Degree Free

Degree Free
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Welcome to Degree Free! It’s our job to share fundamentals we’ve discovered and the mistakes we’ve made while self educating, getting work, building businesses, and making money. We’ll tell you how to make it happen, no degree needed!

  1. 16 hr ago

    College Is Making Your Kid Unemployable (Degree Free #203)

    Want to guide your 16-20 year old to careers that help them reach their goals? Check out our workbook set: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/book Want a custom career plan for your 16-20 year old? Apply for the Degree Free Launch Program: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/launch A father earning $140,000 a year feels guilty because paying for his children's college could put him in debt. That guilt is common. Parents are told that buying a degree proves they love their child and protects their future. But signing a loan without a clear career reason can put retirement, savings, and the whole family at risk. We also look at the gap between what college students believe and what employers see. Ninety-three percent of undergraduates feel ready for work, but only 54 percent of employers agree. About 70 percent of employers say recent graduates need extra training. Ryan lived that gap himself. He felt ready after college, yet his internship and first jobs showed him how little he knew about doing real work. College is not job training. Employers used degrees as an easy hiring shortcut, and families paid the price. Now more companies are removing degree rules and bringing training back inside the business. They need people who can do a specific task well, communicate, learn, and add value. The best move is to shorten the time between high school and your child's first strategic role. Let work build the wider knowledge that college promises but often fails to give.

  2. 2 days ago

    If Your Son Left College and Is Stuck at Home (The Hannah Maruyama Show #7)

    Want to guide your 16-20 year old to careers that help them reach their goals? Check out our workbook set: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/book Want a custom career plan for your 16-20 year old? Apply for the Degree Free Launch Program: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/launch I am talking about young men whose sadness, anger, or anxiety comes from being stuck without a clear goal. I am not talking about a diagnosed mental health disorder. For a son in this situation, the feeling that he is going nowhere may be accurate information about his life. Talking can help him carry that feeling, but it will not give him a path. The answer is not any random job. Busywork still feels pointless when it has no goal attached. I call the better option strategic entry-level work. It is a real role that leads toward a career he chose. It lets him earn money, build useful skills, gain experience, and get honest feedback from the world. That progress creates a positive loop. He sees why the work matters, so parents do not have to nag or push. I also lay out the three moves that keep young men stuck: sending them to another school without a goal, treating a direction problem as something talk alone can fix, and giving them more time with no plan. The better move is to start with the life your son wants. Define his income, schedule, work setting, and location. Then work backward to careers, required skills, ways to learn them, and the first strategic role. He does not need to reach the finish line right away. He needs ownership of a plan and proof that he is moving.

  3. 20 Aug

    The College Experience Was Never About College (Degree Free #202)

    Want to guide your 16-20 year old to careers that help them reach their goals? Check out our workbook set: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/book Want a custom career plan for your 16-20 year old? Apply for the Degree Free Launch Program: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/launch Young adults are moving to college towns without enrolling. They are living near people their age, working strategic entry-level jobs, earning credentials, and building professional networks. They still get the social parts parents want from college, but they avoid tuition and loans. Some can even rent off-campus student housing without being students, which may give them independence with some staff nearby. We think this can be a smart way to launch a young adult, but only when it serves a bigger plan. Start with the Degree Free Four: income, schedule, work environment, and location. Then choose the work, skills, certifications, sports, events, and volunteer commitments that move your child toward their goals. If parents are helping with rent, they can set clear goals and make another year of support depend on keeping those commitments. College towns make it easier to meet people, play sports, and find things to do because many residents are the same age. Yet falling enrollment may change those towns over time. We do not know whether young people will keep moving there if a college shrinks or closes. The larger point still stands. The college experience is really the experience of being young, and families can build that experience without buying a degree.

  4. 19 Aug

    College Won’t Save Your Son. This Will. (The Hannah Maruyama Show #6)

    Want to guide your 16-20 year old to careers that help them reach their goals? Check out our workbook set: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/book Want a custom career plan for your 16-20 year old? Apply for the Degree Free Launch Program: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/launch Parents are told college will give their sons structure, maturity, friends, and a career. The data does not support that promise. College students report high levels of depression and anxiety. More than half of graduates start underemployed, and many remain there a decade later. Debt can delay marriage, homeownership, business ownership, and family life for years. I share Aiden's story. He left an engineering program with no direction. Once he figured out what he needed from work, he found a field service engineering role within three weeks. His plan gave him the momentum college had not. My research found that fewer than one in ten U.S. jobs are legally gated by a degree. STEM is not a guarantee either. Most science and engineering graduates do not work in STEM occupations. The better starting point is the life your son wants. Work backward from his ideal schedule, income, location, and work setting. Then find entry-level work that lets him build skills and test a career before paying for school. If a degree becomes necessary later, an employer may help pay for it. Waiting can also change how FAFSA treats his income. Not wanting college is not a failure. It can be a smart correction.

  5. 16 Jul

    What College Will Take From Your Daughter (Degree Free #201)

    Want to guide your 16-20 year old to careers that help them reach their goals? Check out our workbook set: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/book Want a custom career plan for your 16-20 year old? Apply for the Degree Free Launch Program: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/launch We want to talk about the worst advice we give young women right now, and it's this: if your daughter wants to be a stay at home mom, she needs a backup plan, and that backup plan should be college. We've been hearing this from financial personalities, guidance counselors, and well-meaning parents for decades. It sounds responsible. It isn't. Here's the thing. College as a backup plan is not a backup plan. It's a hundred thousand dollars and five-plus years of your daughter's life spent building debt that will follow her into her marriage, prevent her from staying home with her children, and force her into full-time work she never wanted. We've seen this play out over and over. A lawyer making $75,000 a year, unable to leave her job, six weeks after having a baby. Teachers messaging us in tears because they can't afford to stay home with their own children. Moms who went back to school, got the degree, and still can't do the one thing they actually wanted. Women now hold two thirds of all US student loan debt. That's nearly $929 billion. And a huge portion of those degrees are in fields that don't pay enough to justify the cost, let alone give a young woman the flexibility she needs when she has a family. The real backup plan for a daughter who wants to be a stay at home mom is a high-earning, flexible, in-demand skill. Something she can build now, maintain while her children are young, and return to later on her own terms. Architectural drafting. Court reporting. Medical billing. Construction scheduling. Freight brokering. These are real careers with real income and real flexibility. None of them require a four-year degree. If your daughter knows what she wants from her family life, the job is to build her career around that, not against it. That takes planning. It takes strategy. And it starts now, not after four years and a diploma she'll never use.

  6. 9 Jul

    The College ’Experience’ Isn’t Real (Degree Free #200)

    Want to guide your 16-20 year old to careers that help them reach their goals? Check out our workbook set: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/book Want a custom career plan for your 16-20 year old? Apply for the Degree Free Launch Program: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/launch The college experience is one of the biggest reasons parents push their young adults toward a degree. But when you pull it apart, the experience people are describing has nothing to do with college. It's just what happens when you're between 18 and 22. You grow up. You make friends. You figure out who you are. College doesn't cause that. Age does. Take the spouse myth. Less than one in 100 American couples today met on a college campus. Most people now meet online, at work, through mutual friends, or in their own neighborhoods. The data is clear. If you're sending your child to college so they can meet their future partner, that plan is not working. Friendships are the same story. 57% of college students report feeling lonely. Colleges promise a rich social life and then don't deliver. And when graduation comes, whatever social structure existed on campus disappears overnight. Your child has to start over in a new city with no network and no idea how to build one from scratch. Contrast that with a young adult who spends those same years going to local meetups, joining a run club, volunteering, playing community sports, or showing up to a chamber of commerce meeting. They're building real relationships in the place they actually plan to live. Those friendships don't evaporate. That network grows. Gen Z already gets this. They're going back to third places. Dances, book clubs, gyms, churches, community leagues. They want real connection with real people. Your child can have all of that without $100,000 in debt hanging over their head. The college experience was never about college. It was always about the years.

  7. 2 Jul

    Why This Mom Hired a Life Coach... (Degree Free #199)

    Want to guide your 16-20 year old to careers that help them reach their goals? Check out our workbook set: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/book Want a custom career plan for your 16-20 year old? Apply for the Degree Free Launch Program: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/launch We got a call from a mom who was doing everything she thought she was supposed to do. Her son was 19, had left college, left trade school, and was stuck at home feeling depressed and directionless. Her solution was a life coach to help him feel better about where he was. We get why she did that. But we think it's the wrong move, and here's why. A lot of what looks like executive function problems in young men this age is actually just a complete lack of direction. When you don't know where you're going, you don't know what to do. And when you don't know what to do, you freeze. That's not a character flaw. That's a predictable outcome of having no clear path. What these young men actually need is work. Real work. Entry level roles where they show up, do the job, and earn respect for it. That process builds them. It gives them somewhere to put their energy. It gives them a reason to get up. Sitting still and working on your feelings does not do that. The other mistake is telling them to just get any job. That's better than nothing, but it still leaves them in the wrong vehicle heading somewhere they don't want to go. What actually works is figuring out what they need from their work, finding the right strategic entry level roles, and building a real 12-month plan to get there. We've done this with young adults for years. Parents tell us their child becomes a completely different person almost overnight. Not because we fixed something broken in them. Because they finally had somewhere to go.

  8. 30 Jun

    Your Teen Doesn’t Need College (Here’s Proof) (The Hannah Maruyama Show #5)

    Want to guide your 16-20 year old to careers that help them reach their goals? Check out our workbook set: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/book Want a custom career plan for your 16-20 year old? Apply for the Degree Free Launch Program: ➡️ https://degreefree.com/launch Here's the thing most parents don't know: "degree required" on a job posting almost never means legally required. It means a company added a filter to avoid defending their hiring in court, a direct result of a 1971 Supreme Court case called Griggs vs. Duke Power. Degrees became a litigation shield, not a job requirement. And now that shield is crumbling. States across the country, red and blue, have stripped degree requirements from state jobs. Pennsylvania freed up 92% of state jobs. Massachusetts freed up 90%. Maryland saw a 41% increase in degree-free hires after making the change. The federal government just removed degree requirements for all federal IT managers. And companies like Google, Apple, IBM, and Walmart have already dropped or are planning to drop bachelor's degree requirements entirely. The real number that matters: only about 14.8 million U.S. jobs legally require a degree, and 38% of those are just three roles: registered nurses, elementary school teachers, and high school teachers. Teachers alone make up 25% of every legally gated job in America, and they earn 7% below the U.S. median. That is not a strong argument for the degree filter. The right move for your child is not to pick a major. It is to start with the life they want, figure out what they need from work, identify careers that fit those needs, and then find strategic entry level work. Get hired first. If a credential is actually required and worth it, many companies will pay for it. That is exactly what happened with Quinn McLaren, who broke out of college, got hired as a real estate financial analyst at a Fortune 50 company, and had his employer fund his CPA credential. The system rewards people who show up, apply anyway, and build real skills. Your child can be one of them.

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About

Welcome to Degree Free! It’s our job to share fundamentals we’ve discovered and the mistakes we’ve made while self educating, getting work, building businesses, and making money. We’ll tell you how to make it happen, no degree needed!

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  • Creator
    Degree Free
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    211
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2021 All rights reserved.
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    Degree Free

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