0:19 good afternoon and welcome to the way to wow people making money I'm your host Kevin demmel and as uh those of you who have seen the show before no we're here every Wednesday 12 30 Pacific time and 3 30 Eastern time and then an hour in for the other two time zones uh last week I talked about how the economy and the elections are likely to impact our professional prospects for the coming year and uh you know now as we we head
0:56 toward um the new year and and think about well you know what am I going to do career-wise going forward I think one of the topics that often comes up is maybe I'll you know go back to college and earn a degree and and perhaps that will help um especially among veterans who can go to school on the GI bill so essentially a college education is is free or at a you know significantly reduced cost so
1:32 hey why not especially since the the GI Bill also pays a part of living expenses and in fact a lot of veterans use their GI Bill benefits in order to get the ex the living you know the living stipend that goes with them the the the sad reality is only a fraction and a relatively small fraction of of military veterans who go to college end up graduating with a completed degree and there's lots of
2:08 reasons why that is and that's candidly not my topic for today the the point is though that when there's a lot of people starting college and for various reasons not finishing it and and that's true not only among military veterans but that's true among all people who go to college and and and yet um people are coming out with uh um oftentimes a pretty hefty chunk of college debt so I want to look at this uh issue today and um have I have several thoughts on it
2:44 um I'm going to start out by saying um if we were having this discussion about 10 years ago or maybe a little bit longer than that now um and you would ask me should you go to college I would say absolutely go to college your lifetime earnings the lifetime earnings of a college graduate are much greater than a non-college graduate and so you definitely should go and over the last 10 years I've changed my view on on that on this issue there are reasons to go to college
3:19 um and there are other reasons not to go to college I think there's you know each of us has to do our own cost benefit analysis as to whether you know University is is the right place for us so I'm going to help show you some information that will hopefully help you make these decisions or at least give you some resources and things to to think about um as we examine this so go to share screen okay here we go and share
3:57 okay and oops what have I got here okay yeah all right so I think the first now if you're going to go to college um because you want the experience of going to college you want to expand your academic involvement so that that's a separate issue um and and by the way that used to be
4:33 the reason most people well people used to go to college for two reasons one was to become more educated um and and um up until about maybe 50 or so years ago what that meant was getting educated in what's known as the Western Canon of um of literature and and Science and philosophy Etc so people would do it for that reason and they would do it because they wanted to pursue a profession now the word profession today is is is very
5:10 broad but um 5200 years ago and and earlier profession meant certain specific um jobs if you well they were the law medicine and the clergy so if you were going to go to go into one of those three Fields so then typically you would go to college and you would study to join that so um and in fact um at least a couple of the Ivy League schools were originally
5:46 um um theological colleges basically people um men went there because they wanted to join the ministry and eventually the college has expanded their programs and became universities Etc et cetera et cetera so you know today um there's a broader range of of professions um that probably necessitate going to college although not not as much as you might think um but if if you are
6:22 um intent on exp and expanding your your knowledge just generally or you want to go into again you know the law um medicine these days probably accounting falls into that as well um and um you know I'm gonna exclude the clergy because things are different nowadays and during the clergy um colleges are are only some colleges are a major supplier of of clergy for example for Theological Seminary is
6:57 Major supplier of clergy but but if if those are your aims so then the the sort of cost benefit analysis that we're going to be doing here I don't may not be too relevant for you um you know you could make the argument there there is no price you can put on expanding your mind expanding the breadth of your knowledge the depth of your knowledge Etc and I think there is some Merit to that argument I would put a caveat on that though and that is if you have the means to pay for that
7:32 education right so to get a liberal arts degree today and we'll we'll look at this in just a minute um is is not an inexpensive undertaking um the way it might have been 50 or more years ago and the value of that degree for getting a job is somewhat limited um and so if you're going to get saddled with a lot of debt without a way to pay for it you know as much as you want to pursue the deepening and broadening of your knowledge that may just not be a possibility for you so so on on that
8:08 front I leave you with those thoughts so first of all let's let's look at some information on how much College costs so the average cost to attend college you can see it here on the screen so a private college a little over uh fifty seven thousand dollars um this is uh as of 2022 so as of this year and for public colleges you see in-state tuition is just under 28 000 and out of state tuition is a little over forty five thousand dollars so public colleges remain less expensive
8:44 options than private colleges although you can see the Gap well the gap for in-state tuition we're talking about less than 50 percent um of a private college for an out of state to pay out of state tuition a public College it's it's approaching uh what it would cost to go through a private college now well let's look at this little I just want to look at this a little bit more so you can see what goes into it so um there's uh tuition and fees room and board books and supplies transportation and personal expenses so let's just look at some of those so you can see that whereas the overall cost of going to
9:21 college um is uh um I I should say the overall cost of of in-state the overall in-state costs for going to a public college is about half of a private college you can see the tuition portion of it is actually more like a quarter okay whereas the tuition portion on for out of state uh public colleges is the the Gap is about the same as as it is for the overall cost so and that shows you room and board is uh you know there's a couple thousand
9:56 dollars difference but you know fairly negligible um and and you know looking at um um you know some of the other expenses I think those there's not a big gap in those either so here's here's I think what is um perhaps um uh more important is what is the average what they call sticker price the average cost versus what you'll actually pay your net price after um subtracting uh financial aid and you
10:34 can see that one of the ways private uh universities private colleges stay competitive is you're you're going to get a financial age package financial aid package um on average that is about well it was over half of the cost of of attending right and so um you know that that brings it down significantly um whereas um I'm sorry I'm looking at this wrong I've sorry scratch that it you're going
11:10 to get an average age pack eight package of about twenty five thousand dollars um for a private colleges here it is 25 000 whereas it's going to be not quite nine thousand dollars going to uh private uh going to public uh College sorry let me say that again so to make sure it's clear so the average Aid package out of private institution is about twenty five thousand dollars reducing the the cost the net price to about 33 000. the average Aid package at
11:46 a public college is considerably less um about a third of what it would be at a private college and it reduces the price from about twenty eight thousand dollars to about nineteen thousand dollars okay so but you can see that the the Gap goes from thirty thousand dollars to about twelve thousand dollars so that is how private universities stay competitive so um what I what I want us to do is is keep in mind this right here okay this is the the net price
12:21 um that you're going to pay and this is by the way uh per year okay so they're looking at the net price here for the 2223 Academic Year about thirty three thousand dollars private we'll call it twenty thousand dollars public College okay that's per year so if you're getting a four-year degree you're looking about eighty thousand dollars at a public college and you're looking at about uh 130 133 000 at a private college okay so um that is you know a a hefty price tag
12:59 now for someone who is only going to pay in-state tuition um and they're not you know concerned about uh uh room and board so you know subtract 12 000 from you know nineteen thousand and you're you're you know you're you're looking at it's you know something because well you can't do a direct thing like that but you're probably looking at uh you know 11 000 plus maybe a couple of thousand for books and whatever so maybe you're paying you know twelve thirteen thousand if you're you know living at home okay so that makes it more affordable so
13:34 maybe then you're going to be out of pocket somewhere around forty or fifty thousand dollars okay okay so that's what you're looking at in terms of cost as of right now anyway all right [Music] um Okay so um let's look at average salaries now of college graduates or or just of average salary so the median yearly earnings of uh 24 to 34 year old full-time workers
14:12 right so if you have less than a high school diploma you're looking at about thirty thousand dollars a year with a high school diploma you're looking at about 36 37 000 a year okay some college but no degree bumps you up about three little over three thousand dollars a two-year degree an associate degree bumps you up by about eight thousand dollars about actually about seventy five hundred okay a bachelor's degree over a high school diploma is Gonna Bump you up um twenty three thousand dollars right
14:47 that's a pretty big bum okay and a master's degree is going to bump you up even farther so it's going to bump you up by what is this about 36 thousand dollars okay so uh no I'm sorry thirty three thousand dollars but almost double and once you have a master's degree or higher your um your median earnings are gonna be almost double what they were in high school so that would seem and this has been the traditional argument in favor of going to college is you're gonna earn a lot more money
15:23 um than you would if you just uh have a high school diploma okay now one of the things take into account is your earnings are going to be significantly different depending on what your major is so if your major is in the humanities you're looking at about 51 000 okay that's significantly lower than computer science is where you're in about 76 000 okay math and science is about 67
15:59 okay um business about 61. okay engineering here's 74 where social sciences you're down at about 61 and agriculture and natural resources you're at about 58. so there's a pretty big gap there the bottom being about not quite 51 the top being 76 there's a 50 Gap depending on what your major is okay and and there's not a gap in terms of cost the cost is what it is um your your earning potential has to do
16:34 with your with your major now the last thing I want to look at on this is average salary by age because you can see um whereas median wages in the um arts and liberal arts and humanities is about forty two thousand dollars for a recent grad um by the time they're in their uh mid 40s to late 50s you're looking at about sixty thousand dollars that's that's where you top out and by the way for teaching and serving you start out at only about 39 000 and top out at about fifty one thousand okay now
17:12 um contrast that with um science Technology and Engineering and Mathematics so-called stem right you're going to start at about sixty thousand dollars so you're going to start where liberal arts people end up and you're going to start higher than we're teaching and serving uh people end up okay um so you're going to start at 60 and you're going to top out at 90. okay these are medians again so obviously they're half the people make less half the people make more okay um health and business and health are are are similar you're going to start in
17:48 the low 50s go up into the low to mid 70s okay and uh social sciences you know you'll start about 49 end up at about 71. okay so um there's an impact not only on based on your degree but once wherever you start that to a certain extent is going to determine where you end up okay so these are the median salaries now um what I would say is if you want to be involved in stem for example so going to
18:26 college appears to be a pretty good um a pretty good deal okay if you're starting at median salary at sixty thousand and you have this kind of growth potential so you're probably going to do pretty well all right and if it's going to cost you about excuse me eighty thousand dollars to get that degree let's say if you go to a public uh University or a public college so you know you're talking about you know not even a year and a half in essence to to pay that back okay whereas with liberal arts it's going to take you
19:01 at least two years and same with teaching it's going to take you two years to pay that back okay and and when I say pay that back um that's not the only issue because at sixty thousand dollars or for that matter even fifty three you're likely to have more disposable income to pay off that debt than you would at 42 or 39. so how pressed you're going to feel is you know is going to make a a big difference so I'm not saying you will literally pay it off in two years probably not it's probably going to take you quite a
19:36 number of years to pay it off and probably quite a number of years longer than if you went into stem where you'll have uh more discretionary income earlier in your career and so you'll be able to pay it off more quickly if you choose to okay so that's that's I think one of the things to think about is how is this debt going to burden you now there are discussions about canceling student debt and about programs where if you go to work for this or that your debt is canceled after 10 years and those kind of things um you know not commenting on the mayor rid of those
20:12 programs the one thing I would say is just because those programs exist now doesn't mean they will exist four years from now okay so you know um you may say well wait that's unfair if I start college and with with the idea that I'm going to get one of these you know going to one of these fields where after a certain number of years my debt is canceled and then they take that away that's not fair and the only thing I tell you is you know life is it's not fair so um I I think it would be you know imprudent to absolutely count on that
20:47 being the case I think you've got to weigh in your decision that these programs could potentially go away and so you may be left paying off that debt whether you like it or not okay so if you don't go to college right and you and you don't pursue a college degree does that mean then that um you know you're going to be um this is the wrong thing you're going to be stuck making you know forty thousand dollars a year or less now you know
21:23 these are the median earnings but having said that there are a number of jobs and professions that you can get into that will substantially increase the likelihood that you will do better than the median earnings even though you don't have a college degree now I I mentioned that instead if you're going to go into stem you probably do want to go to college having said that um I have a very good friend who is a
21:58 data scientist he never well he's not he never went to college he never completed college I think he has a year of college I want to say um and he taught himself both coding and data scientists and he is making a ton of money okay now you know it took a lot of self-discipline on his part but if you are a self-disciplined person and you really are interested in technology so it's not necessarily the case that you need to get a degree
22:36 um more and more companies are looking at candidates who who don't have college degrees now right now in technology there's a lot of as we talked about last week there's a lot of layoffs going on so it might be tough to get a job in technology right now um especially if you don't have a degree um what I would say is having the the one advantage that having a degree um gives you is access to the Alumni network
23:11 okay so if you graduated from Harvard you can reach out to a lot of people who have previously graduated from Harvard and and network with them toward your professional success okay so there there is an advantage there but that's not the only place to get that kind of Advantage being in the military is equally good if not better in terms of your ability to reach out and network with people I know I've done that myself so college is no longer the only place to
23:48 get that um kind of Step Up based on having a built-in group of people with whom you can talk and and and share ideas and get advice and get mentors etc etc okay so again another thing to keep in mind now what if you for whatever reason just don't want to go to college but you don't want to be stuck making you know forty thousand dollars a year or less well so there are other fields that you can go into and generally speaking they fall into
24:23 one of two categories so one of them are one of them is licensed professions and I'll talk about what that is in a minute and the other is skilled trades and I'll talk about that uh Second okay so let's talk about licensed professions first so a licensed profession would include real estate Financial Services which includes Insurance it would it could include um cosmetology which is things like hair cutting and that sort of thing
24:58 um these are all jobs for which you have to have a license in order to practice sometimes the license is at the federal level okay so for example if you're going to be if you're going to be involved in the Securities industry you're going to have to get licensed through finra the financial something or others regulatory Association or agency or something like that I don't remember what finra stands for okay if you're going to sell insurance you're going to need to be licensed in the states in which you're soliciting business okay so
25:34 if I'm in California I have a life insurance license here in a life insurance producer's license here in in California okay that would entitle me to sell life insurance to people located in California if I want to sell insurance to somebody located another state I've got to comply with that State's requirements okay so that's that's Financial Services real estate is is another area so if you want to sell real estate and sell it meaning as someone who helps people buy and sell real estate as a as a salesperson or as a broker if you want to arrange real
26:11 estate loans if you want to appraise real estate all of these require licenses and those licenses are issued by each state okay so before I join the Navy I have I had a commercial real estate company and among the services I provided was a Appraisal Services and I had appraisal licenses in I want to say five states maybe six something like that I know I was licensed in California Nevada I think Colorado um Utah I think New York as well
26:49 um and maybe there was one or two others that I'm not remembering right now okay so those you need to have those licenses in order to represent people in transactions or to handle like I said something like appraising where um uh you're going to be involved in what are called federally related transactions so what that means is the federal government is in some way or another supporting that marketer involved in that market for real estate loans now technically if you're going to do appraisals for let's say an estate
27:25 planning lawyer in Most states you maybe all states you don't need to have an appraisal license however the real estate appraisal licensing regime is so well known it puts you at a competitive disadvantage if you do not have that license and especially if you were going to be doing expert witness work so you want some kind of credential and frankly the easiest one to get is is a state license Okay so while there are situations where you may
28:00 be able to practice without a license you will end up giving up a significant part of your earning potential by doing that without having a license and by the way you can work at a real estate brokerage without a license however you cannot represent people so that means you're going to be doing some kind of clerical work something like that um and and and you know your your income potential is going to be you know fairly limited okay so so again those are those are licensed professions let's look at um here's um this is this is information
28:38 um on um uh Financial Services salaries so um they're showing um total annual um median is about 83 000 a year okay if you're a licensed Financial Services person and you have a range of 49 nine thousand on the bottom end to 145 000 on the top end this is according to who published oh Glassdoor okay so now by the way you you can see you can do all kinds of permutations here so you you know you can we can look at it by
29:14 years of experience oops reload see if it'll reload reload please try later oh boy it doesn't want to reload okay here let's do this okay and let's oops uh I don't want to do that um okay well anyway um so I'm you know I'm sure you can imagine that um that uh um you know the the lower end of the scale is going to be for people with less experience in the higher end is
29:49 going to be for people with more experience okay so now let's look at real estate agents this is I this is an interesting graft uh graph or uh chart on me that I found from um uh ZIP recruiter so annual salaries as a real estate agent this is someone who helps people buy and sell real estate so the national average is just under ninety three thousand dollars and it ranges from seventeen thousand five hundred on the low end to almost 200 000 on the high end of course there are
30:25 um many people who make considerably more than two hundred thousand dollars a year as real estate agents so the average annual salary varies by state um from about 65 000 on the low end in North Carolina to the high end which is a hundred and three thousand in Washington state okay here's my state California it's about 93 000 which interestingly is just below Idaho and and New Hampshire okay Hawaii is also up there so again you can see
31:00 that um the earning potential you have as a real estate agent is very good and you do not need to have a college degree in order to become a real estate agent now it used to be that if you had a college degree you could you would automatically qualify to become a real estate broker which meant you could work on your own you didn't have to be supervised by somebody however and when I first got my real estate license here in California back in 1986 I believe it was I went directly I
31:37 got broker's license directly I never had a sales license because at that time as long as you had a four-year degree and you took I believe it was eight real estate classes so you qualified to take the real estate brokers exam and in my case I had worked for someone else um but I had worked um we weren't buying and selling or helping other people buy and sell real estate we were buying and selling on our own account so I didn't need a real estate license to do that uh and so I got a so when I went out on my own I got a
32:13 broker's license directly now recently I uh you know having gotten out of the Navy um I uh I got a a real estate license and because I'd been out of the business so long or well let me rephrase that because my license had lapsed so long ago I had to qualify under the new requirements and the new requirements require um a certain number of years of experience in the real estate business current experience in the real estate business no matter what four-year degree
32:49 you have so I had to go and get a real estate sales license I didn't qualify for a broker's license unfortunately so that that's just you know that's just the way it goes but you can see that you know even with without a degree you know you're you know you're looking at a median uh average income of about ninety three thousand dollars or not a median average an average income national average of about 93 um thousand dollars so that's uh that's that's pretty good I think you know most of us could uh live a pretty good life
33:25 um on that and now there are other licensed professions I mentioned cosmetology um those obviously don't pay typically as much as Financial Services or real estate um having said that um they they do pay you know pretty well um I I was looking it up earlier today I think you know kind of top salary unless you're sort of you know hairdresser to the stars or something like that you know you can make in the in the um you know mid fifty thousand dollar range and that's certainly a respectable salary it's it's higher than the you know forty
34:00 thousand dollars or lower that you would make without a college degree um plus you don't have um um you may not have I should say the debt of going to college now you may have to go to Barber College or you may have to go to um you know hair cutting college and that can be expensive okay so you know that would be something you'd have to look at um having said that um if if College just really doesn't sound like what you want to do or taking on a lot of debt isn't something you want to do and you can't pay for it as you go or or you don't have you know um you know your parents are not going to
34:35 pay for it so I would encourage you to look into licensed professions to see what they may offer you okay now another potential area is what are called skilled trades okay so um these are a broad range nowadays many of these skilled trades are considered or are called professions but but historically they were known as trade so let's just look at some of them okay so auto mechanic and transportation right so an aircraft mechanic
35:11 um these are mean salaries which means average salaries okay and some of these jobs take from just a couple of months to maybe two years to train for so you're looking at almost seventy thousand dollars as an aircraft mechanic auto technician forty eight thousand dollars diesel mechanic 53 hey motorcycle 42. so some of them are not particular particularly High however we need to look deeper into them so if you could get into the Mercedes-Benz mechanics program okay once you get
35:46 through that program you're going to start I believe at about eighty thousand dollars a year and in some areas you may start at close to a hundred thousand dollars a year okay now you're you're working on a very sophisticated piece of Machinery a Mercedes-Benz and so you you know you're going to be dealing with a lot of computers computer Diagnostics etc etc having said that uh you know there are um there are training programs Mercedes-Benz runs a training program
36:21 um I haven't looked specifically into b w or some of the other uh luxury automakers but I suspect they run similar programs and if you can get into those programs um you can generate a very high salary a higher starting salary than a lot of college graduates will get um and and if you know if you like working with your hands um that was my dad my dad liked working with his hands he never wanted to go into management he was an engineer he never wanted to go into management because he liked being there with the the things that the
36:56 companies were building so if that's what you like to do uh you know I would suggest that maybe um looking at some kind of skilled trade would be a much better option for you okay so that now that's that's uh you know Auto and transportation you know building bill building contractors and construction too so Carpenter fifty five thousand dollars a year construction manager a hundred and eight thousand dollars a year now you're not going to start as a construction manager but if you get enough years under your belt in some other trade you
37:31 can probably move up there okay look at electricians 63 000 plumbings plumbers 63 000 uh telecommune telecommunition telecommunications line installer sixty two thousand right so these are these are you know good salaries again much better than the the average uh high school graduate will make and don't have to go to college you may be able to enter a uh an apprenticeship program okay or maybe look if you're still in
38:06 high school and you're thinking about what do I want to do after high school um I had a friend who after he uh the summer after he graduated from high school he got a job in construction and then he did go to college because he wanted to be an architect but during the Summers he went back and worked construction and over the years he kept his skills kept improving and he kept making he kept making more and more money right and plus he got to be outside in the summertime he had a great suntan he uh you know the work you know he was like a built guy as a result
38:41 um and he really you know he really enjoyed the work so if you don't want to be stuck in an office I would again look at the The Building Trades okay um look I think the lowest you hear is what a machinist at forty nine thousand dollars I'm not exactly sure what a machinist does I I assume your Machining maybe uh ventilation ducts or things like that um but look these are just some examples here's a wind turbine service technician um over 58 000 a year and you know wind as a as an energy source is is
39:18 increasing there's a tremendous amount of money when I say tremendous amount tens of billions of dollars appropriated in Washington for renewable energy sources and as more and more wind turbines are built they're going to need more and more technicians so this could be you know a a growing field okay another uh skilled trade Math Science and Engineering now these are technician level careers for mathematician is separate that's obviously that's a college graduate okay and you can see a hundred and twelve thousand dollars but just to be an electrical or Electronics technician
39:54 you're looking at sixty nine thousand dollars a year a chemical technician 55 mechanical engineering technicians 63 000 okay these are there are technical programs that you can enter that doesn't require you to go to college um and uh here it says it takes two to four years train obviously four years for a mathematician but some of these other ones a couple of years to train and you're off and running and um and you're you're making a lot of money okay and then there's medical administration right so medical biller
40:30 coding Specialists social uh okay a healthcare social worker probably went to college uh medical and Health Services managers at 120 000 that's probably who has some kind of public health degree or something like that so that's probably not someone uh without a college degree but um you know again these are like a coding specialist this is an insurance coding specialist right at forty eight thousand that's better than what you would make um as as a just a you know kind of straight High School uh graduate okay and here's more in terms of uh medical
41:07 and dental so now now you're seeing why the the salary for high school graduates is low health aide twenty nine thousand dollars okay that you know if if all you've got if all you've done is graduating from high school and you have no additional training so you can probably qualify to be a health aide okay um but you're not going to make a whole lot of money dental hygienist you can go to dental hygiene school eighty one thousand dollars okay um let's see what was the other one uh physical therapy assistant sixty one
41:43 thousand dollars okay now a physical therapist ninety three thousand dollars a year registered nurse 83 000 most the time um if not all the time people go to college to qualify to be physical therapists and RNs okay but you may decide that you want to be um um an LPN licensed practical nurse or an LDN licensed vocational nurse okay making about 52 000 a year again um I think LVN programs if I remember correctly are about two years so um these are vocational programs and
42:19 um you can get right to work and if you enjoy you know helping people taking care of people so that you know may very well be a good option for you and remember that the sooner you get into a field the sooner you get into your working career the sooner you'll start getting pay raises okay so it may make more sense for you to do a two-year check trade program and get to work two years at least two years sooner than it would be if you went to college um and and start you know getting in on
42:54 increased salaries okay all right um and uh let's see here's let's see what else do we have here okay so Art and Design okay I'm you know I don't know what to say about that frankly um okay so here's cosmetology oh okay I was wrong on the barber Barber it says thirty six thousand dollars a year um normally takes six months to one year to train um however if you build up your own clientele as they note here um you can do pretty well now by the way theatrical makeup specialist a hundred and twenty four thousand dollars a year
43:31 to the best of my knowledge these people do not go to college they learn their trade um probably as apprentices and then building up so um that is a whopping salary right um you know and and and you know you're doing you're doing real well and if that's what you like again you may be you may have some lean years in the beginning but if you can build up to that kind of salary and not have to worry about paying off college debt hey wow I mean that's that's a great option
44:06 to consider okay criminal justice so court reporter 65 000 you will have to go to court reporter school I don't remember how long it is I think it's six months I could be wrong could be a year but it's by no means a four-year program um and there is a dearth of court reporters okay so they are looking for them paralegal again you don't need a four-year degree you can go to paralegal school I think it's a year or two fifty eight thousand dollars and then of course uh law enforcement so average salary seventy one thousand dollars now it is the case that more and more law enforcement officers do have college
44:43 degrees however if you're coming out of the military for example you don't need to have a college degree to go into law enforcement and in fact most localities are desperate for people to come into law enforcement and and this is not reflected here but in some cases they're paying pretty significant signing bonuses if you join a police department and get through their training academy or join the sheriff's department and get through their training academy so you know again if if that if if working with the public you
45:20 know serving your fellow citizens is something that interests you so you know law enforcement could be a much better career uh these days than than going to college now um if you talk to people currently in law enforcement you will hear a lot of dissatisfaction a lot of people in law enforcement feel that they don't have good public support but that that does vary from City to City so for example if you were to talk to police officers in
45:56 the city of Beverly Hills um I I you know I I go there often and I you know say hello to police officers whenever I you know kind of walk by them or they drive by a wave or whatever and if you talk to them they'll tell you um people in Beverly Hills are very supportive and so being in Beverly Hills PD is a great job now there are other jurisdictions I'm not a cast aspersions but you know other municipalities or whatever where they that may not be the case and so maybe that's you don't want to be there you don't want to be there but there are there are lots of
46:32 municipalities and counties um across the country where people are still very supportive of law enforcement and that the key would be you know where are they and is that a place where you want to be something though that might well be worth your checking into okay finally culinary arts and food service so a chef or a head cook is making about fifty seven thousand dollars a year okay um a dietitian a nutritionist making about 65 66 000 a year uh food service
47:08 or restaurant manager making about sixty four thousand dollars a year okay um so in in all these cases you know you may have to take a program um could be six months could be a year could be two years there are some four-year programs um if you're completing a four-year program though you're probably headed to be an executive chef an executive chefs frankly make higher salaries than than what you see here so um if you like to cook or again if you were in the military let's say you were a culinary specialist in the Navy or I I
47:43 don't know what the equivalent um uh designations are in the uh Army and Air Force and Marine Corps but if you were a military cook so you may very well have the qualifications you need already to get into culinary arts and food service in the private sector and if you like cooking there's lots of opportunity there now there is a ton of entry level opportunity pretty much everywhere I think these days as a result of of covet and all of that if you're if you're looking at it though
48:20 as a long-term profession so you know you're you're probably going to want to have some trade education and or come in with some experience and and that will help you move up more quickly but you can see that again with the exception of the baker pastry chef these are all of these salaries are higher than the average salary that you make with a high school diploma Okay so so what does this all mean okay I'm going to go ahead and stop the sharing and we'll we'll just sort of
48:56 um summarize what we've been talking about I think these days the idea that you know you get out of high school and you have to go to college I don't think that is the case anymore there are a number of large companies including Google ey which used to be Ernest young that have positions that do not require a college degree and as you can imagine at companies of this size these are good paying jobs with advancement opportunities and I think Home Depot
49:31 also has positions that don't require college degrees and and I don't think it's just people who are you know working sales on the floor I think you have the ability to advance as well so um if you know if you want to go to college for the experience or because you you know you as I said before you want to expand your knowledge and and you have the luxury of doing that and not have to worry about how you know you're going to pay for college by all means go to college there's nothing there's nothing wrong with going
50:07 to college okay what what is a challenge is if you have to pay for college out of your pocket or borrow money and so then I think it's it becomes a more complex decision because are you going to be able to pay it back are the programs that would cancel your student debt going to be there by the time you get out of college or if you're going back to school and you're going to get you're thinking about getting a master's degree or some kind of PhD or professional degree is that worthwhile I mean I I have a friend who
50:43 um already had an undergraduate and I think two master's degrees went and got an MBA actually she had one master's degree went and got an MBA thinking this would help her get a corporate job and it did not okay so now it's one thing if you have an MBA from say you know Harvard or Yale or or the Wharton School or something like that so you've got an Alumni network that can help you get a job of course those are very competitive programs to get into but to just sort of get go and get a generic MBA I'm not
51:18 sure that that's really worth the cost anymore and the time delay in getting started in some kind of on some kind of career path okay so as altern the two Alternatives we talked about are getting involved in some kind of licensed profession Financial Services real estate those are probably the two best known and they are the two with the most opportunities um I'm not going to talk about specific companies there are a number of them out there and if you uh want to message me
51:54 I'm happy to um uh talk to you about some of the ones that I know about some of the opportunities that I'm aware of some of these programs are incredibly lucrative and some of them you can even get um equity in the parent companies if your practice grows big enough and that's that's really an astonishing feature that's something fairly new just in the last probably I don't know five maybe ten years certainly when I started in real estate
52:29 you know there was no brokerage I could join that would give me uh equity in in the parent company that such things didn't exist but people are innovating and they're coming up with um new ways to um encourage people to come into their businesses and so there's there's you know a number of programs like that so that's definitely something to look into the licenses are not difficult to get and they they will take some studying in some cases the companies will pay for the study courses that you need to take
53:04 so that you're not out of pot so you're out of pocket little if anything um and they'll pay for you to take the license exams as well okay and and again they're not that they're not super difficult um if you apply yourself you will be able to pass okay um and so so that's one thing to consider another thing to consider is like I said the skilled trades whether that's auto mechanics Airline mechanics whether it's the Building Trades whether it's some kind of medical uh career
53:39 that's uh you know below not below but other than um a doctor or a registered nurse or or um uh like a nurse practitioner those are all college-based programs but but other things dental hygienist and and and things at that level you don't need to go to college to uh you know to be in those areas and so it could be a great alternative as can food services and some of the other things that we talked about earlier in the show so I I would encourage you to think about
54:14 what do you want your daily work life to look like okay do you want to be in an office do you want to be outside do you want to be interacting with people on a regular basis do you not want to be interacting with people on a regular basis okay if you're an auto mechanic while you may be interacting with your colleagues you're probably not going to be interacting with the public very much and and that may you may like that and so that may be a better alternative than than something else okay um on the other hand if you like working
54:50 with the public so maybe one of the licensed professions will be better because those tend to be uh jobs in which you're going to be working with members of the public educating them helping them transact helping them with their finances whatever it is whatever part of it that you're involved with okay so look at those things look at where you want to live you know do you want to live in an urban environment in a Suburban environment in a rural environment that too will help determine what kind of career you want to pursue if you want to
55:27 live in a rural environment um but make a you know a sizable salary so you know maybe one of the Building Trades or you know skilled trades I should say um may not be the right path for you but these days if you're a licensed professional so with zoom you can have meetings with potential clients from wherever you are in the country so as long as you have uh internet service that broadband service anyway you can wear work anywhere and so that may be an alternative or you may decide hey I want
56:02 to live in Rural America but I want you know I'm I'm going to go to college and get the kind of job that you get coming out of college that allows me to work remotely okay so then that may be The Driver so I encourage you to look at all of those factors think about them if you have a spouse talk to your spouse or if you have a significant other talk to that person and figure out what is going to work for you okay and then make a decision okay what I would hope you won't do is over analyze and and spend you know
56:38 12 months two years choose something give it a try these days most of us are going to have multiple careers and almost for sure we're going to have one or two that we try that we don't like nothing wrong with that give it a shot give it a shot okay you may find that you like it you may find that you hate it so you're gonna go do something else the if you can do that when you're younger you'll be much better off once you become an old guy like me you have responsibilities it's harder to you know take those kind of
57:13 risks make those kind of changes so so I encourage you to to experiment and and give it a try the worst that'll happen is you won't like something and you'll go in a different direction and you'll know that within six to 12 months at the most um so you know why not give it a shot okay all right so that that brings us to uh the end of the show it kind of zoomed by and you know with these kind of topics I never know I'm not going to have enough to say for an hour but it turns out that I did so uh it's it's to
57:48 the day before Thanksgiving so I do want to wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving hopefully you have friends and family to spend it with or or or you're you've got something special planned and and that's a wonderful thing I I do want to take a moment and just note that um you know most of us if we grew up in the United States so we heard about you know the first Thanksgiving with the pilgrims and and all of that and that's great um I think it behooves us to um perhaps take a look at George Washington's Proclamation uh for Thanksgiving day it's it's a beautiful
58:23 sentiment and it might add some richness to to the the holiday to the Celebration um and also look at Abraham Lincoln when he declared Thanksgiving a national holiday he was the first president to to to to to do that and that's worth taking a look at um as well it's you know it's a wonderful time to get together with family and friends and hopefully we'll also get a sense of the deeper meaning of Thanksgiving which is to give thanks for all that we have for the people in our lives for
58:58 um the gifts that um that that God gave us um would you expect less than that from you know from a rabbi um or if you don't if you don't believe in God so then wherever those that Bounty comes from from the ability of the earth to you know to grow food and and all of that I think it's it's it's useful to reflect on that periodically and so I I I hope amidst the the food and then and uh the you know the the sporting events and whatever else you
59:33 have planned for tomorrow that that you will take a few moments to do so and that just leaves it for me to say to my dear friend Marie you are still my bell I'll be thinking about you tomorrow and and being grateful for the time that we got to spend together other wishing you all the best if you have any help if you want any help with your career plans and sorting out College licenses building skilled trades whatever my email address will be in the show notes and feel free to reach out to me look forward to seeing you this time next week Happy
60:10 Thanksgiving