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Walgreens. Vaccines subject to availability. State age and health-related restrictions may apply. Today on Radical Personal Finance, we're going to celebrate the back-to-school season with a show on the five major benefits of college and some radical strategies for you to maximize your time and your investment. Listen carefully. If you're ever going to go to college, if you're in college, or if you know anyone who's going to college, I'm going to help you get your money's worth out of the price of tuition.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host. Thank you so much for tuning in. This is the show where each and every day--well, not this week. This is the show where most days or many days we work together to help clarify your path to financial independence.

And since college is a very important stop on many people's paths, let's get some bang for our buck today. My hope is that this is a show that if you know anybody in college, that you'll be able to share this show with them. And I'm going to give you just some ideas and essentially a framework for how to think about the major benefits of college.

This is also applicable to high school, and also it's applicable at every level of college. It's basically the major benefits of schooling in general. But I'm specifically in my mind today focusing on the concept of undergraduate college education. And these are the five major benefits of that process that I see.

Once you see these five, I think you'll be able to maximize your time, which is the most important thing that you give up when you go to college, but also maximize your money and maximize this period of your life. Because, you see, if you go through college and you think that the primary focus is to come out the other side with a diploma, well, that might be the primary focus.

But if that's all you think about, then you've missed some of the things that you could get. So I'm going to share with you the five benefits of college, at least that I see. I didn't read these anywhere. I made these up in my head. And if you think I miss any, you just let me know.

But I think I've got a pretty all-encompassing list here. And then I'm going to give you some ideas for how to maximize your time. So let's get right to it. Five major benefits of college are these. And we've got to start with the number one most obvious one, which was the major thing that I was looking for in college and that probably many of you who are listening, if you've been through college, were looking for.

And I've simply chosen to call it fun. The great vaunted college experience. If you were to actually observe the U.S. American college culture through the lens of movies, you might come to the conclusion that this is really the only focus and benefit of college. Or it's at least the aspect of college that we generally choose to raise up and emphasize, at least in the entertainment culture in the United States.

Our culture is replete with dozens, I don't know, maybe even hundreds of movies about the college experience, the sorority house, the frat house, all of the parties and the associated goings on. So the number one benefit of college is fun. Number two benefit of college is personal growth. You'll often hear many people refer back to this period of their life as when they grew the most as an individual.

And how they look back and recognize all the changes that occurred in their lives. So let's call that personal growth. Number three benefit of college is certification. We're going to talk about this extensively. But by certification I mean you can check the box for the certification requirements of a chosen career.

That might be at a basic level, simply checking the box that yes, I do have a four-year college degree. So when you're browsing some online job listings website, you can simply look at it and say, "Yes, indeed, I do have a four-year college degree so I can go ahead and apply for this position." Or it might be an upper level advanced certification, perhaps something like a medical school degree.

You're not going to be able to practice as a physician in the United States of America unless you can check the box that, "Yes, indeed, I do have an accredited medical school diploma." That's certification. Number four is education, and this is very distinct from certification. Education is what you actually learn.

Certification is checking the box and having the piece of paper to prove that you went and theoretically to prove that at one point in time you learned something. But the education is what you actually learned. That's benefit number four. Number five is connections. We'll talk about connections in all of their forms.

As far as my thought process goes, these are the primary benefits that I see from taking time and money out of your life to go to college. Like with anything in good financial planning, life planning, goal planning, business planning, if we begin with stating clearly, "Here's what I want," then we can build a plan to maximize what we want.

Now, I've got something to tell you, and you might not be happy with me, but you cannot maximize all five of these at the same time. It's not going to be possible. So you're going to have to pick and choose which of these benefits are important to you. They may not all be important to you, and you're going to have to pick and choose which is the most important to you.

You're going to need to rank them, and you will make very different decisions about the college choice in general before you even go, and you'll also make very different decisions about what you do while you're in college, depending on which of these is more important to you. Let's start with an example of fun.

If fun is your highest priority, and this is what you're going to focus on with your college experience, here's my recommendation to you. Don't go. I'm not saying don't go have fun. I'm saying don't go to college, because here's the simple reality. If your idea of a good time is to hang out in the college bar and play the college sports on the intramural field and meet the college boys or college girls so that you can hang out and party for four years, it's a real pain in the butt to have to go to class when you're hungover the next morning.

It really is. Why don't you just go get an apartment near the campus, on the campus, figure out some way to be close to the campus, make some connections with somebody who can tell you about the schedule of everything that you need that's going on, and go and have fun.

Move into an apartment with three or four other people who are going to college, and you just live with them. You'll have all the parties, you'll have all the fun, and you don't have to deal with the hassle of getting up for an 8 a.m. class. It's a dumb idea for you to waste hours going to classes that you're not going to remember and waste thousands of dollars paying for classes that you don't care about just so that you can go and have fun.

Just go have fun. Skip the class. Well, your rebuttal might be, "Well, yeah, Joshua, I want to have fun, but I also need to get a college degree." Ah, so there we get into the fact of fun might be your primary objective, but it's not the only objective, so you've got to pick which other objective is going to be the most important to you.

If you also choose certification, I need to be able to check the box and say that I had a good time, but I also need to come out the other end of the diploma. Go get the fastest, easiest, cheapest, biggest joke of a diploma you can get. I had to laugh.

My neighbor has a diploma on his wall, and I was visiting with him, and he's a great guy. He's in the marine industry, and we were sitting out back talking, and then I went into his house, and he was showing me around, and we were looking at--I was looking at his wall, and he has a diploma on his wall, and it has a diploma made out to him from the University of Florida, but under the section where it says what the diploma is for, it says "recreation." I think there's another word before or after, but what stood out to me was "recreation." And I started laughing at him, and I said, "Do you have a diploma for recreation?" He says, "Yeah, I do." I didn't understand, and I asked him further.

It is actually recreation, but it wasn't just recreation how I thought of. I thought it was something that he printed off of a computer as a joke to say, "Look, I've got a college degree in recreation." That's the kind of guy he is. He's a good-time-loving guy. And I thought it was a joke, but what it actually was is he has a degree in recreation as associated with something like physical education to be a PE teacher.

Now, to his credit, he was very clear on why he wanted to go. He is a tugboat captain. He drives a tugboat for a living, and he drove boats before he went to college, and he just needed an excuse to get his dad to pay for him to live for five years so he could party, and he had to get the cheapest and quickest and easiest diploma that he could, and then he came out, and he's never used the diploma for anything in his life.

He's a tugboat captain. I complimented him on his strategy. I thought it was a pretty smart way to approach things. Your primary goal is fun, and you need a little certification so that your fun can continue. So consider that, and if that's your goal, then make sure that you just pick whatever the fastest, easiest, cheapest possibility is so that you can maximize the time of fun.

Now, here's my plea to you. At least think about the fun that you want to have in the future as well, and if fun is your primary goal of going to college--I'm going to go get the college experience-- don't go into debt, please. Having fun on debt for a period of years is not fun when you've got to figure out how to pay it back.

So if fun is your goal, consider skipping school, or if you also want to do something else, go ahead and get the fastest, easiest school. Just don't go into debt. Now, what about personal growth? This question of personal growth is actually my fifth benefit. For a while, I just had four benefits, and I felt like I had to go back and add this in because if you listen to people talk about college, they do talk about this as being a benefit.

But it really annoys me when people talk about it because it's a bunch of nonsense, and the reason it's nonsense is although those college years might be a time of personal growth, it's probably not necessarily just because of actually going to college. But they're often correlated. I don't buy the causation connection for many people, but I do buy the correlation.

The reality is you should have been growing personally since about the age of 12, at least when you start to branch out and think for yourself and start to learn and question and dig out and dig into the big questions of life. If you haven't done that and you're 18 years old, you're behind and you got some time to make up.

But you also shouldn't stop at 22 when you graduate college. You should be just simply continuing a process that starts about, I don't know, 12-ish and continues on until 100-ish when you die. Throughout your life, you should always be able to look back and say, "Wow, I have grown so much this past year," or "I have grown so much these past five years." "I've grown so much this last decade." If you don't have a habit and practice of making time to reflect on, start with the past year, every birthday, think back and calculate and figure out and make a list of the lessons that you've learned.

So it bugs me when people associate always personal growth with college, but I decided I had to put this in as one of the five benefits because it is a time of growing for many people. It certainly was for me. It wasn't, though, because of class. It was because of the changes of life.

In my mind, that would be what I would encourage you to consider. If personal growth is important to you, and I think it should be, then figure out how you can maximize your opportunities for personal growth as you work your way through college. So some simple suggestions for you.

Participate in every opportunity that comes along. See, when people look back and reflect, they often talk about, "Well, I asked a big question." "I met a philosophy professor who challenged my philosophy in this direction," whatever that happened to be, or "I met this person who talked to me about this concept," and now when I look back, I realize how important it was.

Personal growth comes from having a broad exposure. So make sure to expose yourself to as many ideas and as many concepts, as many thoughts and things as you can. Participate in all the opportunities that you have. In my mind, this is where many college students miss it, and frankly, I wish I had done more of this.

As I was working my way through college, I was very concerned with certification. I was trying to get the diploma, and I was also concerned about the associated certification of GPA. So I took primarily business classes. If I were to go back and do it today, I'd work to graduate with a C, and I'd take as many classes that were completely unrelated to business, and I wouldn't worry about the grades as long as I could scrape out a C, and I'd audit a bunch of the classes that I didn't – if I couldn't scrape out a C, I'd just go anyway.

When I look back at my time in college, I don't think of any of the classes that were the business classes that were supposed to make an impact in my life. I got Cs in accounting, hated accounting. Today, I'm a financial planner. The business classes were practically irrelevant, but it was all the ancillary.

It was all the ancillary stuff. If you expose yourself to many different things, you have the opportunity in the college environment, especially the college campus environment, to touch a lot of things in a very compact period of time. If I were looking to live the traditional retired lifestyle, I personally would want to live in a college town.

I'd try to find a college town. The reason is because if you can be near a college campus, especially a big one, the diversity of academic disciplines that's represented is often incredible. So I'd take some acting classes, and I'd take some computer classes, and I'd do all these different things in as much broad exposure as possible.

If you push yourself a little bit, you might find some things connecting in ways you never imagined. There's a famous story that you've probably heard of but you should at least be aware of, and it relates to Steve Jobs. One of the major resources that he drew on at Apple Computer, as the story goes, was exposure to a calligraphy class in college.

That artistic aesthetic that he learned there translated over into some of the Apple aesthetic that we all know today. So just an example that's very well-known in modern culture about this intersection of ideas. So if you're in college, take any class that you're interested in. Show up. Research the schedule and plan your schedule around the classes that you actually want to go to, whether you enroll or not.

If you just tell the teacher, "I'd like to come to the lectures," most places, most teachers would be happy to have you there at the lectures. But here's the key. If personal growth is your reason for going to college, could you consider some other ways to actually do this that aren't connected to being on campus and sitting in class?

Because the personal growth, I really don't think comes from sitting in a boring class. Sitting in a boring class, listening to a teacher rattle on does not personal growth promote. Rather, it comes from that broad exposure and that broad experience. So if you're in class, great, but try to study abroad.

Try to travel. Try to intentionally expose yourself to ideas. If I were going to go back today, me personally, best I could figure, I spent something like $80,000 on college, and not all of that came out of my pocket. I don't have records from the time that I could accurately point to, but I'm going to guess maybe a third to a half of that came out of my pocket.

The balance was tuition aid, grants. Maybe a third came out of my pocket and two-thirds came from other options. But if I were going to go back with an $80,000 budget and I were to say, "Okay, I need four years," and if my goal was to maximize these five things, I'll tell you personally what I would do.

Number one, I'd get the fastest, cheapest, easiest online degree that was from an accredited degree program that I could, and I could do that today in today's market. At some point, maybe I'll go through some of the current providers. I could do it for about $5,000, maybe $10,000 at the max, and I'd just do it all independent study online.

That punches the ticket to certification. Then I would pour myself in to a system of travel and a system of focused education and broad exploration. I would read as widely as I could and I would travel as widely as I could to as many kinds of diverse gatherings as I could to expose myself to various ideas.

All of those things would be a lot more fun. I'll come back to that in a minute, kind of enhance that and sketch that out more at the end of the show. But with personal growth, if this is important to you, just focus on giving yourself a broad exposure and a broad experience.

Next, certification. Think carefully about your need for certification. What do you need and why? What certification do you actually need and why? Your need for certification will probably be driven by your career path, but for the vast majority of you listening – majority of you who are listening to my voice, it does not matter where you go to school.

It doesn't even matter what you study. The only thing that matters is that you have a degree from an accredited university. That is it. Now, there's a small percentage of you listening for whom that advice is not correct. And if you rebel and reject vehemently against what I just said, it's probably you.

But let me give you an example. You can't convince me for an instant that a business degree or a communications degree from the University of Florida is any different in any measure at all from Florida State University or from Florida Atlantic University or from the University of Arkansas or the University of Mississippi or the University of New York.

They're all the same. Every state school is the same. Every private school is the same. Now, are there slight differences? Yes. But as far as the value of the certification, the value of the diploma in the marketplace, for the vast majority of degrees, it doesn't matter. So if you recognize that and if your area of interest, your career of choice is one of those for which it doesn't matter, just go get the cheapest, quickest certification that you can get and save the time and the money and the hassle of the hard majors, the hard classes, the hard schools.

But if your career is one of those that matters, don't fool yourself into thinking that you can go to the state university next door and get your results. For example, if you want to go be a big shot business consultant and work for McKinsey and Company, local podunk state, you just ain't going to cut it.

You better be at the institutionalized business school that's got the very smoothly paved path from business school right into McKinsey and Company. If you want to go to Wall Street, you better get into the Wall Street Business Club. And that means you need the pedigree. So if you want that career and if you need the pedigree, don't waste your time going to podunk U.

Go get the pedigree. Get the certification that matters. But get the minimum certification required based upon your potential career path. And if you don't know what your career path is or you don't know what it's likely to be, then don't waste your time thinking that a mid-tier certification matters.

It doesn't. Either go all the way to the top and slide yourself in with the blue ribbon pedigree or don't waste your time and get the fastest, cheapest, easiest certification that you can. My work as a financial planner, I've never had anybody care where I went to school or even that I went to school.

And the only reason it matters for me to have a college diploma is simply so that I can maintain the CFP designation. They require a four-year university. It doesn't matter where it's from. It doesn't matter if I bought it for 5,000 bucks from an online thing that I studied on the weekends.

It has to be an accredited university, so don't buy it from a diploma mill that's not accredited. There's no reason for that when you can get it quick and easy without that. But that's it. And in the field of financial planning, it doesn't matter. The degree in business is every bit as useless in the field of financial planning as a degree in Spanish would be or a degree in English.

It's a total waste of time. So that's different than if I want to be a big-shot professor. And there might be some wrinkles like this in your career. Let me just continue on with the question of financial planning as a career. If I wanted to be a professor in the field of financial planning, then I might consider having gotten an undergraduate degree in financial planning.

Now, those are starting to gain in popularity. But I didn't know I wanted to do it when I was in college. But now I have a master's degree from the American College, which is a school of financial planning. Well, in that type of environment, that's all the school – the college does.

And so there are some other big players in the financial planning space. But my degree from the American College is every bit as the same as anything else. And I can go and get a PhD from the American College. And it didn't matter whether I went to Harvard or not to get into the American College.

I assume it didn't. I mean they checked my transcript, so I don't know what their weeding out process is. But the point is the field of financial planning, I just need to slide in. So whether I just go to the University of Texas or was it Texas Tech or wherever that they have the school of financial planning, I just got to find one of the universities that has that.

So in summary, my point is consider very carefully what certification you actually need. Consider that very carefully. Two important points, though, on certifications. Your final certification is the one that matters, not the first one. Example, let's say that I went to a local state university. But then I went on and got an MBA from the Harvard School of Business.

As soon as I go on and get the MBA from the Harvard School of Business, nobody ever references the fact that my degree is from the state university. Similarly, if I go to the local community college and handle most of my class requirements there and then move on to some other prestigious university, and that's whose name is on my diploma, nobody cares that I went to community college.

So this can be a good way for you to – if you need a good pedigree and need a good certification, this can be a good way for you to consider maximizing your strategies, minimizing the time, minimizing the money, but getting the pedigree that you need. Recognize you got to be able to get in.

So consider how you're building your entrance pedigree into that university. But more and more for many colleges, that just doesn't really matter with regard to the name on the transferring certificate. The other thing to consider is recognize that you have an opportunity to get the real certification that matters while you're in school.

And this might be something for you to consider because you're already in study mode. Now, I'm only familiar with a couple of fields that I could actually give this. I could give you the field from the financial space, which is where I've got the most practical experience. In the financial space, there's no reason not for you while you're in school to get the credentials that matter.

If you're – the accountants do this well. They get their CPA and they sit for their CPA exams while they're in school or right when they're finishing. Or it could be the certified financial planner exams or the CFA exams. And those are the credentials that matter. So if I wanted to work in finance and I were funding my way through, it's unlikely that I would personally – I would probably get the cheapest, quickest degree that I could to get the certification of the four-year degree.

And I would get the certification that matters, which would be, again, one of those types of credentials. If you come out of college with your CFA, Chartered Financial Analyst designation, in the financial space, it doesn't matter where your degree is from or whether your degree is in communications or whether it's in financial planning because the CFA charter proves your mastery of the subject matter.

You can fake your way through college. You can't fake your way through the CFA exam. Other types of examples might be things like computer certifications, whether it's Microsoft certifications or certain coding things that you can prove. If you can prove that, yes, I wrote this program and somebody who's a master programmer can review it and be able to see the elegance of your code, that's all you need.

That's the certification that matters. So get your real certification while you're in school. Create your art that you can actually look and say, "Here is my art." You're already in study mode. Make the most of it. The college diploma is probably not the certification that matters the most. There are exceptions, but it might be useful to do the college diploma while getting the other certifications.

Let's move on to education. This is the fourth value. My plea to you is maximize your education while you're in college. You have time. Use it. My recommendation, skip most of the classes that are there unless they're extremely focused on what you actually want and need to learn. Many classes are simply required of you so that the school can pass their accreditation requirements for the accrediting body.

And for the majority of you who are listening, the stuff that's talked about in class is going to be absolutely irrelevant to your life. So just go to class enough to pass the exam. Show up on exam day and take it. Whenever possible, choose to go to the classes where you're actually going to learn something.

Here's the way I picture that in my head. Remember that education comes from the information that you gather from people who are more advanced and learned than you. And that the education happens when they share that knowledge with you. And it happens as you integrate it with your own experience or perhaps your own experiments.

And you can absorb the information needed through personal synchronous communication, i.e. talking or sitting in class listening to a professor. And also through personal asynchronous communication, reading, studying the films of somebody, something like that. And preferably both. If you can put these two things together and you can combine it with a certification program, now you've got a real benefit of college.

Now for the vast majority of you listening, it doesn't matter because your college degree is useless from the perspective of education. But while you're there, try to get an education. So try to make some connections with the people who can share knowledge and information that you care about with you.

Focus on meeting and working with and befriending the professors who are advanced in an area that matters to you. Find the people in your community who are advanced in the area that matters for you and get the education regardless of whether or not you need it to get the diploma.

The amazing thing about a university campus is often the people who are represented on it. Many of the leading minds on many subjects in the world make their home and their daily work in a campus environment. So focus on seeking out the people who are going to be able to influence you and help you to pursue the path that you care about.

Don't just go to class, read the book, and take notes and disappear. Do those things if it's something that matters to you and that you care to be educated about, but go beyond that. For example, if your professors have written books, read their books and then talk to them about their books.

In my experience in the college environment, I found that most professors were desperate to find a student that actually cares about the subject matter. Many college professors are passionate about their area of expertise, and yet they're forced to teach classes to pay their bills. And so when they have a bright spot, a young man or a young woman who really engages with the material, they'll bend over backwards to help you.

I've had so many professors in my life that poured into me simply because I demonstrated an interest. Now, I had a basic level of interest in business at the time. Think about if you can get into an area that you have a real deep level of interest in. Think about how much better your results can be.

So focus on using the resources that are there while you're in a college environment and maximize your education. The key thing that you have at the beginning of life is time. Early in life, we generally have not much money, but we have a lot of time. Later in life, we usually have more money, but not much time.

The cool thing about education is it's cheap to buy in terms of money, but expensive in terms of time. And so probably one of the most valuable aspects of college is that you have the opportunity where society expects you to take time to study and to learn. And under your life circumstances, you have a unique opportunity where there are very few pressures on you.

It's very different if you're supporting a family and a household to try to make the time to really further your education. It's possible. I don't make an excuse. I'm furthering mine every day. But it's a lot more challenging than when you're 18. So focus on gaining the education. Read every book that's out there in your areas of interest.

What else do you have to do with your time? Next, make sure when gaining the education that you effectively market it. Because if you can effectively market the education, it will contribute to your certification and perhaps even make the certification unnecessary. Think about my simple example that I've many times talked about on the show of Josh Kaufman's project with the personal MBA.

Let's assume that you take the personal MBA curriculum and the hundred or ninety-nine books that he recommends to develop your own personal MBA. You make a project where you read two books per week and you write a detailed analysis, summary, key action items in your own language without reference to external sources.

You focus on taking that information, that knowledge, and applying it to something. Then you go and you're interviewing for a job. Now, compare these two opportunities. In the one sense, you have a diploma in business from a business school and your interviewer is familiar with that business school. Your interviewer can simply say, "Hey, yeah, this is nice.

You got a diploma." But you don't have any more marketing behind it. Your resume says, "Diploma in business from local business school." Compare that, on the other hand, with the website, joshuasheats.com, with a listing of my in-depth research analysis, my book reviews, on the ninety-nine business books of the personal MBA.

I say, "Yeah, I have this personal MBA. What's that?" "Well, here, pull up your computer, go to joshuasheats.com and take a look." And there is the information. Now, I've gained the education and I'm marketing it. See, the key of the certification that we just talked about is that you can market that.

And so the interviewer is trusting the college to have weeded you out. They're weeding out the scum. That's what the process is designed to do. This is why, incidentally, the entire college press, as I was preparing the show notes, I saw something pop up on my Facebook feed about some new proposal that Hillary Clinton is making about college.

I don't know anything more than the 350 billion or million dollar proposal, whatever it was. But the press, what happens is college is becoming less and less relevant because it no longer serves the purposes of the employers, which was to weed people out. When you make college inclusive, then you eliminate the primary benefit of it.

College has never been about education and college has always been about certification with a few exceptions and some hard sciences and a few things. But on the mass scale, it's basically saying, "Yes, these are the people who can do the things that are – they can jump through the hoops.

They can get the SAT scores. They can get the ACT scores. They can finish their high school diploma. They can go ahead and do the work that's required to get the diploma." So the employer in the interview was saying, "It's more likely that this is the kind of person who can do what they're told to do and finish a course of action.

So therefore, they're going to make a good employee." That's the benefit of it. So what's happening is in the marketplace, the value of the college degree is being cheapened because that weeding out process is not as effective as it once was. It's still important, not as effective as it once was.

Also, in the changing job market, the changing environment where a different type of thinking style is needed, then the value of somebody who can just simply go through the motions and follow everything, follow all of the instructions and finish their degree, that person is less valuable than somebody who can be a creative self-starter and a self-thinker.

This is why if you dig in a little bit, home-educated students are almost guaranteed a spot at just about any college of their choice because a student who has gone from the equivalent of kindergarten through whatever the equivalent of the high school diploma is and proven their focus, they're probably more likely to be a little bit more creative, more of a self-starter.

Home-educated students usually have a more diverse array of interests and they can pretty much write their ticket into any college that they want with a little bit of effective marketing behind it. Colleges are changing. They're adapting. If you go and study colleges now, you study what they're marketing to students, they're marketing themselves as being hip and innovative.

Well, they might be for about three degree programs at that university, but they're not across all 350 degree programs. Anyway, I digress from that. The point is if you can develop the education and you can effectively market it, then you'll gain the benefits whether or not you do it in college or not with the college certification or not.

So develop the education while you're in college, punch your ticket for the college diploma and get your actual education on your time and take advantage of the environment that you're in. College libraries are the loneliest places in the world, but yet there's some of the repositories of immense amounts of data and information that can be incredibly valuable to you.

Make use of them. Also make use of the guides and the mentors that you can find on a college campus. Take the handbook and look through it and use what the handbook says as an outline for your own education whether or not you're at the university or not. Somebody who's probably more knowledgeable than you in your area of interest has taken the time to outline what they believe the basic framework of knowledge is that you need to have.

So take those degree requirements and make that your framework of study. Go to the classes, read the books, and then continue on and flesh that framework out with your own self-study and take advantage of your time. If you go to 15 hours of class, I'd be shocked if the average college student did more than an hour of homework per class.

Those of you who are in a heavy area with an engineering degree, a hard science degree, that's not true in every place. But remember, I'm talking about the 80% here. I'm talking about the state universities that are filled with people getting communications degrees and English degrees and business degrees and all this stuff.

If you're doing an hour of class, you probably shouldn't even be in college because it's too hard for you and you're better off going and building a welding business. But think about it. Fifteen hours of class and you do an hour of homework per class hour, so that means 30 hours of actual focused work.

Don't waste this time of your life. You've got 168 hours a week. Plan on 80 hours of time spent on your studies. Do the 15 hours that you need to pass the 15 hours of class, but dedicate the other 50 hours to your education. Pull 80 out of 168 and there's still plenty of time for sleep and fun.

Which brings us to the final thing, number five, connections. I'm convinced this is probably one of the most valuable aspects of a college program. If, and especially if, you build them intentionally. If you actually go and study it a little bit, one of the things you find is whether it's prep schools for primary schools or whether it's college, the pedigree system, it's not so much the class.

The Harvard School of Business markets themselves as having the world's greatest case study system. Okay, fine. But you know what? I can buy all those cases for 45 bucks each online and I can read the cases myself and I can figure out how to study them. It's not about the case study method.

It's about the connections. And those connections are people who buffet your thinking in class and professors who buffet your thinking and who can serve as the conduit for you into the area that you're focusing on. So make sure that you carefully choose the connections that you need and then choose the school or the area or the club within the school that's going to make the difference.

There's a different school for every career and for every interest. If it's Fortune 500 management, there's a set of schools for that. If it's entrepreneurships and technology startups, there's a school for that. If you don't know what they are, you should. I'm intentionally not saying that. Build the connections that you need and do it intentionally.

Connect with the professors and then plan the connections that you need with fellow students. And if they exist already, just simply be strategic about it. If they don't exist, make them exist. Start the Libertarian Club or start the Business Club or start the Mongolian Language Club, whatever it is that's appropriate to your area of interest.

As I conclude today's show, I want to just sketch out for you an example of a way that you could bring all of these things together. And this example comes from me. It's just simply my experience. We can only talk out of our experience. I don't have any interest in the field of engineering.

So I can't talk through how to take full advantage of a focus in a hard science of engineering. There's somebody out there who can, though, but I can't. But I can talk about it from my area of interest, which are business. And I'm going to share with you the path that I wish somebody had sketched out as a possibility to inspire my thinking.

Because, you see, the problem with talking about college is people often view this as a binary choice. And the choice that people often view is either go to good college, get a good job, have a good career, and have a good, fulfilling life, or don't go to college and be broke and destitute and bankrupt and miserable and poor and -- you get the point.

Those are not the choices. It's not a binary decision. Rather, it's the way that you bring these things together that will determine the value and the level of your success and your expertise. And in 2015, as I record this, we're in a very strange place where you've got to build your own customized mix of these things.

And there's no one saying what's going to happen. You see, people once approached college with the focus on certification, and the idea was, "Well, if I get the certification, then my life is good." But then the world changed, and the certification didn't. And so there are a lot of people that are pretty miserable and upset about what they got for their money and their time.

Don't let that be you. So here's just an example. In my mind, all five of these things are important. And if I were going to go back and I were going to coach the 18-year-old Joshua -- I'm 30 now, so this is 12 years ago. If I were going to coach the 18-year-old Joshua, knowing Joshua's interests, knowing Joshua's inclinations, knowing the things that are important to Joshua, here's how I would coach that person.

If your name is Ryan or Tammy, you've got to think through what is Ryan or Tammy interested in. I have no idea, number one, what my children will be interested in, who they'll be, what will make them tick. My job as a parent is to watch them over the coming 10, 15, 20 years and look to try to understand them so I can guide them in the right direction.

I don't know if they'll be anything like me or exactly different than me. So you've got to filter this through your own lens, but just use this as a little bit of inspiration. And we've also got to just recognize that we're dealing in 2015. The world in 2000 was different and the world in 2030 will be very different.

But here in 2015, here's how I would coach Joshua. All five of these things are important to me -- fun, personal growth, certification, education, and connections. All five of those things are important to me. If you give me a budget of $80,000, here's how I would spend it. I'm good at academics.

I'm good at taking tests. I find it comes easy to me. It's generally always had if I have even the remotest interest in a subject, it's very simple for me to absorb information, process it, and check the right boxes on a test. It doesn't mean I can learn it well enough to get an essay and to deliver an essay or deliver a speech on it.

That's not too hard for me. But to check the boxes on a multiple-choice test generally comes easy. It's just a matter of some simple memorization and the way that most tests are structured for academics. It's absurdly easy. Little study tip, read the book. Second little study tip, underline it.

Third little study tip, memorize it. Every textbook -- like if you can -- in today's world, if you pick up a college textbook, if you can't ace every single exam, it's because you're in something where the knowledge matters and you're dealing with it. You're dealing with mathematics where you got to know how to do it, not just simply the answers.

But I'm just talking general education requirements. The way the college textbook is structured, the beginning, they tell you the learning objectives. Then they go through 30 pages of useless nonsense of prose about it. And then at the end, they give you the outline. Read the outline. That tells you everything you need to know.

Outline the outline so you can figure it out and you can predict the six questions that the professor is going to ask you. It's not that tough. Then memorize those. Learn some memory techniques. Learn how to give a visual picture to it. Learn the lists and you're going to be there.

So for me, that comes easily to me. To some people, that doesn't. If that's you, don't beat your head against the wall. Don't put yourself into a system where you're not likely to succeed because recognize who you're competing with. You're competing with people for whom something comes easily. And one of the things at some point I'm going to -- I thought about doing a standalone show, but I can do it in two sentences.

The problem with college is that all the benefits come to those who finish. But college is destructive to those who don't. So look at yourself and ask yourself, "Am I academically capable?" And if not, don't beat your head against the wall. So for me, academics are not that big of a deal.

It's just a matter of putting in the time, having a little bit of interest and putting in the study time. So looking back on it, if I were going to do it, I believe that in 2015 it's valuable to have the college diploma. I don't think -- and for me, my career interests, I don't think that the source of that diploma matters.

So I would have clipped my way through about two years of college just by simply taking CLEP exams. Those are the simplest way to do it. Then I would have simply enrolled in one of the online programs and done correspondence courses to finish a basic degree in business or whatever one I chose.

I would do the certification. I've given myself a four-year timeline and an $80,000 budget. I would do that while I'm on the road, and I would spend at least a year, probably two years, traveling. I would spend some of that time traveling around the U.S., and I would spend a lot of that time traveling internationally.

But what I would focus on is having a plan for my travel. Yes, traveling for the fun of visiting, but I would take my area of interests. For me, it would be things like business or economics, probably not personal finance because there's -- probably economics. And I would focus on traveling to the places and the people who are influential in economics.

That's how I would spend my time. I'd spend about two years on this project. I would figure out -- let's use economics as an example. I would figure out who in the world is the leading -- who are the leading economics institutes, whether that's London School of Economics or -- it's easy today.

If you have an Austrian bent, there's the Mises Institute. So some of these things are incredibly easier now. But I would choose the course catalog and the degree outlines for the leading universities. I would find them. I would compare them. I would figure out the framework. I would take all the classes.

I would get the reading lists from the syllabus. It's easy. Just contact the professor and ask them for it. Shoot them an email. Talk to their TA. Get those reading lists, and then I would start the reading. Now, I would identify who are the key figures in this field.

So who are the leading economists that I need to know? Put their works together. Economics would be simple because most of it's free and public domain. I would toss it on my Kindle while I'm traveling. I'd spend most of my time reading and writing about those people. Then the course of my travels would be research on those people and also research for who is alive today in those fields of economics.

I'd take a podcast microphone and I'd take a video camera. I would read every book by every one of the leading economists, and I would write my book reviews, mention to them on Twitter that I wrote a book review. And when you've written five books and somebody's reviewed three of them, trust me, they're going to know my name.

So when I call them and I finish the fifth book and I say, "Hi, I'd like to come over to Paris and interview you," they're going to take the interview because I'm shown that I'm a serious student. And I would focus on building the education that I want in the field that I want and through the production of content, develop the marketing for that education.

This is, I believe, how you sidestep the value from me, how I would sidestep the value of the certification of trying to build a pedigree. It would annoy me to no end to have to go through the pedigree system. That doesn't fly with – that doesn't suit my personality.

But I recognize the need for marketing, so I would develop the marketing behind the education. Now think about what I would have at the end of a couple-year project. Think about if there are 50 leading influential names in a discipline, in an academic discipline, and let's say 20 of them are alive and 30 of them are dead or just say 50 of them are alive.

And think about if I've read all the books that all 50 of them have produced and I'm familiar with the historical content of that field. And I've marketed that with an online – obviously a website, but an online portfolio of what I've learned. And then I've gone and I've done a face-to-face interview with each of them.

And remember, I'm an eager student and people are dying to express their knowledge. People with knowledge love to share that with someone who's an eager student, who's a serious student. And because of my depth of education, I can actually engage with them on a deeper level and I can advance the science, the discipline that I'm interested in.

Notice what I'm doing. I'm building the connections that I need. Think about the fact that if I've interviewed the 50 leading people in an industry that I'm interested in, I've demonstrated that I'm a serious student. I've marketed my depth of education. I can call any one of them and I can get any referral and any endorsement and any pathway into any position in the world that I wanted.

Under that scenario, the certification of the college degree is basically irrelevant. But the reason why I wouldn't – to clarify my thinking in case it's the first time you're encountering this type of thought process. The reason why I wouldn't want to – if I'm interested in economics, I wouldn't want to go and get a degree in economics from an established school and get that certification.

It's because then I'm forced into a rigid system with my time. I have to take these classes at 9 AM on Monday, Wednesday, Friday from this professor and the dean has to approve of this, this, this, this. I can't do that. Why would I spend and subject myself to a rigid system where I have to go to this certain number of classes?

If the professor is a waste of time, why should I go to more classes? So I wouldn't – at this point in my life, I wouldn't choose to put myself under that system. There's no need. I can demonstrate what I would need to demonstrate with that certification on my own.

The college in the system like I talked about is useless. I would just simply, while I'm traveling, finish up the correspondence courses to get my online degree so that I can get my CFP designation for the antique CFP board who requires that. Anyway, I understand why they're doing it.

We have to deal with the world that we live in, not the world as – the way we wish it were. But that's how I would do it. Now, that handles my certification, my education, and my connections. Now, think about the personal growth that would occur. If I've spent a few years traveling the world, think about all of the fun that occurs in that scenario.

And think about the breadth of life experience that I would gain. While I'm in Paris for an interview and a meeting with a couple of the leading economics professors there, there's no reason why I shouldn't do all of the cultural events as well. There's no reason not to have a little bit of fun.

But now the world has expanded just a little bit. I would consider that type of approach if it cost me two years of time. And the reason I'm saying two years is because I just don't think four years is necessary, but maybe if it is. I would do two years of that and I would spend two years building the business or whatever it was that was behind the field.

And that's where you've got to get into what your interests are and what your actual areas of focus are because that would be different. But I would consider that a pretty good use of time and a pretty good use of money. If anything in that example trips you up, ignore it.

But design the approach for you. If you want to be an artist, why waste your time going to art school when you can get all of the content of those lectures on YouTube? Why don't you make it a goal to spend a week with 200 world-class artists and then make that your art school?

Put in the work. Now you'll notice, of course, that this type of approach requires you to care. You wouldn't want to do this if you didn't care, but then again, why would you waste four years of your life and thousands of dollars on something that you don't actually care about?

Which is sadly what hundreds of thousands of students are just about to do. But this is not for you. Hope you enjoyed this show. Those are just some ideas. I got a little intense there at the end, but those are just some ideas for you. Take what's useful to you.

Discard what's not. That doesn't bother me. I would just ask you to simply share this. Share this with somebody that you know who might benefit from it. Share it with a high school student. Share it with a college student. Share it with somebody. Share it with a parent. We live in 2015.

We live in one of the most incredible times of human history where the opportunities have never been bigger than they are now. But you're not going to get them if you're stuck in a system from 1955. That world is dead. It's gone. Whether you say good riddance or I wish it weren't doesn't really matter.

It's dead and it's gone. Now, we live in an exciting time, but that requires us to think in new ways. Don't wish for it to change because it's not. It's only going to change in the sense that it's going to get faster and faster and faster. Ten years from now, you are going to be stunned at the societal revolution that's going to happen in the next ten years.

Don't get caught unaware. Build the skills that you need to be successful today and also in the world of 2025, 2035, and beyond. So I hope this content and this information has been useful to you. Please share this with somebody that you care about, and hopefully they can find it to be useful for them.

If this is your first time listening to the show, you can subscribe to the show. Just search the App Store for Radical Personal Finance, and you'll find the show. If this has been useful to you in any way, if you're not a direct patron of the show, I'd ask you to consider becoming a patron.

That's how I pay the bills. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron, and you can support me financially for the work that I'm doing here for you today. No sponsors today, just the patrons. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. I would be deeply indebted to you for that. I would thank you. Let me know your educational project.

Write me an email, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. I'd love to hear what you're doing. If you take this idea and you do something with it, share with me the content of what you actually do with it. I'd love to know. Thank you so much. Adorama, the creator's trusted source for photo, video, and audio gear, is bringing you the best prices, fast shipping, easy returns, and special financing this holiday season.

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