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While I have been writing this for a week or so, I plan to turn this into one of my AI videos that is rather easily digestible. My personal background had me coming up from relatively nothing – but as my mother went back to school and finished her accounting degree, then got her CPA license when I was 14, our status in life moved up from lower middle class to middle class. When I was little – my mom forced my dad to sell his motorcycle so we could have heat in the house. Before that, we had a stove in the living room and remember the nice wood pile we had out back to feed it during the winter. I remember it mostly because I would play with the neighborhood kids on the wood pile while eating cherries off of the neighbor’s tree whose branches came over our fence.

I loved my childhood – but it gave me the “rugged individualism” that Americans historically had been noted to possess. We had a GREAT childhood of neighborhood fun. I grew apart from most of those neighbors, but those memories are gold. Specifically, we would ride bikes all day and all night. At 7 or 8, bike 1-2 miles to the Y and play pool, work as a pin setter for $.35 a game to fund my mountain dew habit, and overall, had an incredible childhood with virtually no money.

Life has changed a lot since then, and somehow, and some way – “standards” to live now are defined by money rather than time spent with someone with an imagination, snowballs, army men, and sleds. Life is harder, and because of the inflation in the 1970s that started, things today are a LOT more expensive then they were then. And, as a child – I would have childhood crushes. Love was very important to me. Today, love is only after someone is 6 ft tall, makes 6 figures, and has a 6 pack. This has led a lot of American men behind, with perhaps 30 million men never marrying and having children.

My mom was able to send me $40 a month for college. But I didn’t really need the money from her so much because I was taught to fish when younger. At the earliest ages, I remember my dad’s father paying me $1-$2 for an hour of stomping aluminum cans whenever I was at my grandparents. Later, I was perhaps 8 when I would mow the grass for the whopping $5. The Y and pin setting. I learned from a very young age, that if I wanted something – I needed to make it happen. This lesson, taught very young, showed me the rewards from being productive. I can tell you I loved books far more than wanting to look at the engine with my dad, but when I hit working age, I worked my ass off. First as a busboy, then as a Burger King back kitchen employee. With a 4 month stint at Sbarro. Then in college, I worked the IT helpdesk at the college, got an internship with the school, and eventually worked at Harley Davidson for 20-30 hours a week my senior year. The first two summers off were working 80 hours a week as a security guard overnights. While my friends went and did beach fun all summer, I was working like a dog. The summer before my senior year, I was working during the day as a college intern, then working every night and weekends delivering pizza. My college gf’s parents cut her off because we lived together before marriage – so I took on a lot of the role of support. She drove my car and I drove a POS.

All of this was to state that my life was not simple – but I learned the value of hard work when young. Eventually, I got a job right out of school in IT making good money – and 30 years later I am a C level employee with 13 certifications and 2 masters degrees. Nothing was ever given to me. And when people think they have the right to take your productivity, it disrespects you at your core. You were able to get shit done, so should they.

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What this piece is about is to put myself back in the mind of a 17 year old, preparing for college. What lessons are important? What was not important?

First, we have to look at a few types of careers, as this was not easy for me to understand when young. I would put this at roughly 6 different paths.

  1. 1) Service. This is military, government, teaching, police, fireman, preaching, non-profit. You will never “get rich” in this path. You give a lot of yourself to a higher cause. Because of the dating problems today with people who do not make enough to date, these fields are going to be hit hard. That being said, some people have a higher calling to service, and people that fall in love with them do not care about money. They respect the man you have become. You do not do the service for awards or pay. You do it because it drives you to help people.
  2. 2) Sales/small business owner. While many may have a marketing degree prior to getting into this profession, it’s not needed. Typically, attractive people who are well spoken and charming can make a killing with this. Sales salaries can be almost unlimited. While someone may have started off selling phones in a kiosk in a mall, then can now be a regional sales manager for a large company. The marketing and business degree then comes in handy if you want to run a company. A CEO typically isn’t the chemist or math guy or accountant. A CEO is the chief salesman of the company, and the marekting knowledge helps you understand HOW to sell WHAT to WHO (market segmentation, etc). Your finance and economics education here can also help you run your own company. These types of people can partner with a technical person to start companies up. The techie makes the widgets, and the sales person creates the orders and tells the story.
  3. 3) Corporate America – typically, punching the clock and working for someone else. These are your cubicle jockeys and are a wide array of positions. From IT to accounting to chemistry to research to engineering – all of these positions tend to have a pathway to senior leadership by means of high performance, reliability, doing the extra work, navigating office politics, getting advanced degrees, and demonstrating leadership. While I was the chief nerd for early in my career, it took a lot of failure until I was able to eventually go from a team lead to a manager. What happens is you make a transformation from “the expert” to “how can I bring my team up”. The problem with this category is that advancement is highly competitive. And in today’s market, if you aren’t advancing quickly enough, you fall behind and have to promote yourself by getting a job in a different company and start all over again.
  4. 4) Trades. In HS, this was sort of frowned upon by my clique of people. As an adult, I completely have a much different respect for them. These people may be electricians, welders, mechanics, union factory jobs, carpenters, plumbers, drafters. There’s maybe a dozen more, but the idea here is you are working with your hands and maybe you need a course or 2 year tech school degree. While 50 years ago our country was flooded with these, many people have been told they need to go to college. And what has happened since then is many people have been pushed towards college and either failed out, drank themselves out, or got a relatively useless degree – and with these, were swamped with college debt for an education that wasn’t suited for who they are. Some people love to work with their hands. And there are sooooo many shortages today, it’s silly. You can’t get anyone to even show up to your house for less than $200. I don’t even want to think about how much it is to replace an HVAC unit or get pex tubing run. This career can start to pay you well starting in HS and by the time you are 24, may be ready to branch off and start your own business. Many women love men who are good with their hands – but many of these trades now pay 6 figures, and if you run your own successful HVAC business you could make half a million a year with a team of 10 working for you.
  5. 5) professional. Think of doctor, lawyer, high end finance, or college professor with a PhD. Unlike other professions – this is the only area that really NEEDS Ivy league schools to get to the promised land. No one cares if you got your teaching degree at Brown or State U. No one cares if you got your criminal justice degree at UPenn or State U. Where this matters is if you want your kid to be a surgeon – you want him to have an undergrad at a top Ivy league school. This membership then allows you to apply for an Ivy league school for med school, law school, or even an MBA to work with the elite banking and investment sectors. Also – assume you want to teach, but not HS kids – perhaps you get a history master’s degree from a decent school – but you need to then get your PhD at a somewhat elite school to be a professor to then run a department someday.
  6. 6) Unskilled. Many of these are perhaps the minimum wage jobs out there. They are called unskilled because it might take you a few hours to a week to figure out how to do it. These jobs tend to pay the least by a long shot because the labor market is easily flooded with people who do not cut it in other areas. I do not want to besmirch these people – but you have things like landscaping, truck driving, painting, roofing – many of these jobs are hard or difficult, but may not need a lot of expertise to do well. The only money in this arena are for the business owners who own the painting company or own the landscaping company. They have to take risk, buy the equipment and sell services. I would suggest that anyone in this area take some business classes at a local community college and eventually, open their own company. Jobs like a truck driver may need a CDL and can require a good amount of training, but unlike jobs in the other areas – this profession doesn’t require a lot of schooling or formal training.

Observation

Too much emphasis is being put on grades for HS kids to get into elite schools where the kid has zero chance of being a doctor, lawyer, financier, or college professor. For 95% of kids who want to do the first three, any state school is fine. No one cares about where you got your undergrad, and rarely anyone ever ask your GPA. Companies want to know:

  1. – can you do the job? This is where experience helps. “But how do I get experience if I don’t have any”. This is where jobs when young help, because you can work for peanuts and Mountain Dew and learn valuable skills. So by the time your first job out of college comes around, they want to see what effort you have put out to make money previously. Leadership experience? They want to see you were reliable, did hard work, and the college degree says “if I send them to training, they will retain a good portion of this knowledge to apply”. People graduate college and think college is a job training tool. It is not. It’s a massive aptitude test. And, if you pass, they will invest the time to teach you how to actually do that job. But they want to see you are already familiar with hard work, bosses, timesheets, and doing whatever it takes to get the job done.
  2. – you have a diverse background. When people say, “diversity is our strength” they really screwed it up. Color means nothing when it comes to doing jobs. Diversity may mean that one of my people is bilingual. Another likes tech in his spare time and can be the power user for the office to help us with IT. Another loves trivia and is great to organize game night at happy hour. Another was a D1 college QB and can lead meetings with a presence and has a fast track to leadership. Another may have been on the college golf team and can be great to take to meet clients on the golf course. Another was a world class chess player and he may be valuable for long term company strategy. Another was really good at playing music and tends to organize karaoke for the office. Another is a church member and volunteers with building homes for homeless people, which may give you 3 skills in one – a prayer group for some, volunteerism, and being handy to help put together furniture in the office or help fix small issues. Your weird or nerd interests provide diversity in skills for the office. Not your skin color. Your diverse background with hobbies and interests make any office a lot more interesting.
  3. – is your home life a train wreck. If you are 26, on your third wife and have 5 children – this is a problem. While you should try to keep home life and work separate a lot, those who have a lot of home drama bring drama into the office. Drama means lawsuits. Drama means confrontation. Aim to live an ethical life outside of the office, and keep as much private as you can.
  4. – you have a vision and drive. If you do not know where you want to be in 5 years, and communicate that to an employer, you are a waste of their time. They want to hire you to plant a seed that will grow and flower in their organization. If you are a job hopper, they see you leaving in months and you are a waste of their time. Likewise, if you want to do your boss’s job in 5 years, perhaps you then become mentored for when he leaves the company.
  5. – you don’t speak bad about previous employers. I have had one TRULY bad experience with a manager in my career. She was a train wreck in 2008, and the entire office was hostile and cancerous. I only worked there a short time, but I just preferred to not speak about her when possible. She may have had a husband and some kids at home, she wasn’t worth my time to disparage. The person you are interviewing with doesn’t want you shit talking them after you leave. Even if the place was a disaster, you can just say things like – “it wasn’t a great fit for where I wanted to go with my career”. Sometimes, it’s not being perfect, it’s how you polish the turd.
  6. – you can get along with people. Lots of team sports, team captains, and even fraternity president on your resume shows you were liked by peers and worked with them. Leadership amongst men shows that you can navigate alpha male vibes to get shit done.

Much of what I describe is “he” and “men”. This is not meant to disparage women. “mankind” is not meant to exclude women. Someone once called me out for my usage of pronouns that were not inclusive. Step back. Touch grass. Look at my message from 50,000 ft.

Colleges

So I just told you above why Ivy league CAN be important. For most of you, it’s not important to your success. It’s a reflection of how the parent raised you, and now they get to tell all of their friends their little Timmy is getting into Princeton. Which means nothing to you if you want to be a school teacher, other than you may end up 5x the student loans.

Try to understand that Ivy Leagues are only really important if you want one of those 4 professional professions I mentioned above. While I also possess an MBA, people misunderstand what the MBA is. While it is true you may go to Harvard and Wharton for an MBA and make $600k as a financier, for the other 95% of MBA seekers, it’s meant to learn advanced management and business skills to complement another profession. So if you were like me and worked in IT, for promotion purposes, it doesn’t matter if the MBA was from a school that was $10k a year or $100k a year. No one cares. You have MBA, and it means you now know how to do a budget for your department, you understand finance and ROI on Capex, and you understand management and leadership skills needed to run a large department. Maybe this can get you a grade increase or a director position in a field like chemistry, HR, or even as a cop. It doesn’t mean for 95% of us that we now have an MBA and will work on wall street for $1m per year.

Side note – the MBA helped me to understand how to manage my own money with investments. For most people, they pay a financial advisor. However, I had so many side hustles I wanted to be able to manage my own money as a second career, fallback career, or help with early retirement.

So for 95% of kids out there applying to college, it doesn’t matter what your SAT scores are. It doesn’t matter if you are a 1000 or 1400 for almost all of you, and after you get into college, that number will never be relevant again the rest of your life. For professional degrees – you need to then take another test like the MCAT, LSAT, or GMAT. I took the GMAT for my MBA which was sort of useless for the level of my MBA – I wasn’t trying to get into Wharton, so for most other non-Ivy league schools, it doesn’t matter.

College reputations

When selecting a college, you need a rough idea of what you want to do. Then, look for schools that do this. For example, I live in PA and wanted to do criminal justice. I looked up rankings and found that some of the best schools for this 30 years ago were West Chester, Indiana University of PA (IUP), and York College of PA. What you find a lot is that while schools may have a lot of programs, they may excel at a few and separate themselves from others. York College was also known for nursing, and they have built out pretty good IT, engineering, and business programs. Other people I knew wanted to be teachers, and with this – you had a lot of the state schools like Kutztown, Millersville, and Bloomsburg. State schools cost less than private schools, usually, and with this, if a teacher job pays $45k to start, why would you want to go to a school that costs 4x as much?

Likewise, many students – including myself – pivot majors once you take a year or two of classes. In my case, I didn’t like the idea of working all day long with the bad people in society. My brain could not handle the bad stuff out there. So I pivoted to IT. And, some of my criminal justice classes counted towards a security minor. This later helped me get my CISSP certification because one domain of the CISSP is physical security.

The point here is that if you are picking a college based on a reputation, also consider other majors you might want as it is common to change majors.

Likewise, it makes the most sense for your first two years of college to do a lot of the basic classes with maybe 1 major class a semester. So freshman year would have 10 classes, and perhaps 8 of them are English 101 and 102, algebra, sociology, psychology, spanish, etc. If you are at the end of your sophomore year and have 16 basic classes done and 4 in your major, switching majors isn’t a massive hit. Or, transferring to another school – many of these will accept up to 60 credits (20 classes) of the English 101, etc.

Community college?

I think this gets a bit of a reputation knock as “dumb kids” go to these. But the truth is, English 101 there may be much less stringent than your local state college, but may transfer into them easily. Maybe you don’t know EXACTLY what you want to do? Community colleges are a FRACTION of the cost of “regular” 4 year colleges, so why not live at home for a year and get 10 of these classes done for a fraction of the cost?

I did my first college class at age 11 at Reading Area Community college – intro to BASIC programming in 1987. Community college gets a beating on reputation, but assume you do your first 2 years at a community college, then transfer 60 credits of all of the basic classes to a state university, your 4 year degree will say “Penn State”. Who……cares….where you did English 101.

No one.

Online colleges

Online schools also get a bad reputation. I did the Brick and Mortar for undergrad. Then for 3.5 of my 6.5 years of grad school was brick and mortar. But when you are a busy professional with a 1 hour+ commute, weird and erratic hours, and a family to manage- getting to that Brick and Mortar may be hard, if not impossible. Attendance is a big deal for this. With the online schools – I could watch a lecture Sunday afternoon or Monday night, from the comfort of my own home. What was interesting about my online schools for my master’s was that often they would have subscriptions to Harvard or MIT lecturers, so I am getting the exact same lecture that a Harvard Student sitting there would be getting. Same knowledge, but the prestige of my school was less than Harvard.

Let’s translate this to your job. If you are getting the same knowledge passed to you a Harvard MBA is, and you are directly applying it to your job, does it matter where your diploma is from if that knowledge helped you kill it at work? No.

The big knock I saw was that it let in everyone. Meaning, some of my earlier classes may have had 8 sections of the same class with 25 people per class. Some of these people were very much not bright. But, they were given the opportunity. They wash out quickly. By the time I got to the end of my masters’ degrees – those in my classes were at the same world-level career I was in. They were impressive people. Do not knock an online graduate degree because the amount of work you need to do is staggering.

Type of education

I didn’t like my undergrad so much. Why? Because a lot of it was based off of homework and tests. I get it. “Rote knowledge”. In 1215 – we had the Magna Carta. Awesome. I memorized that date. But often undergrad was about feeding you “this is fact” rather than “how does this work”. This provides institutions the ability to sort of “program you” for things that they deem as fact when it’s a lot more nuanced than that.

I loved grad school because it was tons of papers. If you can’t tell, I have the ability to write a lot of volume – having about 1000 blogs here and 5 books written. I was able to crank out papers very quickly – because a lot of the subject matter was directly related to my fields I had a ton of expertise in. So I could read something, apply it to work, and then write about it in depth about how my experience with it was – and then cite things in APA. Cool.

But while undergrad focused on mid terms, attendance, and completing rote tasks – grad school for me helped me unpack how the world worked.

I would not go to undergrad and then immediately go to grad school. Waste of money and time. I got into the real world for 3 years and then had my employers pay for a lot of the grad degrees.

Skate to where the puck is going to be (hockey pic!)

I was always someone who was interested in the world. In politics. In understanding tech and the future. If you pay attention to the world and try to understand it, you can reasonably understand where the ship is going. And with it – you can sort of understand a potential destination.

Before I went to college, I wanted to be a lawyer. Or work for the FBI with a law degree. Or be a prosecutor. My guidance counselor had said (in 1994) that there was a backlog of lawyers until at least 2005. That could have been the best advice I was ever given, as law schools can cost $150-300k with massive loans – and many of these lawyers are getting out of law school and can only get public defender jobs for $45k. With massive student loans.

So I would advise anyone today to only use college for STEM programs. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Most other degrees now are kind of useless for an undergrad. And – unless you are going to be a doctor, lawyer, professor, or high end wall street financier, a state school is fine.

With what is coming in the world, you can see how AI is talked about most. This is going to eliminate a ton of job fields, and a good portion of entry level jobs. It can potentially even do a lot of legal work and even patient diagnosis. When you think of AI – you think of data centers and GPUs. This means that we might need chip designers. Well, there’s not a lot of these in the entire world. Data centers may need a ton of techs to wire them up and maintain servers. But these are relatively dead end maintenance jobs.

Engineers build things. And, I can see in the next 10-20 years, there will be a massive push to produce more factory goods here. Lots of robotics. Lots of engineering. Lots of computers to attach to the systems. Wiring. HVAC. Drones. This country is about to go to “war” with southeast Asia over productivity. Where there were plants here with 10,000 people working in them – in the 1980s and 1990s many of these were moved overseas and we lost the ability to produce a lot. This created global supply chains. Globalism – is more or less dead. This means that countries are trying to re-home all of their supply chains. Think about what this means

  • – Robotics and AI with farming
  • – Robotics and AI for building and maintaining autonomous factories
  • – Self driving trucks to move raw materials and finished goods.
  • – Drone delivery systems – not from the warehouse, but perhaps from a self driving truck.

Most jobs as we have known them over the last 30 years will be radically different. When I was in college, we had tier 1 helpdesk. This was then moved to India. Then remote into machines happened, and lot of tier 2 was replaced. AI has now replaced the tier 1 and is coming for tier 2. AI can do a lot of the engineering at tier 3. And – AI can do a lot of the architecture and documentation at tier 4. You would still need humans involved. But if you look at that factory from 60 years ago with 10,000 people producing a million widgets a year, I can see a new version of this where there are 1,000 employees at this new factory to maintain equipment, feed, and do various items- and perhaps they produce 5 million widgets a year. 1/10th the labor and 5x the production is extreme, but gives you an idea why we have about $20 trillion in investments promised. Most people don’t understand how important jurisdiction is to investment, and this is the difference with Chinese building and the US building. If you invest in jurisdictions where your IP or the like can be stolen, it creates massive risk. So our country can be a magnet for world investment where communist China may have severe limitations.

Paying for college

Many like myself didn’t really have parental financial support. Colleges then were perhaps 5x less expensive than now. Government subsidies with guaranteed student loans then arguably drove up college prices. You can see on charts how items with subsidies tend to go up in price. Those free market items tend to go down over time as efficiencies are found.

That being said, the cheapest option may be community college. Then online colleges. Then state schools. Then private schools. Then Ivy league. The truth here is no one in HS gives kids an education on Return on Investment.

So it helps to understand when to borrow, and for how much. Assume you get a medical degree or law degree from an Ivy league school, you are going to have a high ROI as they get the highest paid jobs. But consider a guy who is good with his hands, apprentices as a welder, and then at 22 goes to community college, gets a business associates while he is working full time, and at 28 opens his own welding business. He hires welders, accountants, HR – and by 40, he may be making half a million a year.

What about sales? Maybe you were the homecoming king 6’4″ QB who the girls loved. You blew out your knee, and D1 college is done for, but you get a gig selling cars locally. Everyone loves you. You move up to the sales manager at 24. Regional sales manager at 30. And at 35 you run your own dealership?

Not everyone needs an Ivy league degree to succeed. Think about the welder and the salesperson – between them had 2 years of an associates degree but between them at 40 are making a million a year. We contrast that with someone who got a gender studies degree from Brown, is $150,000 in debt, and now that DEI programs everywhere are being eliminated, this person has no marketable skills and is massively in debt.

So college is not a slam dunk to make good money. You have to:

  • – pick a decent major
  • – find the school that is right for you
  • – navigate costs
  • – get experience
  • – have different hobbies and interests
  • – work with others
  • – be dependable and know where you want to be in 5 years.

Let’s look at funding. You can do “cash” with the sticker price, but most colleges today are hurting for enrollment. They cannot reduce their sticker price because that sticker price is part of their prestige and exclusivity. Likewise, schools that have massive drops in enrollment may also loosen entrance standards to cast a wider net – but many of these kids can’t afford the sticker price, so they come up with gimmicks, grants, and scholarships to attract you.

Meaning – you should apply for maybe 4-8 schools. Odds are, if they aren’t Ivy League schools, you will be admitted. And, given enrollment issues and sticker prices, you now are trying to get them to give you their best package. A school with a sticker price of $42,000 for all in? Maybe tuition gets dropped from $25,000 to $15,000. But many of these schools expanded a ton, and now the room and board are hard to negotiate. But tuition may be.

This is why diversity of interests is far more important than your GPA. I played tennis, baseball, was a world class chess player, and was an accomplished musician. I was highly involved in student life, and with that, my school costs were significantly knocked down. People who can speak languages are of interest. On your entrance essays, speak to how your background is reflected in a lot of different areas. Maybe you are a volunteer at your church. Colleges love when students volunteer. Our fraternities were forced to do community service.

Today, no offense, everyone gets trophies and GPAs of everyone are inflated. I heard a decade ago about how some high schools may have had 10-20 students as valedictorians. Meaning, as long as you graduate in the top 20% or so of your class, you should be eligible for goodies academically. Top 5%? Maybe some more goodies.

Some things to help you, now…

  • – volunteer for stuff with your church
  • – participate in things like rated chess tournaments
  • – play instruments
  • – have a job
  • – play sports
  • – participate in leadership things like Junior Achievement
  • – start a business like a lawn mowing business to show you understand complexities of business
  • – join a debate team
  • – join a cyber security club
  • – learn to code some web pages and demonstrate proficiency in AI
  • – be a scout
  • – donate time to a good cause
  • – work out and have a fitness club
  • – book clubs
  • – trivia clubs
  • – cooking groups – like chili bake offs
  • – shooting competitions
  • – equestrian events

What you want to present to a college is a lot of different facets of you. Your GPA and SAT may have been important 30 years ago, but not today.

The FAFSA is done – you think – to help you with college. What it is really doing is getting the college the information they need to extract the most amount of dollars from you. The lower the incomes on the FAFSA, the better the deals you get. The more money your family makes, the less you can afford – and if they want you enough, they may knock off a massive chunk of it, and maybe ask you to work a little as an RA or library person or something.

The amount you can borrow now as an undergrad is

Year 1 – $6500

Year 2 – $7500

Year 3 – $8500

Year 4 – $8500

If a state school is $24,000 for room and board, and you can only borrow $6500 – that means you have to come up with $17,500 from other means. If the FAFSA shows money is tight, it’s possible further state grants can help you. I got grants from PHEAA to help out. Plus, I also had a 1/3rd tuition scholarship. So maybe after all kinds of grants, to GO to a state school may cost $9000 per year, or $750 a month. If your parents help you and you work, maybe you have to come up with $400 a month. Or, perhaps $100 a week. This is why working your ass off during the summers helps, so you maybe amass $5000 working for the summer, and draw off of that each week.

This is an example. Maybe you can’t get enough for a state school because you were only in the top 40%. In that case, there could be local community colleges where you could borrow the full amount. Pay for the first 2 years with loans, get a job, and finish your bachelors at nights with your company paying the tuition with tuition assistance.

Other options may be to commute and not need the expensive room and board option. For York College, it’s $25,000 alone for tuition, but if you are a dependent of an employee of the county, it seems like it could get down to $15,000. Maybe in year 1 and 2 you commute, make some friends, and in year 3 you move in on campus and borrow $8500 and get aid so it’s still only $15,000 but now you are living on campus.

For the most part, forget Ivy league schools unless you have near perfect SATs and GPA and you can get massive scholarships. Unless – you are rich and your parents pay the sticker price out of prestige.

What do you want to do with your life?

I had a vision when I was in my teens of sitting by the morning breakfast table drinking coffee, reading a newspaper, and my loving wife gave me a kiss on the cheek while my little ones were getting ready for school. I wanted a life where I didn’t work nights or weekends. That actually removes a LOT of professions. I didn’t really like working with my hands at the time. I wanted to make good money. When you start to see what you want your life to be like at 30 or 35, you can then work backwards…

  • – if you KNOW what kind of life you want to live, it helps you pick from one of the 6 types of careers
  • – if you know the hours you want to work, it narrows down the majors
  • – if you know the LIFESTYLE you want to live, it then determines majors. If you want to make a lot of money, it also removes the service-oriented professions.
  • – if you have a drive of understanding the world – it can then help you understand where the puck is going to be, to then help you narrow majors even further.
  • – if you can understand what major you then are looking for, it helps you determine the narrow set of schools
  • – if you can understand the schools and the sticker prices, and navigate if you want to commute or go there – and work – or not – it starts to shape which college you can afford.
  • – if you understand the ROI for your major versus how much debt you may have, it then helps you even further narrow down a major
  • – hobbies and passions are just that. A career is to make money. Sometimes they align. Sometimes they don’t. Maybe you need to design a life that can accommodate for this? For example, perhaps you love the ocean – it doesn’t mean you need a marine biology major, but maybe you go to a school on a beach and surf? Maybe you end up working at a job by the beach and then can spend your spare time there? Odds are you may stay near your college town when you graduate, and people may also choose colleges based on location and access to things that interest them.