Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. Today on the show, I want to talk to you about probably your children, although this might apply to you, but primarily we're probably going to be talking to your children.

And my title of today's show is this, why not skip high school and just graduate from college instead? I'm going to expand on that in today's show. I'm going to teach you how you can help your bright, academically capable high school student to graduate with a college degree at the age of 18, either instead of, or in addition to, their high school diploma or GED, which can open up a tremendously accelerated success path in life for them.

The concepts that I'm about to discuss are applicable in almost any year, but I do want to anchor them in the current year. As I record this on July 27, 2020, we are living in, I don't know if we're in the beginning of, in the middle of, or near the end, who knows, but we're living in a global pandemic, the COVID-19 global pandemic.

And this global pandemic is affecting different parts of the world differently. There are some nations that have been able to beat the pandemic back and they're operating more or less as they were accustomed to operating before the pandemic. There are other nations that are moderately affected by the pandemic and there are other nations that are severely affected by the pandemic.

There is a very wide swath of the radical personal finance listening audience, which is living in places that are severely affected by the pandemic. Now I think this pandemic is having a number of positive results. I think there's a number of silver linings that we can observe in the midst of this pandemic.

A couple of them though, relate to the physical distancing suggestions and requirements in which we are living. I previously recorded a show on radical personal finance here talking about how your biggest career opportunity right now is that your current work can be moved online and can stay online. In that show I discussed how the opportunity to earn your income from anywhere in the world that you can set up an internet connection is probably the biggest potential lifestyle benefit you can have.

And if you were to go back to the 1990s, you had to engage in all kinds of bird brain, you know, envelope stuffing jobs or really unusual careers. You know, if you were a back to the lander and you wanted to move out to the country and you had to figure out how to make a way, make an income from the country, you were limited to either the low income opportunities that were available in the country or you were limited to some really unusual careers or you needed to travel.

Well, things improved in the early 2000s as the internet became more useful and more and more people were able to go online, especially those who did computer work specifically from the very beginning. And then online work became more and more mainstream. But even in 2020, there was still, prior to the pandemic, there was still an expectation that in office work was the standard.

I think that expectation is changing and will continue to change. Now certainly many of us make a living in things that can never go online. But for those of us who do knowledge work, the move to online work is a tremendous lifestyle benefit. You can eliminate your commuting, you can move from the side of town that you don't like living on to the other side of town, you can move from the middle of the city to the country, you can move from the country to the middle of the city, whatever you want.

You can move from one country to another country, live anywhere. And so it's a tremendous opportunity. That's something that I think we're getting good results from due to the pandemic. And I hope that you are making full use of that. But we're also getting a lot of opportunities in the field of education.

And I think this is so powerful. First we're getting more parents involved in their children's education. The word I hear from people who are involved in things like local homeschooling groups is that the interest is extremely high. I don't see how parents can't at least notice a little bit more what was happening with their children's education if their children are doing online classes from home.

At least they're going to see more and hear more than they previously were seeing and hearing when their child was in a local classroom. I think we're getting tremendous advances in teaching techniques that more and more people are learning how to teach online. This is going to open up new career opportunities for teachers.

Once a teacher realizes, you know what, if I can effectively teach these hundred students in my local school online, then why shouldn't I just go ahead and establish a class for 1,000 students on the other side of the world online and charge them for it? And so I think there's going to be a lot of teachers who are going to be able to take their teaching skill and ability and transform that into new careers.

I think this is going to open up the world to where we get better teachers. I think there are many parents who are going to look down and realize, why should I have, you know, Mr. Jones at the local school who frankly is not all that bright, but he has the job.

Why should I hire him to teach my child history or mathematics when I can hire, you know, Dr. Singh who is on the other side of the world, but he's brilliant and fantastic and he is able to teach so much more, right? I think there's a lot of parents that are going to realize that and start being careful in the teachers that they hire for their children's education and not just take what's given to them by the local government school district.

There are a lot of more things that I could say. But what I see as the opportunity here is for you as a parent to take advantage of the fact that your child is forced to be in your home and use that to help your child get some bigger results.

Now I need to emphasize as preamble before I get to the specific suggestions, I need to emphasize that you as a parent need to study your children and understand what your children need. You need to do what's best for your children. And so the ideas that I have to share with you will not be best for all children and they may not be best for your children.

Our responsibility as parents is to understand the unique creatures that our children are and coach them, guide them, teach them in the way that they should go so that they can achieve the things that they're put here on earth to achieve. And to do that, we need to not try to apply a one size fits all system to them, but rather understand who they are uniquely and then seek to meet their unique skills, their unique talents, their unique personalities with things that will be helpful for them.

With that as the foundation, let's talk about some ideas. I think the single biggest opportunity that a parent has to help their child get on the fast track, and here I want to restrict the fast track to academics and to their career. I don't know if this is a fast track socially for your child, although I don't see that it has to be a conflict.

I don't know if this is the best for the development of your child, but these are the fast tracks for academics and for career. The single biggest opportunity that you have as a parent is to help your child to move onto a fast track educationally by getting rid of the fluff that is designed for low achieving children and moving them into a level of studies that's going to challenge them.

It's my general observation that education, hear the air quotes, right? Education, schooling has largely been brought down to a very low academic level. We can debate why that is. We can debate if that was some kind of intentional conspiracy, right? Dumbing us down for some reason. We can debate if that was just an outgrowth of certain overall trends, maybe more, right?

You could say, well, more students are in school now. Now everyone's in school and so it wasn't just the intellectual elite of yesteryear that now have access to school. You decide for yourself. But it's my observation that the average academic expectation or the academic expectation for the average student has changed a lot in the last 75 to 100 years.

The rigor of school has dramatically decreased for the majority of schools. I think, can't prove this, just an opinion. I think that what used to be learned in primary school has now been stretched out to at least high school if not beyond. If you go back to the late 1800s, 1890, 1900, something like that, before the progression of the progressive movement entered American education system.

If you go back and you look and study what a student learned in a sixth grade education, it's impressive. You've often heard people say, well, my grandfather had a sixth grade education. I want to ask, when did he get that sixth grade education? Was it in 2020 or was it in 1920?

Because there's a big difference between the sixth grade education of 1900 or 1920 versus the sixth grade education of 2020. So it's my opinion that what used to be taught in five or six years has now been stretched to 12 years. And what used to be taught in high school has now, for most classes and most subjects, been stretched into college.

And then what used to be taught at the undergraduate level in many if not most college degrees has now gone to the graduate level. So without commenting on whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, I think it just is a thing. What do you do if you are in charge of guiding an academically competent, intellectually bright student?

I think you put them on the fast track. And basically, if appropriate, you encourage them to get back to the older, more challenging track. You move them back onto perhaps a speeded up life phase where they can get ahead a little bit quicker. There's a big debate, especially in personal financial circles around college and college planning.

My opinions lie somewhere in the middle. I'm not ready to write off college in favor of YouTube U. I think there's a tremendous benefit in having a college degree. Assuming that my children are academically inclined, I will encourage my children to at least finish a bachelor's degree, a college bachelor's degree.

The reason I think this is important is at the minimum as a backup plan. I've become really sensitive to the need for people to have backup plans, for the need for people to have a fallback option, especially for them to be able to earn a decent wage in a career that has specific requirements and that has a good hiring ability.

One of the things that stymies a lot of people's entrepreneurial ambitions is if they don't have something to fall back on where they can quickly and easily get rehired. You may have an idea to go out and start a business, but what happens if the business fails? I think about this a lot.

What happens if all my businesses fail? What do I do? I have four children to support. I have a wife to provide for. I have a family to take care of. I can't afford to go back and get a job delivering pizzas. I tried that one time. I thought you could make 20 bucks an hour.

Found out you can't, like nine. And I can't support a family on $9 an hour. Just cannot do it. And so I need a decent wage. I need a decent professional wage. And so I need to have a backup plan. I need to have some kind of industry that I can go back to and get hired quickly.

Some of the most difficult financial planning situations I've ever been in is when coaching people who don't have that. They meandered into the workforce. They skipped college or took a few classes but didn't graduate. They wound up bouncing from one job to another job. A lot of times they were single.

Then they got married. Then they had children. And all of a sudden, they find themselves unable to live on $20,000 a year. And they find that I need to make more. Well, in those situations, you can't just go back and Uber helps, right? But it's hard to make a living driving for Uber.

It's hard to make a living and support a family driving for Amazon. It's hard to make a living as a server, right? You need some good skills. You need something significant that you can fall back on. Now, in all of those careers, there are specialties. And I don't think that that backup plan has to involve academic accreditation, for example.

Perhaps you have developed a skill of bartending. Well, you're going to make a lot more as a skillful high-end bartender than you are as an entry-level server. So something like putting in place bartending skills and being able to toss a bottle with the best of them may very well be a reasonable backup plan.

But I think the old standby backup plans of a degree, a certification, a job specialty that's in high demand is a really good idea. I think of somebody, let's say you've got a nursing degree, right? A nursing degree is in very high demand. The nurse who maintains the qualifications, who maintains all of the relevant licenses, et cetera, a nurse can be assured of employment in just about any city in the world.

And then, of course, that employment can be high or low, but at least it can be employment. You can support a family on a nursing income. I think of somebody like an accountant, right? If you're an accountant and you have a current CPA license, you have the ability to go and get a job.

You may not love the job. I'm not saying you love it, but at least you have it. And so these kinds of backup plans are important. It's important to have a useful, financially valuable skill that could assure you of employment fairly quickly. You know, recently I brought all my financial planning certifications back up to date.

And as I was thinking about why I did it, the reason I just went out of compliance on my CE, I didn't stay current on my continuing education. I was traveling. I didn't really care. I worked really hard to get a certified financial planner designation and a chartered life underwriter and I have a master's degree in financial planning.

I worked really hard at some point for those. But over the last few years, they've just become relatively unimportant to me. Now, you know, I needed them previously because I needed to learn the stuff, but now I know the stuff and I know that whether or not I have a CFP after my name doesn't really matter to me.

I know the stuff. And so I had let them go, but I recently just thought, "That's stupid. Let me just go ahead and get them back and do the CE." And one of my reasons is I want that as a backup plan with a good academic pedigree, with the experience that I have as a financial planner.

I could move back to any city in the United States and I could have in a week or two, I could have a six-figure financial planning job at almost any firm. And what would open the door and separate me from almost any other applicant is the long string of letters and designations after my name.

That would get me an interview at any financial planning firm in any town in the United States. And I can't afford not to have that kind of backup plan. I can't afford not to do that for the good of my family. I can't afford not to have those options.

And it puts me in a much stronger position as an entrepreneur to have those options, which is why you always, even if you're going to start something entrepreneurial that you're excited about, you want to make sure you don't... You want to make sure that if you get wiped out, you can still eat.

There's a time and a place to take a risk, but sometimes you wipe out. And the fact that you have a teaching, a current teaching designation or certification, you can go and get hired and take a year and just teach and then go ahead and work at nights on your dream again while you're getting your feet back under you is really, really important.

There are a lot of entrepreneurs who've gone bankrupt and started afresh, but you start with a job and you need to maintain that. And so for children, I think one of our responsibilities with our children is to help them develop that. I think this is where we really fail our children a lot of times because the academics that we teach them, the stereotypical mainstream path does not help a child very much.

First, a high school degree is of minimal benefit in the job marketplace. A high school degree at one time had significant benefits in the employment marketplace, but at this point it might be a barrier to entry to not have one. But the possession of a high school degree doesn't mean that much.

You don't see that many decent jobs, median and upper second quartile jobs saying must possess a high school degree. You usually see a college degree. And so the high school degree doesn't prepare children for the workforce in any really strong way. In addition, the college degree in and of itself can be a good way of opening doors, but many college degrees don't even prepare people for a decent job.

General studies degrees, humanities degrees, the proverbial underwater basket weaving degrees, these types of degrees do not help students. I always just feel so bad for somebody who says, "I got an English degree or a gender studies degree or these general humanities degrees. I'm all into the humanities. I'm all into English." But these are the things that open up.

They don't do much for you. They're only useful in an academic world. And when you got college enrollments declining, you've got colleges cutting things back, there's a major job crunch in the academic marketplace, you don't have much of a choice except to go and get another advanced degree. The PhD glut has been real for a long time.

And so you need to help your child to prepare for something, something where they're actually going to be demand. But I do still think that four-year degree is helpful and is necessary. So putting these things together, if you want your children to be prepared for the future, if you want them to have the academic qualifications, and if you all of a sudden find out that your children are going to be at your dining table every day, what can you do to help them?

My recommendation is skip high school, study college. Skip high school, take college instead. Here's how you do it. You take your student, you map out with them, right? You need to take into account their interests, but you map out with them a course of study that's going to allow them to get college credit for as much of their areas of studies as possible.

And there are many, many ways to do this. Let's start with the basic stuff that most people know, and then I'll tell you how to turbocharge this. When I was in high school, I took a number of AP classes. I wish I had taken more. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't do this.

Nobody taught this to me when I was in high school, because I would have crushed this. But nobody taught this to me. But I took a number of AP classes. For the uninitiated, AP is an acronym for Advanced Placement. Advanced Placement classes are classes that are geared towards helping bright students who would like to have a little bit more of a challenge to study a subject, to get, in most schools, a little bit higher GPA for their good grades in that subject, and then to prepare them for an exam at the end of the year, and that exam will be accepted by most colleges if this exam is passed, accepted by most colleges for college credit.

So for example, I took a handful of classes, but I took an AP English Language and Composition course. I could have just taken a standard English course, but I took an AP English course instead. Then at the end of the year, I sat for the exam. It was a few-hour exam, and you get graded on a one to five.

I think I got a five on my English exam. I took a US History, United States History, AP United States History class. So we study history all through the year, and at the end of the year, we take a comprehensive exam on AP History. Passed that one. I took an AP Calculus class.

Took Calculus all through the year. At the end of the year, I failed that one. But the ones that I passed gave me college credit. My college gave me three hours of credit towards my degree for each of the AP classes that I passed. Now, in hindsight, there were more AP classes available, but I didn't bother to take them because nobody laid out for me how important they should be.

I remember that I chose not to take AP Chemistry. I chose not to take AP Spanish. I just didn't take them because I didn't really care all that much, and nobody taught me that they were really important. But there are lots and lots of AP classes available. Your local school, your child's school has them.

Your child might be enrolled in them. So the first thing to do is to encourage your children to understand how important and valuable these are, how extremely important it is that they take these and prepare for the exams and pass the exams because this will allow them to very quickly get through college, which will save them money, save you money, and/or allow them to specialize in some more interesting things.

My wife had so many AP exam credits that she basically had her first year of college done when she went in, finished her four-year degree in three years, didn't take any extra classes, got a major and a minor, but took her four-year degree in three years due to AP classes.

And that's relatively easy. So at the very least, that can cut the expense of college by 25%, which in a world of burgeoning student debt is particularly helpful and valuable. Now that's mainstream. But don't jump over it just because it's mainstream. It's important. I want to talk for a moment about academically competent children before we go on.

You'll notice that I use these phrases repeatedly. Academically bright, right? Academically oriented, intellectually competent, cognitive with children with a high cognitive ability. All of these are ways of basically saying your children are high IQ and they're doing a good job. Academics come easily to them. If your child does not fit that description, then I think as a parent, it's your responsibility to help them find something that does come easily to them.

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems with the one size fits all, colleges for all approach is we often try to shoehorn children who are not academically gifted. We try to shoehorn children who are not, don't have a high cognitive ability into careers where they get frustrated. When you look at college graduation rates, what you find is there are a lot of students who graduate from college.

But the people, and they go, they graduate, they come out of the other side with a degree. Yeah, they got some student loan debt in most cases, but it's not that big a deal, right? They get a job, they pay it back, not that big a deal. The people who really get hurt are the people who have pushed into academically oriented tracks, but whose brains don't work that way.

They go to school for three years, they pay crazy amounts of money. They don't have any scholarships because they didn't have good grades in high school, but yet they're told you got to go to college, you got to go to college, and then they drop out. And now they've got $40,000 of debt and no degree.

Those people should not go to college. College is for people for whom academics come easily to them. If academics don't come easily to you, if academics don't come easily to your child, go do something that comes easily to you. And you'll make a lot more money and be a lot more successful and be a lot more successful faster.

Right? I am not skilled with my hands. When I work with my hands, I feel like an idiot. I feel completely incompetent in the majority of tasks. Not true. I don't feel like it comes easily to me because I think it's important. I've tried to gain some basic skill, but it just doesn't work.

Whereas for me, academic subjects are the easiest thing in the world. My brain works that way. Very good friend of mine from childhood, he's the exact opposite. Academics don't come to him, but when I watch him work with his hands, it's like he sees things in 3D, but physical things.

He's incredibly competent. He's so gifted. And he makes a six-figure plus income as an electrician. He's really good. And he's got kind of that good mix. I've known guys that made six-figure incomes as welders. I've known guys that built huge businesses. So you don't need academics to become financially successful.

And if you'll set your child whose skill set is not in academics free from the chains of an academically oriented society, what they'll find is tremendous opportunity in other areas. So that's a separate show of how to steer those children. But if you have a child who's academically oriented, taking classes, learning, and taking tests is not that big a deal.

Requires discipline, but it's not that big a deal. In hindsight, the reason I failed my calculus exam, for example, was I didn't do the homework. Nobody came along and made sure I did the homework. I didn't know what I was talking about. I never, I just didn't pay attention in the class.

And that's why I failed. It wasn't because I was not competent and I couldn't have learned. It was because nobody required me to learn it. The teacher let me slack off. My parents let me slack off and I failed the exam. AP classes though, in a standard school environment can give everything that your child needs to quiz out of their first year of college.

Now you say, okay, fine, but here's the secret. Did you know that you don't need to be enrolled in an AP class to take an AP exam? Let me tell you about some of the AP exams that are available. I'm going to read you the list. Let's start with arts.

There is a 2D art and design class, also a 3D art and design class. There is an art history class available. There is an AP drawing exam, sorry, these are exams, and an AP music theory exam. Depending on the exact college requirements, your child, if your child is artistically oriented, there is 3, 6, 12, 15, 18 credit hours, possibly more of college credit available for passing those AP exams.

18 credit hours is your child's first semester. And your artistically oriented child would probably really enjoy that. Next English, AP English language and composition, AP English literature and composition. Your child likes to read. There's six plus hours of credit available. The reason I say plus is that every school says what they'll accept.

Three is about the standard for these. If your child gets a three, a four, or a five on the AP exam, they'll probably get three hours of college credit. Some colleges will give more than three hours, so it's possibly more. What about history and social sciences? Well, here are the AP exams that are available.

Comparative government and politics, European history, human geography, macroeconomics, microeconomics, psychology, United States government and politics, United States history, world history, modern. There are 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27 hours of potential history and social science credits. Huge, hugely powerful. Next math and computer science, AP calculus AB, AP calculus BC, AP computer science A, and AP computer science principles and AP statistics.

For your mathematically oriented children, huge number of math credits available. Sciences, AP biology, AP chemistry, AP environmental science, AP physics one and two, algebra based, AP physics C, electricity and magnetism, and AP physics C mechanics. Tons of science credits available there. AP world languages and cultures, there's an AP Chinese language and culture, AP French language and culture, AP German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish language and culture, also Spanish literature and culture, and Latin.

So if your child is studying Latin, go ahead and pass the AP Latin exam and get the college credit. There are something like 38, I didn't count these fresh here, but almost 40 different credits that your child can take. But here's the secret. Your child might be enrolled currently in AP, there's no AP chem, yeah, AP chemistry, or AP calculus, great.

But they can take the rest of the AP exams and they don't have to be enrolled in the course. And the AP, the AP is done by the college board. The college board is actually providing right now free online courses for AP classes. So if your child is at home, they're already taking school online, go ahead and have them take these AP classes and pass the exam at the end of the year.

The courses are being taught online for free by the college board. There are also tons of courses available. I was recently looking at a math curriculum. My wife and I were talking about what we're going to do for this next year for our children's math curricula. And as we were discussing it, there's a math program that I admire and I was looking at the requirements.

So they've got all of the math, algebra, they've got, which get to the algebra test in this moment, they've got algebra, they've got calculus, and then they got AP physics, AP chemistry, everything is there with one math curriculum. And the price of the course is a hundred and something dollars.

The teacher is awesome. Everything is video based and it's a homeschool course, totally available. And so if your child, even if your child is still enrolled in the local government school or something like that, you can just sign them up for the homeschool course. Easier if you just pull them out of the local school, but it's all right there.

And that's the power. Now why don't most parents do this? Most parents don't do this because their child is enrolled in a traditional school, local private school, local government school, and they want their child to be there with their friends. They've already got eight classes there. They've got too much homework.

How can you add more on top of that? But if your child already can't go there, if they have to do school online anyway, why not unenroll them from all the dumb stuff and enroll them in AP classes? For an academically bright student, you buy them an AP manual, a review manual, say, "Read this book, take this test." I'll get to this more when I talk about CLEP in just a moment, but my basic assumption, assuming that my children are academically competent for their high school career, again, all of this open to proper judgment of a parent, adjusting to the unique nature of his children.

But for my children in high school career, what I basically plan to do is to say, "Here's a book. Read this book, learn it, take this exam." We don't do in our homeschool. We don't do any tests. We don't do any quizzes. We don't do any of that junk.

We just learn and we do the work every day. I would do the same thing in high school. Here's the book, learn this, pass it. Here's the book on United States government and politics, learn this textbook, pass it. Now I'm good at that. That's what I've done with all my master's degree.

I did the entire thing. I have a master's degree in financial planning. The entire thing was ship me a textbook or two or three. I read the textbook. I take a test. That was it. Did that, I don't know, a dozen or two times and wound up with a master's degree.

And that's the power of it. But again, that's why I try to give you the caution on you have to make sure your child is academically inclined. To me, I thrive in this environment. Your child might thrive in this environment. I would have thrived in this environment as a high school student.

Your child may not. So just for that. But there's 30-something courses. And even if your child is not enrolled in an AP class, they can still take an AP exam. Anybody can take an AP exam. Now the limitation of the AP exam is they're offered once per year, May generally.

And so you have to take them all at one time. So that can be a very tiring week if you're taking five AP exams or 10 AP exams, but you can take them. And there's no limit on the number of them that you can take. You just simply have to arrange it and do them all during May of that year.

Now at the moment, it's my understanding though, that they're administering these exams at home, which is a totally separate opportunity. Where now you don't even necessarily have to go into the school, but we'll see what happens in May of 2021. Now what comes next? Well next we come to CLEP exams.

CLEP exams are college level examination programs, which are given basically the same rating or weight as AP exams. If you pass the CLEP exam at the appropriate level required by the school, generally 50 points, sometimes a little bit higher, depending on the school, your school will give you a certain amount of credit.

Let me go through some of the options that are available here. CLEP exams, composition, and actually before I do it, let me, let me notate this for you. The neat thing about CLEP exams is CLEP exams are available to anybody. Can be a child, can be an adult. So if you as an adult wish to finish a four-year college degree, a bachelor's degree, this is your ticket to getting college credit quickly.

If you can do this, if you can sit, read a book, take an online class, right? You can use a teacher. You can give your children teachers if they need teachers, give them an online class. If there are things that they need the teacher's input, great. If it can't be learned well from the book, give them the teacher and have them do that.

But the CLEP exams can be taken by anybody and CLEP exams can be taken around the clock. They don't have to be taken at any particular time of the year. So let's go over the current CLEP exams. First, composition and literature. American literature. Analyzing and interpreting literature. College composition.

College composition modular. English literature and humanities. There are six courses where if your student passes those exams, which I don't know, I've always found that stuff pretty easy. Some people don't. But if your student passes those exams, there are potentially 18 credit hours of work. Now here is what's interesting.

If you're going to take an exam on American literature, let's say you're going to take a ninth grade English class, right? Most of us took in ninth grade some kind of English class. But all you got for that at the end of the year was ninth grade English credit.

Why not just simply adjust your ninth grade English class to adjust, to fit the needs for this college composition exam? I know it says college, but come on, give me a break. Bright ninth grader with practice, very well do this. English literature. Why not just simply adjust your 10th grade class to the syllabus and the things that are going to be tested in this English literature exam?

In a homeschool, you have all this as a possibility. So you adjust your curriculum to these CLEP exams and you map the courses to the exams and your child's final test at the end of the study period is pass this exam. Now if you had given Joshua, the 10th grader, this as an option, and you told Joshua, "Here, your job is just study this and then test the exam.

And whenever you're ready, let me know." And some of those I could do in two weeks, some of those I could do in two months. One of them might take me two years, who knows? Now we've got the ultimate in broad-based education, getting college credit, and it's just at the pace of the student.

Study, take the exam. Let's continue. World languages, French language, German language, Spanish language, and Spanish with writing. Four different exams there. History and social sciences, American government, history of the United States one and history of the United States two. I mean, pause. If you're going to take a history class, why not just map the content of the history class to the CLEP exam and make sure that component, one of your history texts as you're hammering home the real point of history that really needs to be learned using your living books, using your primary sources, using your, you know, whatever professor you're going to use, just map that and then have the capstone requirement of that course for your ninth grader, your tenth grader be, read this CLEP exam review book of the history of the United States, read this book, take these practice tests and go past this exam.

I'm not, I appreciate that this can be challenging for many students, but for a bright student or for a disciplined student, this is very doable. There are lots of students that are doing it. And there's no real difference in academic ability between a disciplined and mature tenth grader or a disciplined and mature 15 year old and a disciplined and mature 20 year old.

There's nothing magically that happens at the age of 18 where somebody's academic levels come up. And so if you can instill discipline and character in your children such that they can do this and put an orderly environment in place where they're expected to study and expected to do it, you can basically skip college with this path.

Continuing on, human growth and development. Your child needs to understand about the human body and growth and development, map their content to the CLEP exam. Introduction to educational psychology, introduction to psychology, introductory sociology. Don't you think that most of us should study a little bit about psychology and understand at least the basics?

Wouldn't that be important? Principles of macroeconomics, principles of microeconomics, social sciences and history, western civilization one, ancient near east to 1648, western civilization two, 1648 to the present. Most of that, a good history curriculum could knock out your western civ one and two and history of the United States one and two with CLEP exams at the end of the course of study.

Science and mathematics. Here's what's interesting. First biology. If your child's going to take a high school biology class, just map it to the, map the requirements to the CLEP exam and have them read the CLEP review book for their biology book and at the end of it take the exam.

I'm going to change the order here. There's college mathematics is a CLEP exam. Now college mathematics is interesting but it's a lot of arithmetics, not algebra, a lot of arithmetic. Your child who's taking math, who's good at math can read the prep book, pass the exam. Next college algebra.

Why not finish your algebra class and have the capstone requirement of your high school algebra class take the college algebra CLEP exam? There's not that big of a difference between, I mean there's a good, high school algebra class is the same as a good college algebra class. We're not talking about differential equations here, it's algebra.

Next chemistry, calculus, natural sciences and pre-calculus. So right there if you've got college mathematics, college algebra, pre-calculus and calculus, if you map your high school students study to those four exams, they take the class, take the math curriculum, build the skills, read the review book, practice the exercises, take the pre-test and then take the exam, you now have with those four classes you now have 12 credits, 12 college credits.

And then business, financial accounting, information systems, introductory business law, principles of management, principles of marketing. Again total potential of 15 credit hours if they pass all those CLEP exams. That's a lot of potential credit hours. We're now going to pivot to the third program, less known, not quite as widely available but still perfectly applicable.

The DSST exams, Department of Military exams, the Dante exams. I'm going to read fast but listen to these titles of exams. The nice thing about the DSST exams also often accepted for college credit by many colleges, also often accepted for college credit but these are a little bit more granular in nature.

They focus on more subject matter. And so your child can often, they can prepare for these, right? Study.com has a lot of great resources for DSST classes. They can prepare for these exams and they can take them and they're smaller chunks than the AP US History exam. So let's cover them.

Forgive the thunderstorm outside my window. Sorry about that. Continuing on, the business courses for DSST, business ethics and society, business mathematics. Now pause for a moment here. You want your child to understand business mathematics, right? That's basic knowledge. That's mathematics 101. That's every business owner needs to understand business mathematics.

This is not difficult stuff for those who are academically inclined. It's not hard. So have your child take the DSST exam and pass the DSST exam and now we've got some real benefits for their math studies. Instead of just saying, yes, you took ninth grade math, 10th grade math, 11th grade math, 12th grade math, have them take business mathematics.

It's going to be much more practical than ninth grade math. Business ethics and society, business mathematics, human resource management, introduction to business, management information systems, organizational behavior, money and banking. Personal finance class, right? We say we want to teach our children personal finance, have them take the DSST exam for money and banking.

Personal finance, take the personal finance exam. Principles of finance, principles of supervision. Now the humanities, ethics in America, introduction to world religions, principles of public speaking, principles of advanced English, composition, math, fundamentals of college algebra, principles of statistics, math for liberal arts, physical science, astronomy, environmental science, health and development, principles of physical science one and introduction to geology.

Social sciences, how about this? A history of the Vietnam War. I think that'd be super interesting, but take the class, get the college credit for it. Take the exam. Art of the Western world, criminal justice, foundations of education, fundamentals of counseling, general anthropology, introduction to geography, introduction to law enforcement, lifespan developmental psychology, history of the Soviet Union, substance abuse, the Civil War and reconstruction, and then technology, fundamentals of cybersecurity and technical writing ethics and technology.

So now to your high school student, right? Why not go ahead and have them take the substance abuse class as part of their general understanding of the dangers of substance abuse and get some college credit for it. There are other options for education. I'm, for example, ignoring GRE subject matter exams.

I'm ignoring dual enrollment, right? Your child could always just enroll in a local community college. There are many options. I'm just talking about taking exams. These are three broad sets of exams that you can simply take. Now conceivably, there's the limit as to the number of college credits that your child could get here is pretty high.

If there is something like 35 exams available for each of these, in theory, if the child took all of them, that'd be 105 exams, which in theory would be 315 credit hours. Now we'll talk about the limitations of this, but so that you understand the American college system, in the American college system, a four-year bachelor's degree basically requires a student to complete 120 credit hours of instruction.

A credit hour is considered to be one hour per week of class during the course of a, what is it, a 16-week semester? I don't remember, 12-week, 14-week, something like that, a semester. And so in the course of that semester, if you have a three credit hour class, you have class for three hours a week.

Sometimes that's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, sometimes it's Tuesday and Thursday, sometimes three hours on Saturday, depending on how the college is set up. And the average full-time credit load is considered to be 12 hours up to 18 hours. Of course, you can take more. I don't think I ever took more than 18, but I did take 18 some hours, as little as 12 one semester.

And so that's 12 hours in a week up to 18 hours in a week. Trust me, doing this on your own is far more efficient from a time perspective. And it's just a tremendous opportunity. From a financial perspective, what do these things cost? Well, every CLEP exam costs you, I think it's like about 90 bucks.

AP exams cost you something in the range of 100 bucks. Let's just figure 100 bucks each. 100 bucks for three credit hours of class is a tremendous steal of a deal. You'll probably also need to pick up a couple of books, some review books. Of course, you'll need textbooks.

Those vary in cost. You might need to enroll your child in a course, but this is nothing like the tuition costs that most colleges are giving. So there are plenty of options available here for college credit. Now, back to the opportunity of coronavirus. Why don't people do this more?

Well, they say, "I need the benefit of being on campus." Well, you're not on campus right now anyway. If you're a college student listening to me, you're not on campus right now anyway. So why don't you just go ahead and take some of these exams yourself if you don't have a full slot of transfer credits by exam for your university and speed your way up?

If your high school student is not in class anyway, just have them do this. If you're sitting at home taking classes online, what's the difference if you take classes online and then take the exam or not? Just do it. You don't need to be enrolled. Take the exam. This is a fast way to get a lot of college credits.

Now what's the limiting factor here? What you need to understand is that of those 120 credit hours, most colleges limit the number of transfer credits that they will accept and they limit the number of credits by examination that they will accept. So if you go to the local state university, that state university says, "We think that the only – if we're going to give you a degree, then that degree needs to indicate that we've had control of the quality of your education because we have to protect the quality of our product," which means that we're going to require you to take 60 or 90 hours of instruction here on our campus.

Totally fine to do that. That's within their rights. Some prestigious universities – most universities will accept something. You go to the most prestigious university and you took all your AP exams, they'll usually give you some credit. But most won't give you more than 30 hours of credit. Certainly most won't give you more than 60 hours of credit.

Here's where the opportunity is. There are a handful of universities that will give you more credit. There are a handful of them. They're discussed online. There's a few of them. You can – I'm just trying to decide whether to name names or not. I'll name one. One of the most popular ones is Thomas Edison State University.

Thomas Edison State University, speaking broadly, does not limit the number of transfer credits they'll accept. So it's possible to go into a college such as Thomas Edison State University and possibly come in with 80 or 90 or 100 credits. I think they might limit it at 90. But you'll come in with a lot of credit hours.

Now they will require some of the courses online. You won't be able to get a degree in a certain subject without taking more courses than is required. In a moment I'll talk to you about accounting. But for example, you're not going to get an accounting degree unless you take some upper level accounting.

You can quiz out of possibly some of your lower information if you take the DSST exam on business or on financial accounting – sorry, the CLEP exam on financial accounting. That could help you to quiz out. That's great of the introductory one. But you're still going to have to take your advanced managerial, et cetera, accounting.

So if you choose a school that will give you credit for those exams, you now have an interesting opportunity. I want to talk about Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison, one of the more popular, a handful of others that you can look into. But Thomas Edison is very popular because they allow you to take these courses.

But what they also do is they do online classes for the rest of their classes. They have extremely reasonable tuition. So if you're going to take classes anyway and you're going to take all your classes online anyway, now all of a sudden the disadvantage of taking all virtual classes at Thomas Edison State University versus your local prestigious state university starts to disappear.

So you transfer into Thomas Edison with 90 credit hours of examination by – of credit by examination. And then you go ahead and do another 30 credit hours with them towards a degree. You got to map your credits, of course, to a degree because they're an accredited university. They're going to make sure – they got to make sure that they – you satisfy their degree program so you got to map all your stuff out properly.

But now you have one year. But here's the thing. These are online classes. And so if you've got time, you can do these fast. You can do these very, very fast. Now, there are a bunch of other classes out there. I've got tons of archives of this stuff. I should put it into a course at some point.

But that's the basic concept. Quiz out of a bunch of stuff by just simply studying it, taking the exam. Study, take the exam. And then finish off at a university that will give you a huge amount of credit for a degree by examination and then go ahead and take your final courses there.

And you can do this for a few thousands of dollars. Now let me give you an example. This doesn't, by the way, only apply to undergraduate studies. You can also do this for graduate studies. And I've talked over the years about my interest in accounting. I'm interested in accounting personally for obvious reasons, right?

I'm a financial advisor. But I've often thought that accounting is one of those really nice careers. Some accountants really love their work. Some accountants don't. But accounting is one of those really useful practical skills to develop. Let me explain why. And this is, if I have a student who's mathematically oriented, this is the kind of advice that I would give my high school student.

This would be bad for someone who just hates numbers. But for someone who's competent with numbers, this would be a perfectly good thing. Accounting is a career that is in demand. The only time that the demand for accounting is going to go away is if you go into a hyperinflationary world.

In Venezuela right now, there are no accountants. All the accountants that previously were accountants, their business disappeared, and they are all farmers now or gardeners. Because it's impossible to do accounting in a hyperinflated currency. Just there's no way to do it. And what's interesting is even the whole concept of bookkeeping and accounting disappears when you're dealing with, because you're dealing with physical stuff, physical trade.

If you're dealing with money at all, you're dealing with a backpack full of taped together bundles of useless bank notes. And so the whole concept of accounting just goes out the window. Absent that though, accounting is one of those professions that's in demand. You need accounting to make good business decisions.

You need tax accountants who are going to prepare tax returns. Taxes are not going to become less complex. And so it's one of those things that's in demand. I think that accounting is a really good industry. It's a seasonal industry. It comes with a lot of work if you work for a big accounting firm, but it's a seasonal industry.

It's an area of expertise. Not a lot of people are suited for it. Some people are. I've often looked at accounting as a really ideal kind of seasonal employment. If somebody is a seasonal tax preparer and they want to live that kind of seasonal employment lifestyle where they work six months, they're off for six months, et cetera, you can do that as an accountant.

You can earn a reasonable wage in your months of work and you can take the other months off, go hang out in your RV in Mexico, that kind of thing. But accounting has significant licensing requirements. And so you have to have education requirements. You have to have licensing requirements.

And as with any licensing scheme, that is a cartel that restricts the flow of people into it. So if you want to get into it, you've got to pass all of those licensing requirements. That means that the cartel can impose artificially high wages because there is a barrier of entry.

So once you're part of that cartel, once you're part of there, you have a little bit of protection for your industry. But accounting is also one of those things that you don't need to be a certain age. There are young accountants, there are old accountants. And so let's say that you give me Joshua's hypothetical 14-year-old.

And my hypothetical 14-year-old is interested in a lot of different things, probably going to do some kind of entrepreneurship or some kind of passion project or some kind of business that they're really into. But they understand that, "Hey, Joshua, just going to prepare me for a career. And I'm going to have a backup plan." So we work them through their high school curriculum, right?

You want your children to have a well-rounded education. But what you do is you map their classes to these CLEP exams. And the deal that I would make with my student is this. Listen, if you want to get this stuff done fast, I've always been motivated by get this stuff done fast.

If you want to get this stuff done fast, pass this exam. So let's say that you're not that into science, but I, as your father, believe that you need to know something about basic science. Great. Here is a biology textbook, and we'll sign you up for the biology CLEP exam.

You read this textbook, you pass the exam. You can do it as fast or as slow as you want, but you're required to pass this exam. Some students give them the textbook, two weeks later, the textbook is read. They've memorized what they needed to memorize for the exam, pass the exam.

They now proceed to forget everything about biology that they don't need for the rest of their life. Supplement that with, here's a psychology, right? You want to study psychology, pass this psychology CLEP exam, pass this AP chemistry exam. And now we've got everything mapped to them. Once they have a significant number of credits with broad credits, hopefully mapped to a degree so that we're not just taking every CLEP exam and every AP exam just because we can, we're going to map this to a degree.

Then we go ahead and enroll them at something like Thomas Edison State University. So in this case, I would actually enroll them in the business degree that they offer there. Now I'm focusing on an example for accounting, but Thomas Edison University offers a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a specialization in accounting and CPA and certified public accountant specialization.

And so let me just read you, for example, from their website. The Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and Accounting Certified Public Accountant Specialization is designed specifically for accounting students interested in pursuing CPA certification. The program ensures college level competence of financial, managerial, and cost accounting, analyzing performance and auditing, as well as the principles of finance, business, and the arts and sciences.

The BS/BA in accounting/CPA will provide CPA bound students with the prerequisites required to sit for the CPA exam in the state of New Jersey. The degree is a 120 credit program. Upon graduation, students can seamlessly integrate the program into the CPA and master's track, which I'll come to in just a moment.

Now listen to the overall plan of earning this degree. Professional education requirements, intellectual practical skills, written communication, oral communication, quantitative... Let me pause. Written communication would map very nicely to something like the CLEP exam for American literature or for college composition or for English literature. The oral communication would map very nicely to the...

What was it? The DSST exam in public speaking. Principles of public speaking. Quantitative literacy, that would map well to some kind of math course. Information literacy. Then, civic and global learning, diversity, ethics, civic engagement, knowledge of human cultures. Nine credits from that. Understanding the physical and natural world, four to seven credits.

Mathematics, three credits. General education electives. So you could pretty much knock out those first 60 credits easily for Thomas Edison with those CLEP exams. Now, professional business requirements. Financial accounting, three hours of financial accounting. That would map very nicely to the CLEP exam on principles of financial accounting. Managerial accounting, that would not map.

So you'd have to take the managerial class. Business law would map very nicely to the CLEP exam for introductory business law. Principles of management, that might map very nicely. And I don't know this, I'm just going based upon an educated perspective, but I haven't called them and talked to them.

You have to do this with every college. But that might map very nicely of a business law to, sorry, principles of management to the, what was it? It was the CLEP exam. Yeah, principles of management CLEP exam. Computer concepts and applications. Introduction to marketing, that would map very well to the CLEP exam.

Principles of marketing. Principles of finance. That might map well to one of these other ones. Business and society or international management. Macroeconomics, microeconomics. Conveniently enough, there's an AP macroeconomics and an AP microeconomics class or exam. Then business and managerial communications and business administration capstone. That of course, any university requires their capstone to be there in their local area.

Then you've got 24 credit hours required of accounting. So those are the classes that you go ahead and take from the university. It's all distance study, intermediate accounting one and two, advanced accounting one and two, auditing, federal income taxation, and then advanced level accounting and collectives and cost accounting and advanced audit.

At the end of that, those online courses would take, depending on the student, they're not easy, but they would take a certain amount of time. The end of that, now you have a bachelor's degree in accounting. Now in addition to that, Thomas Edison State University has options where they will give you credit.

They have other examinations that they'll provide for you of the, what do they call the TECEP exams, where they'll give you, it's the, they call them the Thomas Edison Credit by Examination Program. So they'll take, they have hundreds of different subjects that they'll allow you to take an exam on and demonstrate your knowledge, which can help you to just skip to have to take the class and they'll give you credit for it if you credit by exam.

But in addition to that, they'll give you credit for studying for and taking the CPA exams. So now let's move on to the CPA and master's track. The CPA and master's track provides accountants who possess a bachelor degree, but who are not yet certified with an opportunity to earn the extra credits needed to become a CPA and earn a master's degree at the same time.

The university can award candidates up to six credits for passing the uniform CPA exam and enroll them in the Master of Science and Management Program, where they can earn the remaining 30 credits needed for certification, as well as the master's degree. The MSM program focuses on the organizational leadership and integrates management theory and practice as they apply to the accounting industry.

The CPA and master's track provides an affordable, flexible method to earn the 30 additional credit hours needed to become a CPA and enables candidates to earn a master's degree at the same time. So a student who's interested in accounting, who's competent with math, who's able to pass the CPA exam, makes the CPA exam their project for one year, one and a half years, whatever it takes.

They pass all four sections of the CPA. They go ahead and do these master's degree programs. Now they've fulfilled all the requirements of the CPA except the experience requirement. We'll get to that in just a moment. And now they have a master's degree. And this is not six years of work, right?

This is not, sorry, this is not 10 years of work. The average track here is four years of high school, ninth through 12th grade, then go get four years of college degree to get a general business degree, take four whole years from that, and then go and take another two years to get a master's degree.

Now, of course, somebody who's studying and gets a degree in accounting will probably start sitting for the CPA the year after they're done with the four years, but this can be done much more quickly. So you give me that 15 year old, that 14 year old, this could be done by 18, 19, 20, somewhere like that, depending on how diligent and motivated the student is to get this done.

It's well within the competency of a motivated student who has good character, who's willing to study on a daily basis to finish this up in a few years. Could it be done by 18? Could be. Could it be done by 19? Absolutely. Could it be done by 20? Certainly.

For a motivated, competent student, absolutely. And so now you have a student who has a master's degree in accounting, a CPA license, and the only thing that's missing for the CPA, of course, is you have to fulfill this experience requirement. What I would do is I would make sure that I have my student working along the way.

I would find a local accountant and I would have them volunteer and help volunteer and or help the accountant and do work as a bookkeeper in the accountant's office every afternoon. I would encourage them to devote the first half of their day to academics and then work from say one o'clock to five o'clock, four hours every afternoon for a local accountant.

And over time they build up the accounting experience, they start working with clients, they do bookkeeping, they learn the relevant software. I would have them do a certification course in QuickBooks, et cetera, learn and get some certifications for the use of the applicable accounting software. And they could go ahead and build a little side hustle of doing tax returns for people on their own.

They can do that locally, they can do that internationally, they can do the work right over the computer just like so many accountants are doing right now. So this is the kind of thing that provides somebody with a clear outcome and they can start their accounting career at with a master's degree at 18 or 20 instead of later.

Now let's talk about a couple of downsides of this approach. First thing is what about the prestige of the degree? That does matter in some fields. It's extraordinarily important in some fields but in most fields it does matter. But in a situation like this, the couple of things I would point out.

First if you do an undergraduate degree you can always then go on for a prestigious master's degree. It's the master's degree that you have that the brand name matters, not the undergraduate degree. It's the doctoral degree where the brand name matters, not the undergraduate degree. You can have an undergraduate degree from the local school but if you have a Harvard MBA, what everyone notices is I've got the Harvard MBA.

Doesn't really matter what your local school is but if you got a decent GPA and you got a 180 on your LSAT and you went to Harvard Law School or to Columbia or whatever, now that's what matters for the prestige perspective. Prestige does matter but not in all fields.

Number two, this kind of approach actually gives you a really valuable form of prestige. What my experience has been that people who are screening job candidates are often looking for these kinds of stories. For example, when I was applying for jobs after college I had an interesting story to present and I would put this on my resume.

I would say I graduated, I self-funded my education at a private university and I graduated debt free. They would ask me about that and I would explain the story of how I got out of debt my senior year of college and how I worked 40 hours a week, I took 18 hours of class, I got straight A's and how it totally transformed my life.

At that point in time, the career, the particular name of the college didn't matter nearly as much as the specifics of my story. In a situation like this, if I've got a degree from Thomas Edison State University and I'm applying for a job, I'm going to tell somebody I got my degree from Thomas Edison State University at 17 years old.

Let me tell you how I did it. I wanted to save money and not come out of school with $80,000 of student loan debt and we did this, we spent a total of $7,822 on it and I would tell the story. It separates you as being a hardworking, self-starter, motivated, ambitious person and those are qualities that really are incredibly important in some careers.

In addition to that, the reason I use the CPA example is that when you're in a field where there's a form of professional accreditation or certification, the particular degree doesn't really matter. If you're a CPA, it's the CPA diploma or certificate that you hang on the wall of your office, not the university.

But the CPA requires you to have a four-year degree and to have accounting courses in order to get the CPA degree or credential and to pass the exam, but it's the CPA exam. So nobody goes into a CPA's office and says, "What college did you graduate for?" They look up and they see certified public accountant by the state of New Jersey.

Boom, now we know. And then we come into competence. Is this person competent? Can they save me money? Do they know how to teach me how to set up bookkeeping, how to teach me tax savings, etc.? How good is their marketing? How did they find me? And those are the things that matter.

So you can help a student to come out with a system like I'm describing here at 18 or 19 or 20 years old, and now instead of having to go to school for another two or three years and then start, they've already got an independent business. If that student has worked for an accountant locally during that period of time, they've built up some sideline accounting clients, that could provide the financial base that they need to then build on.

Maybe they go start some other string of businesses. Maybe they're prone to entrepreneurship. Maybe they specialize. The world is open to them, but they've always got that college degree. Check, done, at an early age, with no debt, and they've got some sort of professional qualification. Now there are other careers that this kind of approach fits well for.

I'm using a financial career, but another good career would be something like IT. What you want to look for when you're doing these kinds of things, you want to look for some kind of credentialization system based upon skills and knowledge, not based upon age. And so IT is a really good scenario.

Thomas Edison will give you college credit for IT certifications. Other schools will as well. So if you have certifications from, what are the IT ones, Cisco, or you've got Microsoft certifications, all those certifications qualify you for a job, first of all, a very decent good job, but they additionally then get you college credit, and they can work back and forth.

And so you can build something like IT. And if you have an 18-year-old who's got a college degree done, now they can always check the box, "Yep, I've got a four-year college degree," whether or not they're applying for a job in IT, they can do that. If you've got that 18-year-old also has the knowledge acquired and the professional certifications where they can get an IT job, nobody cares about their age.

Now when you put this into a spreadsheet and you look at how much money somebody can have by starting early, it's powerful. One of the things that I've done, I did spreadsheets in the past, and I would say, "What if I started an 18-year-old and they skipped college, and they just simply started in the trades, right?

They became an apprentice for a carpenter or an electrician or something like that. And instead of paying money for four years, they earn money for four years, and they come out, it takes a long time for the college graduate to beat them. Even if you assume the college graduate has a higher starting pay.

If the person going into the trades makes $30,000, but the college graduate comes out four years later and makes $45,000, it takes a while for the college graduate to earn the extra $120,000 that the tradesperson earned from 18 to 22. Now in time, if the tradesperson doesn't increase their income, the college graduate will pull ahead.

So we can generally assume and understand that a college graduate will earn more money throughout the course of their lifetime. Now one of the things that I've often troubled when doing these comparisons is, "But who are we talking about?" Because the kind of people who are likely to go to college are also the kind of people who would likely be very successful even if they didn't go to college.

So it's kind of a survivor bias, right? I went to college because I was under the basic idea that only losers did not go to college and I wasn't a loser, so of course I went to college. But I didn't really have any vision for it. And I don't think that college made any really meaningful impact on my overall career choice, all that much.

Now it's hard. You go back and you look and you say, "But this, I met this person and this class impacted me, blah, blah, blah." I don't know. It's just I can't trace any knowledge that I gained from college to my current life path. I trace people, I trace a little bit of exposure, I don't trace any knowledge to my life path.

And I think that if I'd had a coach or a mentor who was knowledgeable about how to build a career path and get those same things without college, I think I could have had a lot more success at an early age skipping college. But I still get nervous about, "What about the credentialization?

At least having a backup plan." And so I would be nervous to tell my children, "Yeah, don't go to college. Just don't even bother. I'm not there." And so I see this as a really cool way if it works out, if the student is amenable to it, et cetera.

I see this as a really cool way of satisfying those things. Where now you can coach a bright 18-year-old to, "Hey, they got the college degree, maybe even a master's degree, CPA exam, get them those experience credits during their teenage years and they can start earning at 18 years old.

And they can avoid student loan debt. And we did this whole thing at a total price tag of say under $10,000 total instead of $80,000." This is powerful for the right fit. Now, are there other things about college that are helpful other than academics? Certainly. Social dynamic, having fun, meeting people, expanding your influence.

There's lots of other considerations. However, even if one of my children needs that college experience, I would a lot rather they just skip the entry-level stuff and quiz out of those first couple of years and go right into the upper-level electives. College is not a healthy place for young people, especially in those entry years.

It's a very good place to make a whole lot of stupid decisions and wreck your life. But that starts to change as you get to upper level. And so even just for the moral rectitude of your child, if they can quiz out of the first couple of years of college, maybe do an online degree and then go into a master's degree in a specialization where they're on campus in a traditional format, there's a huge value in that kind of education for some fields.

In those situations, I think it's much better for them to go into the advanced-level courses than the entry-level stuff. I mean, there's just so many dangers of the stupidity that happens with 18-year-olds in those first few years. And so this is even just a way of helping your children avoid some of those dangers.

Not a perfect system. Not going to work for everybody. We shouldn't try to make it work for everybody. But for a motivated person, if you can, and I believe that you can motivate people. If you lay this out to them, show them the benefits that will accrue to them if they take this course of action, it can change everything.

And I'll tell you, if I had come along to the 13-year-old me and laid this out for them, for me, I would have gone with this. And I've done this. I've done this in the classroom. Just tell you, I'll close with one story. I used to teach junior achievement, and I loved to do it.

And I would go in, and I wasn't a great junior achievement teacher because I would do the curriculum for the junior achievement, but I frankly, I kind of was just a motivational speaker instead of doing the junior achievement curriculum as much as I should have. But I loved it.

And I went into junior, high school seniors, high school juniors. And I just remember how there's one young man, and it was a local government school, and we went into the classroom, and I was talking about goal setting. And the specific example, I picked on him. I like to pick on students in the class.

And I picked on him, and I said, "Give me a goal that you have." And he gave me a flippant goal. And he said, "I want to have a Shelby Cobra Mustang." And I said, "Cool." I said, "Shelby Cobra Mustangs are awesome." I said, "What year?" And I went through goal setting.

I said, "What year? An old one or a new one? What color?" And I laid it out. And I said, "Okay, how much does that cost?" He's like, "I don't know, 60 grand." So we laid it out, and we started talking it through. And then I said, "Well, how are you going to do that?" And I said, "How much money do you have?" "I don't have any money." "Do you have a job?" "Yeah, I worked at the local ice cream shop." And I said, "Well, you're making, I don't know, $8 an hour?" And I said, "Well, that ain't going to work." And he said, "That sucks.

You're not going to get a Shelby Cobra Mustang working at the ice cream shop earning $8 an hour." So I said, "What could you do? How could you make more money?" And he's a high school senior, kind of a goofy kid, not really engaged. That was why I picked on him.

He was like, "I don't know. I guess I could go to college." I go, "All right. Well, how are you going to go to college?" He said, "I don't know." I said, "Have you taken the SAT?" I can't remember if he had or hadn't. So this is directionally accurate, but I can't remember the specifics at this point.

But he said, "No, I haven't taken the SAT." I said, "All right, well, take the SAT." Or maybe he did, and he got a bad score. And so long story short, I laid out the success path for him. And I said, "Listen, you can get the Shelby Cobra Mustang, but you ain't going to get it working at the ice cream shop dipping ice cream for $8 an hour.

That's stupid." I said, "But what you can do is you can get a great score on the SAT. With a great score on the SAT, you can go ahead and get a college degree. You can work your way through college." And I showed him how the SAT score would impact his college tuition.

I showed him how he could make a lot more money. I laid out a budget for a young adult. And I said, "You can have this Shelby Cobra Mustang." I think it was like by age 23, five years, and you have this Mustang. And the exact details are not important.

You know the path I set him on, because it's what I talk about here every day. But one of the most meaningful emails of my life came in a year and a half, two years later, something like that. And he said, "Joshua, I don't know if you remember me." I did.

But he told me what happened. And then later we got together for lunch, and he told me all about it. But he said, "After you showed me that path, after you showed me that success path, how I could do that?" He said, "I decided to do it." So he started studying for the SAT.

I can't remember if he'd taken it already and gotten a bad score or hadn't taken it all. But he took the SAT. He got a great score. He said, "Before you came in, I wasn't planning to go to college." He said, "But I've gotten a full ride to a reasonable middle-range school." It wasn't an Ivy League, but it was a reasonable middle-range school.

He said, "They gave me a full ride based upon my SAT score." And he told me what he's studying. I've forgotten what he was studying at this point. But he told me what he was studying, and he was excited about it. It was something he was genuinely interested in.

And he said, "I never would have done that if you hadn't showed me how to get that Shelby Mustang." And I've often thought about him. His email is in my smile file somewhere. But I've often thought about him. Here's the perfect example of a goofy kid, just goofing off, came to his stupid junior achievement business class that I'm going to take, goofing off, about to graduate high school, just looking to have fun.

And when you show him, "Look, here's how you can get fast success," all of a sudden, they're willing to work and willing to spend Saturdays studying for an SAT. And I feel like we don't do that enough for young people. We don't show them that what they do matters.

And yet that's the basic cornerstone of behavior change is to see, "If I do this, I may get that. Whereas if I do this, I may get that. And I don't want that, but I do want that. So I'm going to do these things that are probably going to lead to that." So what I would do if I were teaching this to students is I would say, "Let me teach you how to be financially independent and rich by 30." And I would use this as the foundation.

I would get put in a 10-year career as an accountant from age 20 to age 30, plus the savings that come from the high school point. I would layer that 10-year career of an accountant onto an investment plan. I would lay out a real estate acquisition plan for them to acquire five to 10 houses from 20 to 30.

And now at 30, you're financially independent, hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, five to 10 houses paying you money, and a career that you got as a backup option. Got it." And so don't just write off my ideas here just because you say, "My 13-year-old just wants to play video games all day.

My 13-year-old says they want to be a YouTuber. They're not going to take exams." First of all, don't write off any child, right? Don't write off any student. They're all important, and we need to find out how to work with each one of them. But this success path is totally doable.

These exams are not tough for someone who's academically oriented. This is doable. It may even be easier since your child is already doing distance learning. So do some digging. Read some CLEP exams. Look around. If you want more on this topic, if you want a course with all the universities and all the stuff that's in my files, I'm happy to...

I don't know. If there's interest, I could do that. But lay this path out. Weigh the potential downsides. It's not perfect, but I think it's really good. I think it's really good from an academic perspective because most college degrees are not going to feed academics. You need to learn, you study on your own.

To get a degree, you study in a college, with the exception of some hard sciences. Generally, to learn, you study on your own. To get a degree, you go to college. Not perfect for all situations socially, but man, it's a lot safer environment to have your 18-year-old living at home in a safe environment, somewhat insulated from some of the pressures of that age group at college.

You got to make sure that your students are getting social engagement, but that can be accomplished in many ways. You got to make sure that they're being exposed to potential marriage partners. Those are all things, but they don't have to happen in college. You tell that 18-year... that student of yours who's struggling and is just ticked off because of having to go to school on Zoom, "Listen, buddy, why don't we swap this in for a few years and you go ahead and get a college degree by 18?" Yeah, if you want your GED, you can do that too, but you don't need it because you have a college degree.

All of a sudden, it might change the motivation of your student. Hope these ideas have been helpful to you. Thanks for listening. Remember, I've got some courses available at radicalpersonalfinance.com/store. Best one there would be the career and income course, Radical Personal Finance Guide to Career and Income Planning. Put simply, if you get your career right and your income right and you start early and you get something that you can work late, finances are amazing, but you got to do some thoughtful analysis.

Don't forget that if you're in a career that you feel stuck in and you want to rework, remember that this is not exclusive to children. This is not exclusive to teenagers. You can do this too. So, if you're 49 years old and you're just annoyed and you feel like you need a college degree, get cracking on the CLEP exams, go to an institution like Thomas Edison, see what they'll give you for credit by examination, see what they'll give you for life experience, see if you can trade in some of your professional certifications for some college credit, and then get to the online learning.

It's quite in vogue these days.