A genuine split — 8 shows land on three different arguments, with no consensus in the arena.
Than the way it's worked out. This to me is one of the big mysteries. Like you go to South Africa where I just was and what's a leftwing right-wing view? Who will hold it? Can you sort of recognize someone is probably leftwing by the way they walk into a room? The answer is yes. It's crazy. How can that be? There's South Africa. It's a 14-hour flight and they have a totally different history. Nonetheless, there's some guy I met. I was like, "Yeah, he's on the political left." You know what? I was correct. He walked in the room. That was my thought. I knew it. Some other guy I met, I thought he's probably like right leaning Africana. I was again correct. It's crazy. >> You're in New York. I'm sure you see people all the time where you just think, "Yeah, they're they're probably on the left, right?" >> And most of the time, you're correct. >> Um, how do you think about the returns to an undergraduate degree right now? Like say you're a 16-year-old, smart 16-year-old, 17-year-old. What algorithm should I be doing to determine a if I should go to college and how I should balance between taking on debt and the kind of institution uh I I want to go to. >> If you can finish college, you should go. Adam OMIC just had a good tweet today that the returns to college are still pretty high. Uh, but the if you can finish is a big caveat. Schools don't like to release the rates at which people finish. My best guess is they
Okay. So, when people ask me if they should go to get an MBA, I ask them a lot of questions. Do you have rich parents? Are you accelerating at your current career? What are your financial needs? But also, where did you get in? Because an MBA from Kellogg is going to create a brand halo for the rest of your life and opportunities and networking that will be worth taking out some debt. In today's office hours, we discuss whether MBAs are still worth it, the role of Legacy Media today, and advice for new dads navigating anxiety. Question number one. >> Hi, Prop Gene. I'm a 28-year-old guy who recently made the decision to leave my job and head to Kellogg for a full-time MBA. I'm taking out loans to make it happen, but I believe in the vehicle. I've heard you speak about how HOS leveled up your career, and I've seen the impact of the degree firsthand. My dad's MBA was the reason that our family was able to immigrate to the US and break into the middle class. My professional background is in product consulting and strategy for a medium tech company and I'm recruiting for either consulting or product in the fall. My question for you is if you could help me try and not read the label from inside the bottle. If you were entering an MBA program in the current state of things, what would your strategy be and what would you be thinking about to maximize the degree's value? >> Uh thanks for the question. So just some data about a quarter of a million students are currently enrolled in MBA programs globally. The MBA is the most popular degree in the US. The cost, the average MBA ranges from 78 to $270,000. That's quite a range. Uh, and the average MBA graduates with $75,000 in debt. The payoff is still real. NBA
Still think that college is extremely outdated. I think that we're taught to go study and then get a traditional job. Um, but especially in the world of AI, I think that college is no longer needed. That being said, I believe that your network is your net worth. And there's no better place to go than college to expand your network because college is really the first time and only time in your life where you're going to be thrown into a world where everyone wants to make friends. No one knows each other, right? So, everyone's open to this like emotional connection. I always tell people like I actually think one to two years of college is extremely useful because that is where you're going to build your network and you're going to build the deepest network because you their most talented friends are always going to get these like multi-million dollar job offer straight out of college. But um if you're able to have that emotional connection like everything is sales from retaining your employees to selling them to get you them to join your company and uh college is the best place where you can like really build that emotional connection because everyone is open to it afterwards. Like you may go work at a company, you may join like you know different uh like interest groups etc. But um it's just not at the same density as colleges. So you're saying go to college, but don't go there for the degree. >> Exactly. >> Right. Go there for the networking, the groups of people, the emotional connections, practicing things. >> And I think college is a really great place, especially in classes, to like learn a lot and learn how to think, but you should apply those skills to practical skill sets or you should apply the skills that you learn into practical use cases. So I would learn how to think in these classes and then I would start
Things but can't understand them. What happens when they get of college? They generally remember things they heard without knowing what they mean. So they jumble them together in ways that don't make sense and then tell people what is when it's actually not. And I thought that hit the nail on the head with the hammer. I'm certainly on board with the whole, you know, college should be, unless you have a very clear vision for what you're going to do with your life and you need a college degree in order to do that thing, please don't go to college. Like, just just watch a couple of episodes of Dirty Jobs with Mike Row and then go out there and earn a real living. Just college is not for everyone. >> I mean, that's that's a bit of a trap that people are in now nowadays, though, because of the way the economy is and the way the job market is. It heavily favors the employer so much that they can put ridiculous college level uh restraint. You know, >> by and large they're not. That was a phase that we went through in the 90s and into the 2000s. And and I watched this happen in Australia because I I was homeschooled and I was never going to go to university. I had no interest. I'm one of the least educated people you're ever likely to meet. And at least in terms of official education. And people said to me, "Oh, you're ruining your future prospects. You'll never get a job. They're never going to employ you. You have to have the piece of paper just to get in the door." And I watched that change in real time in Australia as the degrees became so ubiquitous that they actually became next to worthless on on a resume. >> But in in America, a lot of it doesn't have to do necessarily with the specific degree, but having a 4-year degree in general means that you can laterally transfer to other businesses. But if you're going and you're filling out an application online and you're not meeting somebody in person, first of all, the AI program they're using to check all the resume is just going to reject you off the, you know, off the
Colleges to do is just absolutely bloat their um staff with a bunch of um administrators that aren't providing a better education. Remember Xihinping just killed off a bunch of degrees you can get because he's like these are So these don't matter in the modern economy. So we've got people going to universities to get degrees that literally don't matter. You're not going to add value. This is why you remain in debt for so long because your job is not going to pay you enough for that investment. So this is like um everybody's an entrepreneur of their own life and they say to start my company, my life, I'm going to take on this debt in order to go get this degree so that I can build this company, my life, moving forward. And the government's like, "Yeah, cool. I'm going to back you." And so I'll guarantee it. So the banks will give you the loan and then the schools are going to get their money whether you end up succeeding or not. And so the schools win and they just keep getting bigger and bigger and bloating and bloating and getting more and more obese and more um degrees are added on that are never going to pay back. So there are bad companies that never should have been funded in the first place and taxpayers are going to eat that when that kid defaults whether now or in the future. The taxpayer ends up having to pick up the tab. So, what they should do is go, "Oh, we need to free market this because some of these degrees are stupid." And so, we're going to net we're going to let kids decide. So, hey, if you want to take an underwater basket weaving degree, uh if you want to do like transbs studies, whatever, go do it. And if schools want to offer it, great. And then when a crop of people gets out and they're like, "Damn, I got my transbian studies degree, but
Ahead or maybe the only way to get ahead is to go to college. That's a category error. The best way to get ahead is to cultivate a skill set and then make intelligent decisions about the life in front of you. But we've been told that college is kind of the shortcut. So I mean like literally down to board games that you play when you're a kid. So I play the game of life with my kids. And in the game of life there are two paths. One is the college path and one is the not college path. The not college path is shorter. You get to the end of the game faster. But at the same time, the college path gives you access to a bunch of jobs you wouldn't have had if you went the high school path. And so you choose the college path. So everyone was told go to college since basically World War II. And universities who suddenly had a gigantic influx of people coming into college, many of them unqualified to be in college, decided to provide an unending supply of useless degrees. So our university system which used to produce good employees and innovators now just produces what you would think. It turns out degrees because that's what people want. They want the degree because they think the degree means money but it doesn't mean money. Very often it just means debt. So now you are turning out dispossessed college graduates convinced not that their college screwed them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars but that the system capitalism screwed them that America large scale screwed them. As Nate Silver says, I'm reminded here of Peter Turchin's elite overprouction hypothesis. It basically argues that America is producing too many college graduates relative to the number of high prestige, well-paying jobs available to them. People who wind up in this situation often carry heavy student loan burdens or other sorts of debt. Even if their material situation is objectively
People have done that they live very well and you know it doesn't mean you're dumb like a lot of these people that live very well are very self-educated they read books they watch documentaries they're interesting people and they're entrepreneurial we've got this bizarre thing in our head that if you didn't go to a school and get a degree you must be a dumb person it's weird and it's not smart it's it's not good for for anybody to think that way well you know I I very rarely play The Devil's Advocate in this argument but but I I do think I know why it happened or at least how and I was in high school in the late 70s and there was a very concerted push for what we call higher ed which by the way already sets the table right yeah if it's higher ed over here I guess we have lower Ed over here you guys are the language is is is awful but the but the pr I and to be fair in the ' 50s 60s '70s we we needed more doctors we needed more Engineers we needed more people matriculating through you know fouryear schools but what happens with PR at least from what I've seen is that it always goes too far and it wasn't enough just to make a persuasive case for that path we had to do it at the expense of the jobs you're talking about so if if you don't go this way you're going to wind up turn in a wrench with a giant plumber's butt crack and some other ridiculous Trope so it's a lot of stereotypes and stigmas and myths and misperceptions that started to swirl
Them. So, what we need to do, she's saying, in in large very flowery language, which you you know that Americans despise academics kind of gatekeeping from them by trying to use exuberant language of the superfluous of the O, the pedantry, and people hate that. What she's saying is you don't like how the federal government is currently running these programs because they're awful at it. And so therefore, what she's saying is the federal government also needs to run all of these additional programs that some people happen to like currently being private. That's her her only answer to some things being unaffordable for some people is that the government needs to run it entirely. That is insane. That is like, wow, gee, I I happen to have a hangail and it hurts. I better cut off my entire arm >> to our higher education so that we're actually meeting the basic needs of everyday working families in this country. >> The there is no need there is no need economically. This is also one of the things I'll talk to you about economic needs. Well, I mean our families have economic needs. So we need to provide universal higher education. College degrees are in their lowest demand this century. The lowest demand for white collar college degrees. What are the big What are the massive? What are the incredibly large incentives and the demands for trade schools? Going to trade schools that there are already state incentives for that just so happen to be in red states in free market states. So the argument that what you really need to do is pay a bunch of baristas to go get psychology degrees, that's not going to resonate. >> So that we're not just getting by and surviving so that we're actually
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