26] Hannah: A lot of people do that.

[00:06:27] Gretchen: I did 39 semester hours in a calendar year because then it was my dime, and I needed to get it done. I also think that my getting my degree in the early ’80s is an entirely different degree than the degree you possess today.

[00:06:45] Hannah: I agree with that because I believe the mid-1980s was the last time there was positive ROI on the majority of college degrees. Part of that has to do with, unfortunately, if you follow the money and you go back and you look at the Reagan administration and how they changed the way colleges were funded. There’s a quote from Ronald Reagan that says, “An educated proletariat is not in the best interest of the nation.” All of a sudden, college degrees became something that was unattainable for the masses. I think that makes a tremendous amount of difference for us as parents of young adult children to retool our own thinking to recognize that we have to do something different.

[00:07:28] Gretchen: What have you found?

[00:07:30] Hannah: I just want to stay on that history for a minute because there’s so much there that I feel, I was talking to some friends actually, that their daughter is– she went to college, wasn’t really sure what she was going to do. One year later, very predictably, she is going to be coming back home. We were sitting outside our house, sitting around the campfire, and her dad just said, “How did it get like this?” I said, “That is the question. There is a lot here.” While there was a policy change from the Reagan admin, the actual root of the problem, I believe, is older because in 1960–

We’re going to rewind all the way. We’re going to nutshell this for everybody because I think it is important to understand how it got like this and why. You and I were just talking about the tuition doubles every nine years. How did it get like this? How did the demand grow to sustain something that increases that much and provides so little ROI? Why is that? After World War II, the government gave returning GIs, GI Bill money. Now, universities were small before that. There’s a quote from, I think it was the teen of Brown, back in the day. I think it was 1910. He said, “I can’t give this stuff away.” That’s what he said.

Then what happened is all these GIs came back from World War II. These are now, they weren’t old, but they were men. They were grown men. A lot of them were married or got married and were having children. They came back, they had GI Bill money, and they went to college. Now, what did they go to college for? They went to college for professional licensure, doctors, lawyers, CPAs, architects, engineers. What happened is all these guys, it was called the GI bulge. You can look it up. All these guys came back, and all this money flooded into these colleges. It wasn’t there before. It was fake. It was artificial because it was government-subsidized. It was taxpayer money that was being distributed to these colleges.

They liked that. They liked that a lot because they had never had money. We talk about starving artists. Back then, they were starving academics. They were not doing well. They got used to this money. Then as that tapered off in 1965, the Higher Education Act passed. The Higher Education Act is what allowed parents to begin taking out loans on behalf of their kids. Supposedly to make it more accessible. I think that it was a money grab. I think that there’s a lot of times when you look at policy changes, the intent behind it is good, but the result is bad, especially when it is tied to government subsidies. That always creates corruption, and it always creates perverse incentive structures. What happened is 1965, they allow parents to take out loans for their kids. Now, the amount of kids going to college, so this is important, now we’ve talked about the amount of jobs that legally require college degrees in our country now is 7.7%. That’s all. That’s it. 7.7% of jobs in our country legally require degrees. Now, back then, it was 7.4%. There’s been a 03-

[00:10:26] Gretchen: There’s 0.03% increase.

[00:10:28] Hannah: It’s a 0.3% increase. Yes, correct. Not a lot. A lot of that’s just because of the amount of jobs has grown. It doesn’t really have to do with, but that said, this is important because back then about 10% of high school students in our country were going to college in 1965. This is important because by 1976, the amount of kids going to college had increased in a huge way. Now you had twice the amount of people going to college. It’s much larger, much larger, and people were going because the money was available and it was fake. It was fake money. You can take out money that you don’t have to buy these things.

Back then, what a lot of people were attributing degrees to was success because the people that were buying degrees were buying them to get professional licensure that’s degree-dependent. They were making money, and they were doing well because it was an equal match to there’s this many jobs, there’s this many architects, you have to get an architecture degree to become one. That’s why. That is very important. 1976, what happened is they had to amend the Higher Education Act because the default rate on the loans in that amount of time, 11 years, went from 2% to 9%. Doesn’t sound like a lot. That’s a 350% increase in defaults.

That’s where the root of this problem started, because once they made the loans bankruptcy-exempt, why wouldn’t you raise tuition as much as you can? Whatever Reagan did was after the fact because once you make loans bankruptcy-exempt, who wouldn’t sell them? Who wouldn’t give them to people because they can’t get out of them. They’ll follow them until they die. That is really where then the colleges just went, “Oh, awesome.” We’re addicted to this government money, and now people have to pay us that we can charge them whatever they want and they will pay it because the social demand for it. People were saying, “Oh, well, if you go to college, you make money. If you go to college, you get a good job,” because it was more correlated back then. Then I believe that it lasted until about the mid-1980s.

[00:12:22] Gretchen: Well, that is a greater depth of understanding than I had before, and you explain it so succinctly and so clearly. I really appreciate that. What do we do with these kids who are now– The most common question my children were asked from the time they hit high school, “Where are you going to go to school? What are you going to do? What are you going to major in? What are you doing after high school?” Those questions are constant. They’re social capital in our country today, but I don’t necessarily think we’re doing kids favors because people ask me, “Well, what do you want to be when you grow up?” Well, I’m still waiting to figure that out.

[00:13:02] Hannah: A lot of the reason now that it’s so risky, and the way that we think about it at Degree Free is college is a tool. It’s an educational product like any other product. That’s why we say buy a degree, because that’s what you’re doing. It’s very important to reframe this purchase because of the emotional weight that it carries for people. All these nebulous social things that people think it’ll do, it’s going to help them become an adult. It’ll teach them critical thinking. It will get them a spouse. It’ll get them into a better social class. None of these things are actually true. The spouse one in particular is very much not true at all.

When we teach kids that the first thing that you do to find the right work for you is buy something that costs $108 to $150. $6,000 and takes five and a half years on average to get, we create so much anxiety and so much stress on them. Rightfully so because for many of them, the burden of the debt and the wasted time and the lost wages that they will experience, and then the interest will rob them of the ability to have kids, to buy homes, to start businesses. We’ve created this extremely high-stress choice at a very young age, when they have no information. They do not know any jobs. That was something that we found is that most kids can only name about eight jobs.

For context, there are 867 jobs in the Bureau of Labor Statistics alone in the occupational handbook. The Bureau of Labor Statistics handbook is not accurate because they don’t do a good job keeping track. Just a story to illustrate this, they didn’t record data scientists as a career until 2018. At that time, there were 100,000 people in our country employed as data scientists. They had data scientists working at the Bureau of Labor Statistics before they acknowledged that it was an actual career. This is a job that does not require a degree. It pays a median of $112,000 a year. We are not giving kids good information. Our school system uses limited boil-down versions of the Bureau of Labor Statistics to give our kids options. They’re never getting clear information.

[00:15:15] Gretchen: They’re not even getting half of the full picture.\

[00:15:18] Hannah: No. Also, the careers that they teach them about, the eight careers, what you’ll find most of the time is it’s the same ones over and over again. They’re all careers that you can see with your eyes, which makes sense. Then for girls and boys, there’s very little variation, but they’re saying the same careers. They’re all jobs that require them to buy degrees. From a policy level, the goal of K-12 education is to funnel them to this purchase because it makes a lot of money. It’s also because we’re measuring things that don’t matter. For K-12, what’s the success metric that most programs will claim? You might know this, but a high school program, be it a charter school, a private school, a micro school, a home school-

[00:16:03] Gretchen: What is the percentage of students that go on to college?

[00:16:06] Hannah: There it is. What is that really telling us?

[00:16:10] Gretchen: What it’s telling us is that we can’t think outside the box either. We can only think in one linear way.

[00:16:18] Hannah: All it tells us is how many kids are going into debt. It does not tell us anything but that because the only guarantee is debt. That’s the only thing that they are guaranteed going to get. It’s because we’re measuring things that don’t matter. It’s easy to track college admissions. It is not easy to track life outcomes. It’s not all malicious. From a policy level, we’re going, “Oh, well.” I remember I was talking to a guy. He actually does prep. He runs a school for wealthy kids. He said, “Oh, yes, our college admissions rate is 95%.”

I looked at him, and I said, something is terribly wrong. That’s way too high. That’s way too high. You’re burning these kids’ time, you’re burning their energy, and you’re burning their money. They don’t need to– statistically speaking, maybe 20% of them need to go. I think it’s probably 10% or less. It’s probably 10% or less. Let’s just say, conservatively speaking, it’s Pareto’s law. It’s 80% of them don’t need to be there at all. It’s going to actively keep them from the things that they should be doing if they are doing that. It’s a lot of us because we’re just measuring the wrong things.

[00:17:32] Gretchen: Hannah, how did you get from that professional certificate that he needed, that $356 certificate, to doing what you’re doing now? How did you find all of this out? Because this was information, as you said in Florida last year, it’s publicly available information, but none of us do the homework to figure it out.

[00:17:52] Hannah: I think I’ve been very fortunate in a way because I started creating content online and started talking about what I had done. Then I started to see in the comments, just from giving people information, that they were able to do it too. Just saying, “Oh, this is how you do it.” Then other people were able to just do what I did because I was just telling them how to do it. I went, “Oh, okay, there’s something here,” because I had a girl message me. I remember after I first started posting on TikTok, this was years ago, it was five years ago now.

I think after three months after I started posting, she had asked me one question about something, and I gave her an answer. Then she DMed me. She was young, she was 23. She said, “Hey, I want you to know that I just landed a job. I have a one-year-old that I really wanted to be home with. I was able to land a remote job in technology because of the information that you gave me. I’m making $100,000 a year.” Oh, I’m sorry, no. It was $170,000. She was making $170,000 a year. That’s what it was. Blew me away. She was out-earning me, but she had just been strategic. That was something to me that was just like, I remember crying thinking about that. We get messages like that all the time from people that just say, “Hey, my son’s going to flight school now. Hey, my son got into cybersecurity. Hey, my daughter’s an apprentice at an equine veterinarian tech as an equine veterinarian tech.”

It’s just all these amazing things. I was just getting the feedback loop, or I was just testing stuff. I’ve always been like that. If someone tells me you can’t do something, I don’t believe you until I’ve seen if that’s true. I’m going to try it. Then if I get the feedback that, okay, that doesn’t work, then I’ll find something else.

[00:19:36] Gretchen: Do I remember you telling me when we met in Florida that you were a homeschool grad, or you were homeschooled? Do I remember this correctly?

[00:19:43] Hannah: I was a homeschooled grad, but I was partially homeschooled, yes, which is probably, I do credit that with a lot of the way that I think. I will credit that to my mom and to the basic classical education that she gave us. A lot of freedom, but read a lot of Founding Fathers, read a lot of classical literature, Cicero, Plato, Socrates, just read a lot. Really, my mom was very big on questioning. I think it’s Thomas Jefferson, but question with boldness even the very existence of God. It’s just questioning everything. Question everything, always, because you will find the answers if you ask.

[00:20:22] Gretchen: You’ve done a lot of questioning here over the years and really created an environment where you can be a source of information for people. You’ve done a lot of homework for people that they don’t now have to do. Tell us a little bit about where that brings us to now, because I think it’s probably been two years since I found you on TikTok.

[00:20:45] Hannah: Now we’re able to do just in this topic of what we’ve been able to find. I think a lot of it is just because we are able to focus in and we’re just looking in a different way than a lot of people. We’re just looking at what was the root problem. This is an engineering principle, but your first principles, what is causing this, and always looking for the root of the issue, because you can always go back further. You can always go back further, but we found ultimately that the real problem with the young adults was they just don’t know what jobs are available.

Then for parents, they don’t know how to narrow down, even if they did have. A lot of people, when we published our book, they asked us, “Oh, can you give us a list of jobs that don’t require college degrees?” I just went, “No, I can’t give you that. It would be the size of a phone book. It would literally be 335 pages long, and you would have no way to navigate it. It would be completely useless.” That’s why the internet is a much better resource than a paper book that’s this big that you can knock somebody out with if you threw it at them. I realized then the gap for the parents was so high because they said, “Can you give me a list of jobs that don’t require degrees?” I’m like, “People must think that it’s very small. It’s not. It’s almost all the jobs. It’s all of them.”

[00:22:01] Gretchen: You’re also dealing with generation now, the generational principle of we’ve been acculturated to believe that degree is the penultimate goal to a successful post-academic experience.

[00:22:19] Hannah: I think a lot of it, too, especially for homeschool parents, and you heard me talk about this at the FPEA conference, but homeschool parents send their kids to college at a much higher rate than everybody else. 74% of homeschool parents will send their kids directly into college. My mom, while not actively homeschooling me at the time, she did up until high school. Then I was in private and then public and then dual enrolled. A lot of that, I believe, is because homeschool parents still believe that college equals education. That’s the problem. It’s a problem for a few reasons. I think probably the biggest two would be, one, it’s a product, and you’re buying it. We’ve made it something that’s not a purchase, which is a real problem because for many families and many kids now, it will be the most expensive one they ever make.

They won’t be able to make other expensive purchases in their life because of that purchase. It will keep them from those things. Then the other reason is because we have bought that people can pay while education. I think that that’s really the driving force behind why we do what we do. For me, I can’t stand people that put up garden walls and gates, and unnecessarily so. Anybody can be educated. Anybody. You need a library card. You need to read. If you can read, you can be educated. That for me is really ultimately what lies underneath all of this, which is I really dislike and resent that the institution that supposedly educates our populace has told everyone that they cannot be educated unless they buy from them. No. No. That’s not. That’s an uneducated point of view. It’s a very compelling marketing tactic.

[00:24:03] Gretchen: Sure. Absolutely. It is. I was so surprised at so many of the questions that we were asked this week. I sent them to you. You said you had researched them. What one stood out to you the most? What was the most compelling question?

[00:24:19] Hannah: There’s a couple. The first one was, I’m going to read this one. “Can you talk about trades? What are the top three to consider?” I really do want to get into this. I think that people maybe won’t expect the view that I have on it. A disclaimer, my youngest sister was a structural welder. She did that through paid on-the-job training, not even apprenticeship, not a union, nothing, just paid training for a private company. I helped her find that. It was because it fit her needs. She wanted to do it, and she was interested in it. That is a hard job. It’s a very skilled job, pays very well. She’s 23 and owns her own house now and is married.

That’s the result of her getting, instead of spending all that time in college, because that would be when she would graduate, instead of spending five and a half years in college, she worked, now is able to, should she want to, go into an inspector role, a management role, a QA role, or stay home if she wants to and have kids. That’s where her life is at now. When I’m talking about trades, it’s not because I don’t think trades are good. It is because I don’t believe there are any good jobs. I don’t think there are any good jobs. There’s only the right job for your child. That’s it.

[00:25:29] Gretchen: I love that. No such thing as a good job, just the right job for your child.

[00:25:34] Hannah: Yes, because someone could say, “Oh, being a doctor is such a good job.” I’m like, I would hate to be a physician. Are you kidding me? That sounds horrible. That sounds like punishment to me personally, because it’s not what fits my needs. For some people, it’s the right job, and so they thrive in it. Everyone is different, which is the beautiful thing about it. When a lot of people, they say, “Can you talk about trades, what are the top three trades to consider?” What I hear is, “Can you talk about college? What are the top three majors to consider?”

It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing because you’re starting too far in. You got to go back. You got to go back the train up, and what do they need from their work? Income, schedule, work environment, location. Okay, figure those things out, nail them down, and then go objectively look at all of the different options because we had a young man come through the launch program. He was 19 years old. He left Texas A&M. He was 19. He had gone for a year, didn’t like it. He actually said something I’ve heard a lot from the young adults who are leaving college is they can’t understand their professors because many of them are from other countries and there’s a language barrier.

He, really bright kid, but he just did not. He was like, “I just can’t. I can’t do this.” He comes out, gives us his needs. He wants to live in his hometown. He wanted to start at, I believe, he wanted to start at $70,000 a year. That was his starting. He eventually wanted to make 100 because his goal long-term was to be able to get married, have at least two kids and be able for his wife to have the option to stay at home while their kids are small. Very clear goals. We helped him figure out. We helped cultivate, get this involved.

[00:27:12] Gretchen: That’s not actually a one-and-done conversation because you really have to figure out what those goals really are. It takes some time to define them.

[00:27:22] Hannah: Yes, definitely the goals part. Their needs you can, for the most part, extrapolate because you’re, where do you need to work? Because you’ve got to start from somewhere. Work environment, what work environment do you absolutely not want to be in? Because for some kids, they’ve got asthma. They can’t work somewhere where there’s dust or there’s fumes. For some kids, they hate fluorescent lighting. Working in healthcare, for the most part, would just not be a good fit. Some people are like that.

Once you figure that out, then you can just look for what’s the right fit. He ended up coming in. We got all his needs down. Then we found him a field service engineering role in medical device repair. Great job. High paying, super in demand. He got hired. We don’t do job placement, but we do give entry-level roles and write resumes for young adults who come through the program. He applied with that resume to the top entry-level role, and he was immediately hired, immediately. Actually, the company just reached out and said, “Do you have anybody else like this?”

This goes back to the trade thing, which is I said, no, I don’t, because we’re not a conveyor belt, because I don’t know if I’ll ever get another kid with those set of needs in this location. I have no idea because that’s not how this works. It’s him, where he is, down to zip code specificity. For trades, this is very important, too, because a lot of people have been going, “Oh, my kid’s not going to college. I’m going to send him to trade school.” Then we get out, and I should read this comment, but it was a lady that said her son went to be a welder, and she said he can’t find a job. That’s because you just went to a trade school. You did not go look for entry-level work on the job training, and they didn’t make sure it fit his needs first.

It didn’t work because it’s the same thing as buying a degree and hoping that that’s going to lead to employment. You figure out what they need, and then you have to figure out what careers fit that, what’s available near you, what skills gap does your child have, what do they need to learn, licenses, certs, hours, what have you, OSHA training for welders or for tradespeople sometimes. Then you figure out what they need to do to earn it because it may be that an associate’s program or a certification program or a four-year college is the right fit, but you have to figure out if they need to do that or if that’s the most efficient educational product available.

[00:29:29] Gretchen: Basically, what you have done then is you have reverse-engineered this, figuring out what do you want as far as what do you want your life to look like, and then tailor the academics, whatever that may be, to meet the expectations of what you want your life to look like. That’s a question we don’t ask very often in this country.

[00:29:53] Hannah: I think that we don’t ask because we don’t want the answer, because that means individual attention for every child and the schools are bursting. There’s 40 kids in a class. How are you going to do that? That’s what we’re trying to figure out. We’re trying to figure that out as quickly as we can because the more kids we can help this way, it’s going to change the fabric of our country if we can fix this. It will change the future if we can fix this now.

[00:30:19] Gretchen: When you sit down with a student, what’s the first question you ask them? Where do you start? Because there’s a lot of– I can see this going in 100 different directions. What have you and your husband decided is the best place to start as far as having them question what they want?

[00:30:39] Hannah: Good question. We never start with the hardest question first because teenagers are cagey things. [laughter] You ask a bunch of fun questions first. You ask questions that get them thinking and break their frame about life. We ask questions like, the first questions we ask are, “If you could teleport anywhere right now, where would you go?” We ask a bunch of questions that are like that, and then why. We ask a bunch of questions like that and then say, okay. We ease into it, “What do you want your family life to look like?” Because that’s where we reverse engineer. At that point, they’re just talking about what they see for the future. They’re not in this yes, no, stress mindset.

[00:31:20] Gretchen: Well, they’re also not trying to figure out how to give you what they think you want to hear.

[00:31:26] Hannah: Exactly. Exactly. Part of the reason why we started the launch program itself and didn’t just leave it with the book was because the impact of a neutral third party specifically for this age range cannot be overstated, because we have no skin in the game. Our job is to get the answer and you just keep asking until you get the answer in a kind way. It’s talking to somebody who is just not in it and isn’t a stakeholder, a personal stakeholder in the outcome, because then you don’t get kids to answer what you want to hear. You don’t get kids that just say, “I don’t know,” because they’re talking to somebody else. They don’t say that. Then you don’t get kids that they really don’t say outlandish things. A lot of the time, that’s one of the things that’s come out of this process. Our strategist team, we review all the kids going through the program every week. One of the things that’s become really clear about this age range is they’re actually very pragmatic for the most part. The rep that they get for being out of tie, I don’t see it. A lot of them, they want stability. That’s one of the top words that we found. They just really want something stable. A lot of them want to have families, and a lot of them just want to not hate their jobs. They don’t even say they want to be passionate. They just want to not hate their jobs. They want their work to give them the things that they need. That’s how you should view work. I think not viewing it that way is what got so many people into huge amounts of student debt.

[00:32:54] Gretchen: Absolutely fascinating. You’ve made a really valid point, particularly when your book is fabulous. I would knock a lot of books off. It’s sitting on the top of my bookshelf here. The book is fabulous. The challenge with it, though, is if I sit down with my child and go through that process, how does my child color his answers to me so that he feels like he’s answering in a way that makes me feel safe?

[00:33:24] Hannah: I think the biggest advice I could give parents for that, we experienced that when actually my nephew came to stay with us, and he’s 16. We were talking, we were personal stakeholders in his life. It was crazy because my husband, Ryan, he was talking, his name is Kama, and he was talking to Kama, and he was just saying, “Hey, what do you think about– what about this?” He was asking him the questions, the ones that we’ve asked hundreds of people, hundreds of kids in this age range. Kama was answering and Ryan just kept correcting him. I said, “I’m going to do it,” because it was so hard for him to not say, “Oh, I think you mean this,” as they’re talking.

Our strategists don’t do that. It’s near impossible for parents not to do it. It’s nearly impossible, as they’re going through this process to just go, “Oh, I think you mean this, or are you sure? What about this?” It’s all from you love them. No one loves them as much as you. The thing is parents are the most– you are the most, I cannot overstate this, parents are the biggest determinant of what their kids do after high school. It’s parents. If they go to college, it’s because their parents wanted them to go to college. Most young adults do not go to college because they want to. It’s like an unbelievable amount of that influence. It’s that last launch influence because they’re going. This is your last steer. It’s your last steer.

[00:34:51] Gretchen: Oh, I can certainly see that because I vividly remember my eldest daughter will be 40 in May, but when she was 18, I said, “I don’t care where you get a college. I don’t really care what you major in, but you’re going to college because it’s a ticket punch to a better life.” Well, maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t. I have to admit that now I look back on that, and I think I was probably pretty profoundly influenced and ignorant because that was the only message I had received. I had graduated from a high school that 96% of us went on to college. Of course, that would be the better path forward. Why wouldn’t we have that? That high school still has that same point of view now. The reason I know that is because two of my kids graduated from there. They still have that. The interesting thing is, when I had a child who wanted to go into the trades, he became persona non grata because he was screwing with their statistics.

[00:35:51] Hannah: When that happens, man, they’re not so many of these kids because what’s so interesting is I found too, whether a kid goes to a lower-income school without a lot of resources, very limited vocational creativity. They know three or four jobs. It’s crazy, but high-earning households, private schools, prep schools, it’s the same thing. They know a very limited– it’s a bell curve. It’s crazy. They know doctor, lawyer, engineer. That’s all they got. If I had a dollar for every young lady that came in, a psychologist, if I had a dollar for every young lady that came in these days from a prep school, then it’s like, oh, I think I’m going to go into law or, and I’ll just say psychologist. Yes, I know that because you know four jobs. I know that because you know four jobs.

Then what’s crazy is you get the lower tier, it’ll come in and teacher, psychologist, teacher, psychologist, teacher, psychologist, all day. It’s always the same jobs. It’s because it’s for different reasons. This is lack of information and lack of resources. This is lack of options because there’s one path.

[00:37:04] Gretchen: How does the advent of AI change what you’re seeing as far as conversation is concerned with these kids?

[00:37:10] Hannah: I gave a talk about AI at the conference that you and I went to. I will say, too, I forgot to mention the other part of my story, which is that after I got into tech, I then ended up working for an AI and machine learning software company, enterprise level, Fortune 500 companies. That gave me very unique insight to, one, what was going on at those companies, two, what was going to change, and three, why the degrees, because I saw them remove internal degree requirements for allocating talent at huge companies. I saw them, I saw the internal systems being built to do that. I was like, “Oh, this is over. This is over. The colleges are obsolete.”

They already were, but all AI did was really just nail that down because now nobody needs them. They don’t need them for work. This is one thing, too. I’m not anti-college. What I am is I am anti going into large amounts of debt for things that do not help you achieve your goals. For instance, if your child has a trust and they do not need to make a lot of money and they want to go to college and study obscure English literature, who am I to tell you that? If you have the money, I don’t care. That doesn’t seem like, sure, go for it. It’s the people who are trying to use it for employment, and it is not going to function like that.

That is not going to be effective. Go for the love if you can afford it. Sure, do it. Do it. Absolutely. It’s trying to use it as a shortcut to employment in a world that is not going to work because the skill turnings, too, in AI are going to be so much faster. I want to talk about how many jobs have actually been lost to AI because I know parents have probably seen like, oh, no, AI is taking all the jobs. No one will employ college graduates. Sorry, go ahead. Go ahead.

[00:39:02] Gretchen: No, no, I would like for you to speak more about that because I get parents who are asking us these kinds of questions through our social avenues all the time.

[00:39:13] Hannah: There’s two really big things parents need to know. The first one is that no one’s hiring college graduates because companies don’t want to hire college graduates because there’s something called the reality gap. That is the expectation of earnings that they are graduating with because they’re spending $100,000 to get a piece of paper that they think is going to get them, not an entry-level job. When they get in and the market available wage is $50,000 or $40,000, which is exactly the same as it was before they bought the degree, and then they get in and they actually have to work after they have been on a college campus, which is not real life, and they’ve been using their future earnings to pay for that, their expectations are ruined. Their attitudes are ruined. They’re terrible employees, unfortunately. This is not me. This is Intelligent.com did a survey of a thousand hiring managers, all of which had bachelor’s degrees, at least, themselves, and they said they will not hire college graduates anymore because 71% of them had fired one in the last year and because they come in not able to communicate with no critical thinking skills. This is literally what they said. They were unable to look people in the eye. There goes out of the window all of the things that supposedly college says that they do because they love to switch. Academia loves to say, “Oh, we’re job-training,” but then they don’t. They’re not effective for that. “Oh, well, okay. Well, that’s okay. We’re bad at that. We’re education,” but then they don’t teach critical thinking, and they don’t teach any of that. They can just flip-flop. It’s great. It’s a nice little racket. That’s great to just say you’re both, but really, they’re neither. I think maybe straddling that horse is why they’re in the position that they’re in now.

That’s two things. The employers don’t want to hire them. Then I just saw two days ago, but there was a survey of small businesses, and they said that they’re not going to. They’re not hiring graduates. They can’t afford it. They can’t afford their wage. They can’t afford the turnover, and they can’t afford the training time, and they can’t afford the attitude. They just can’t do it. When your child is entry level, no one is expecting them to have aptitude. They don’t have any experience. They literally know nothing. They are expecting them to come in with a good attitude and to want to work. It’s difficult. I feel really bad for these grads because I think college did ruin their expectations. It ruined their outlook. It taught them that business is evil. A lot of them are taught that business is evil and money is evil. Then you have to go work in a business to pay your bill. It ruins their attitude. I would not hire. Not because they had a degree, but just because of the way that they speak and the things that they say. I’m not going to hire you. You’re not going to stay here, and you’re not going to be willing to do the work that needs to be done. It just becomes that they’re risky hires.

The second thing is that they need to know that that’s what’s going on. The true loss of AI jobs. Last year. Let’s talk about 2025. There was an actual study done of how many jobs were displaced due to AI. I have a theory that this is not even the real number because I think that it’s very easy to blame the robots if you’re a CEO and you’re sitting in a boardroom, as opposed to you just being bad at your job. You had to lay people off. I think that plays well in the quarterly updates. I think that they are, “Oh, it was AI. It was the robots.” No, it was probably you. Okay, 6,000 jobs nationally displaced. Only 6,000.

[00:42:29] Gretchen: 6,000. That’s really interesting. That’s actually fascinating to me. I expected you to have at least one more zero on that number.

[00:42:36] Hannah: No. More than that, AI has created more than 6,000 jobs. Hiring jobs. Good jobs. It’s creating a ton of jobs. That is where Jensen Huang, who’s the CEO of NVIDIA, he was just at the World Economic Forum, and he was talking to Larry Fink, who’s the CEO of BlackRock. I actually share Jensen’s view of the future. This has been something I’ve seen for a while. I’m like, this is going to create so much work for people, and also more human work. We’re not designed to sit and do spreadsheets and send emails and automation. That’s just not what people are good at. People are good at doing actual work. I don’t even mean hands-on work, but mental work as well. Creativity. Things are going to become extremely valued as creative fields, storytelling, artistry. Disney is now hiring hand-drawn animators again because now AI has made the digital stuff so prevalent that it’s not compelling anymore. They’re hiring illustrators for their movies now. That’s a really good example of what I’m talking about. Jensen Huang thinks we’re going to have labor shortages because he thinks that there’s not going to be enough people to do all the work that needs to get done. I share that view with him.

[00:43:46] Gretchen: You said something very interesting, which is something that I have found in several interviews that I have done with people in different fields in the last year. They’ve said what they’re seeing is young adults who come in with an unrealistic expectation of success out of the gate. They forget that between the nexus of not knowing and knowing, there’s all this messy interspace in here that you need to engage in to get to knowing. They think that a college degree means they start at knowing. That creates quite a gap for kids. Then the thing that stuck with me, that stood out to me more than any other guest that I had last year, was actually a college professor. She said, “If you’re using AI to circumvent the knowledge, so you’re going to use AI to tell you how to do something, you’re going to use AI to write the paper for you, and you’re not going through the process of knowledge acquisition, then you’re shortcutting yourself.” She said the flip side of that coin is, if you can’t do it any better than AI can do it, why would anyone hire you in the first place?

[00:45:08] Hannah: I’m going to say something about college professors that’s probably not going to play well, but with that said, I think it desperately needs to be said. College professors, and this was a survey of professors, shoot, what was that? I need to cite the survey. I can’t remember the name of it, though. It was, of how many professors worked outside of academia at any point. This matters a lot, because parents, you’re about to spend $100,000 for these people to tell your kids what’s true and to teach them how to work. That’s what you think you’re paying them for.

[00:45:36] Gretchen: They’ve never done that.

[00:45:38] Hannah: Never. Never. Less than 10%. If they’re not STEM professors, less than 10% of them have ever worked outside of academia. Ever. Ever. I’m sorry, but academia, what it rewards is purchasing paper. It does not reward performance. It doesn’t. That’s not the system. They have to buy paper to get into the system. Less than 10% of them have ever worked outside of academia, including jobs like a barista while they were in college. Now, your STEM professors, not a lot better. Not a lot better. Business, technology, some of your engineering, and your technological professors, maybe a little bit more. I’m not talking about professors of practice. I think that they should all be professors of practice. If you haven’t worked in this, you can’t teach it. What are you talking about right now? You literally have no idea what you’re talking about. I think it’s 40% of them had not worked in their field in the last 15 years. Just for context, you’ve got people teaching marketing and technology in colleges that have not been in the workforce. Instagram didn’t exist. Instagram did not exist at the time that these people went into academia. They have no idea what the market needs. No clue. They have no idea. Also, for a lot of them, the way that they were employed outside of academia was after they had become PhDs and gotten doctorates. Then they consulted when they were 45, 50 years old. They have no idea how to help your kids get entry-level work. They have no idea what skills are needed in entry-level work in the actual market because the entry-level skills in academia are not remotely the same.

[00:47:16] Gretchen: That brings me back around to one of the questions that I thought was important that I wanted to ask you, which is how do we help our children get ready to know what to do next? I think one of those things is that we need to teach our kids the soft skills. Like you said, look you in the eye, shake hands, be willing to work hard, those kinds of things. What else?

[00:47:38] Hannah: I actually think that they need to be able to read and write. While AI is one of those things that, yes, does it create a lot of write, can it create a lot of text? Sure. It cannot write like a person. It cannot. It does not. People can see it in the same way that you can see art that has been created by AI. This is part of the reason why I think that human skills are going to get so much more valuable. If I could pick a set of things that your child could do that I think would be universally applicable, one, speaking. If your child could speak in public, oh my goodness, they are going to rule the world. Rule the world. Toastmasters. It’s free in a lot of places. Find somewhere that will take your child. Toastmasters is more valuable than college. Toastmasters is more valuable. You’re talking to people who are different ages. They’re almost all professionals. That’s why they’re there. They’re trying to learn that skill. The secondary effect of that is that you’re going to actually build a network of people who are, oh, well, a young person. They’ll bend over backwards. People will bend over backwards to help young people. They will. Very oftentimes, kids are not in the environment where they’re able to do that. They’re around the other drunk 18-year-olds and college professors. That’s it. That’s what the college campus is. That’s not a great network. A good network, though, is a bunch of local people who are professionals who are growing in their career. That’s why they have to go learn to speak. They’re able to give you connections. That’s a great place to be. That’s a great place, especially if kids are in high school. That’s absolutely the best thing. Reading, writing, speaking. Critical thinking is in there too. If you learn to write, you will have to think critically because otherwise, people can’t understand what you’re writing. If you speak, you’re going to have to learn to think critically because otherwise people won’t understand what you’re saying.

[00:49:26] Gretchen: I really am secretly delighted. I did not know what you were going to say, but I love the fact that you have said what you have said, because I say all the time to parents, you need to teach your children to write to an audience under a time constraint. Parents will look at me and say, “AI will do that for me.” No, it won’t because I can tell the difference. Even I can tell the difference between what are your own thoughts, formulated and put down on paper, and a computer trying to tell you what to think. It’s huge. It’s just parents don’t understand the depth to which being able to write successfully makes a difference for our kids.

[00:50:09] Hannah: One other thing I would say too is if your child’s not a strong writer, but they can articulate things, because some kids do struggle with that. They can articulate, but they’re not hands to keyboard. One of the most powerful things, I think, and the world is moving this way, because screens are not going to be as prevalent as they are. Everything that we’re doing, all technology now, is to get us away from sitting at the computer, because humans aren’t good at that. We’re just not good at it, and so everything’s going to move away from that. If you can get your child a dictation app, like Letterly, or even using ChatGPT to just dictate. Especially Letterly. It helps your child understand and read back what they’ve said. If they’re trying to articulate or convince somebody of a point. If I had a child that I was trying to teach how to communicate, I would do that and then say, okay, does this make sense now? Is this a complete thought that you’ve created here? Does this connect? If someone was listening or reading this, would they understand what you’re saying? That, I think, is super helpful. Again, something very low-cost, free, that people can just use, and homeschooling family should be using. If you’re homeschooling your kids and you are not teaching them how to use AI, please teach them how to use AI.

The other thing is that college professor. One of the things that I think is the most insane thing is the fact that colleges– the thing is, all the professors are using it, by the way. They’re all using it because they’re not incentivized not to use it. They’re using it to make their presentations. They’re using it to make their reports, syllabi. They’re using it for everything. They’re using it to grade. They’re doing all of that. On the flip side, they are using AI to catch your children using AI to do their AI-generated work that the professor used. Instead of teaching your child how to use AI because they will need to know how to use it in order to get work to pay off the loans that they took out to pay this person to use AI to catch them using AI doing their work. It’s the most circular, insane thing. I’m like, what are we doing? What is actually going on here? This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen, but yes, the insanity of that.

The thing is to just remember that a lot of things are being said about AI right now were said about the internet. Every technological leap, we do this. People said it about the assembly line for Henry Ford. People said it about the cotton gin for Eli Whitney. We do this. Humans do this. We just like to panic. Every time there’s a new technological leap, we’re never right about what happens next. It always makes more jobs every time. It’s so predictable that this happens.

[00:52:34] Gretchen: I learned about nine months ago. One of my kids over dinner said that they were using AI as a coaching tool to prepare themselves. They did a long hike. They hiked the Continental Divide Trail from Montana to New Mexico, 3,100 fun-filled miles. Yes, he left June 18th and got home November 20th.

[00:52:58] Hannah: That is so cool.

[00:52:58] Gretchen: He had used ChatGPT to be his coach to prepare him week by week to make that hike. When he said this over dinner, I went like, “Tell me more about that.” We actually recorded a podcast about how he had taught ChatGPT how to coach him to successfully have this experience. He was able to successfully do that. I think that is something that we, as parents, need to learn how to do. We need to learn how to work AI so we can teach our children how to get AI to coach them to be better at the soft skills they need to have.

[00:53:41] Hannah: The other thing it’s amazing for is language learning, because it never gets tired. It’ll correct you. It’ll give you context. It’ll talk to you, which, if you don’t have somebody that speaks the language you’re trying to learn, it’s invaluable for that. Invaluable. Absolutely amazing.

[00:53:57] Gretchen: Hannah, this has gone way too fast. Our hour is almost up. There’s so many other things I wanted to ask you about. In these closing minutes, what would you say would be the important things you would want parents to take away from our conversation?

[00:54:13] Hannah: When you are trying to guide your child into the right career, there’s three things. When you’re trying to guide your child into the right career, you have to figure out their needs first. If you do not figure those out, and what careers you are choosing are not based on those things, your child is going to end up in a job that doesn’t fit their needs. It’s very difficult to be happy in a job or content in a job that does not fit your needs. If it does not fit their needs, it will also keep them from being able to do the things that they want in their life. That is really the reason why this is so important. If you have kids that are, oh, I want to go into social work. Oh, I want to teach. Oh, I want to be an engineer. If it doesn’t meet their needs, that’s not a good fit. It doesn’t matter what it is. You have to help them explore based on their needs. What’s cool about that is it works for every need, hyperability, disability. It works for anything. 5.0 kids, kids with autism, kids with ADHD. It works for all of them. They’re all going to get different answers because they should, because they’re all different.

The next thing is that I wanted to talk over the degree-free pathways really quick. Basically, there’s five avenues that your child could take to choose a career or to learn the skills that they need. The first is going to be get a job, get an entry-level job. The second is going to be find on-the-job training apprenticeship. The third is going to be earn a license or certification. That could be a notary or a pilot, and anything in between. It does not matter. The fourth would be build or buy a business. Something I think parents should know is that there is a silver tsunami, that’s what it’s called, of baby boomers retiring, and their businesses are just going up in smoke. They have no retirement plan. If you walk in with very little cash, or even no cash, you can make some deal where they will teach your child. It’s like a buy-in deal where you go in and you say, “Hey,” and obviously there’s a lot of due diligence to do. You need lawyers, you need CPAs and stuff, but assuming it’s a business that’s making some money, and if it’s in business, and has been for a little while, it probably is, you say, “Hey, teach my child this thing, how to do this thing, how to run this business, and then we’ll earn you out. We will just pay you monthly.” You’ve now bought your child an asset instead of debt, and you’ve done it in cash flow. If your child is entrepreneurial, that’s probably the right move.

Again, make sure that whatever business that they’re going into meets their needs, but it’s the same thing. If your child, their needs are met by being a sewing machine repairer, okay, great. Now go find somebody that runs one of those stores and offer them an out because they don’t have one. You can just save all of that evaporating value and give it to your child for a lot less than a degree too.

Then the fifth thing is learn a skill because learning a skill will eventually loop you back to getting a job. If your child wants to repair mountain bikes or become a photographer or be a professional organizer or anything, just having them learn a specific skill, even copywriting. Yes, even in the age of AI, copywriting is a valid skill, but having them learn those skills so that then they can loop back around to getting a job or possibly earning a license or certification for something. Those are the five degree-free pathways. Then the big thing too, parents, I cannot stress this enough. 92.3% of all the jobs in our country don’t require degrees. If it says a degree is required and there’s not a legal requirement in that your child will get arrested or sued if they did that job, it’s not real. It’s a request. Ignore it. Yes, they can apply to be a management trainee at Sherwin-Williams. There’s not a degree required for that. Just apply for it. It’s fine.

Then the other thing is that, I talked about this at the conference, but very important too for parents to know, a lot of people feel like all the job listings have degrees in them. They don’t. 14.5%. That’s how many jobs mention a degree even as preferred. That’s all of them. Most of the job listings don’t even mention them. It’s declining all the time. Really, the key becomes having your child figure out what the right entry-level role for them is and figuring out how it ladders up into the career that they do eventually want so that they get into the right level and they’re able to do that work.

The last thing is just that the future, I think, is really bright for young people. I do not see the doom and gloom. I hate the fact that so many of them feel that way because we let them feel that way. That’s not real. The future is very bright. I think we’re about to enter a renaissance era. I think things are going to be amazing. There’s going to be so many new jobs. There’s new job titles coming out every single month. We estimate there’s about 3,000 unique job titles, by the way, are degree-free. The challenge becomes teaching your child how to find the right one for them. If you want to help them figure out different types of jobs, we call this vocational creativity. When you look at a product or a service or any type of business, just have them think a little bit deeper, further up, and further into that career, like, oh, who rents the land? Who does the landscaping? Who runs the payroll? Who hires the people that work here? Who does the lighting or maintains the security cameras? Things like that. Then think about the parts for the cameras that go on this building. Where do they come from? Who makes those? Where do they get stored? Who ships them? All of these things. Just think about work in a more dynamic way because it’ll help your child recognize opportunities other people don’t see.

[00:59:19] Gretchen: I love the fact that you are encouraging kids to think because, in a lot of ways, our society doesn’t encourage that. I think that is what sets you and the capacities that you offer for students apart so dynamically is that you’re asking kids to use their brains. In a lot of ways, we’re presently in a society where using our brains is not considered an attractive proposition. I really love the fact that you are encouraging kids to do that.

[00:59:58] Hannah: Thank you. I do encourage people with the vocational creativity. You’d start that as young as you can, because that just helps them look at work totally different.

[01:00:06] Gretchen: Sure. You’re saying that I don’t need to wait until I have a high schooler to do this?

[01:00:12] Hannah: No, start as soon as possible because you just say, oh, people are picking up cones off the road. Oh, did you know that’s a job? It’s that simple. Also, you’ll find yourself doing it, which is cool too.

[01:00:22] Gretchen: That’s very cool. Hannah, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been a precious hour of time that has gone way too fast. I appreciate everything that you’ve had to say. As our audience can tell, we were full of information today. I knew Hannah would bring the receipts, if you will, as far as the terrific information. I’m just so grateful for the time she was able to carve out from her family and her very busy business life to spend this time with me. Thank you so much. I am very grateful indeed.

[01:00:53] Hannah: Thank you for having me on. It was a pleasure.

[01:00:55] Gretchen: All right. Take care. Bye-bye.

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