00:00 Speaker A
Speaking of mere mortals, um, like myself, with a kid about to go to college in a couple of years. We got to talk about your new book. Uh, it’s called The Truth About College and it’s a guide for parents who want to help their teens answer difficult questions about higher education. Not just where to go, which is I think is most of the literature is kind of geared towards that, but just how to think about like what you want to do with your life and how college feeds into that. Is that a fair way to describe it?
00:23 Speaker B
It is. The question is fundamentally, should the kid go to college? I mean, there’s no question college remains the best path, but that’s only if the child is ready for college and they choose the path and follow it correctly. That’s how they emerge with a degree in a field that is marketable, they can earn a good income. They can have a a wonderful life. We know that college graduates make the most money in America. They’re also healthier, they live longer, they are less likely to divorce. They have stronger family and community relationships. Going to college getting
00:59 Speaker B
a degree is wonderful. But how then do you explain that 24% of freshman drop out, that only 62% graduate in six years, that the average person emerges college with $41,000 of student loan debt, that we have 37 million college dropouts in this country. That these days, 25% of college grads say they wish they never went.
01:23 Speaker B
Clearly, something’s wrong in in how we’re executing this plan. That’s what my book is about. Like you said, most books are all about choosing a college, choosing a major, how do I get accepted? No, ask the fundamental question, is my kid a college candidate?
01:34 Speaker A
So, I and I feel like also a lot of the recent, um, um, questions centered around what you’re talking about are kind of focused on return on investment from and focused more on the what can the college provide to me, which you don’t have as much control over. You have more control over what your kid does and the conversations you have. So like, how do you have these? What do you how do you figure this out?
02:00 Speaker B
So, in my book, The Truth About College, there are uh in the back of the book, 20 conversation starters for parents to have with their teens, asking these fundamental questions to help you decide together is college the right path, recognizing there are so many alternative paths today for free education, for apprenticeships, for vocational school, for taking just a gap year or two. Let the kid grow up a little bit more and mature and develop, see what the world a little bit more to help them determine is college the right path. Is it now? What kind of school, what kind of major, so that the outcome is much more likely to be successful as opposed to ruining their lives.
02:51 Speaker A
I mean, it’s pretty tricky though when you’re talking about a kid who is 16, 17, 18, even waiting another one year, I mean, you know, in other words,
03:00 Speaker B
25% of college kids are over the age of 25. So, not just waiting one year, maybe wait five. Go learn about yourself, go travel, go get a job, see what it’s like to have one and see what the economic realities of the world are. That could help you frame your decision making.
03:22 Speaker A
Yeah, I guess I just think about myself and not figuring out entirely who I was until much later, which I think is true of a lot of people.
03:31 Speaker B
And this is a big mistake parents make in fact, is that they’re thinking about their own college experience 20, 30, 40 years ago, or grandparents, 60 years ago. College today is not like it was when we went to school and we need to recognize the fundamental differences, the challenges kids are facing. By the way, we haven’t even mentioned AI.
03:52 Speaker A
I know I was going to ask you about AI.
03:53 Speaker B
And the incredible threats to most careers due to technological innovation. Many kids are studying majors for fields that literally won’t exist by the time they graduate.
04:08 Speaker A
and and I don’t know if waiting a year is going to help with that. I mean those feel like questions that we won’t necessarily have answered for a little while.
04:14 Speaker B
And so I’ll tell you the the path that I describe in the book. There are four major things that you need to make sure your kid learns. And any college can teach these: thinking, creating, managing, and communicating. That is what you need to teach your children how to do because that is adaptable in virtually any career. As opposed to, oh I’m going to become an engineer, learn how to code. Well, great. We don’t need coders due to AI. So we need to learn how to think and create and communicate.
04:50 Speaker B
You’re in the communication field. This is transportable to cross industry. And this is what we need to help people realize is that college of the past is not what exists today. The cost is so much higher, the challenge is so much greater. We need to rethink and re-evaluate the approach we’re taking. And that’s what I help people understand in the truth about college.