HOUSTON — Why did you spend time writing this report?
Student debt is a large problem in the United States. Total college debts stand at $1.4 million, every second more than $2,800 worth of student debt is accrued, and the average student debt in 2017 was just over $37, 000. For 99% of Americans, the cost of college is a huge burden.
Why is it such a burden?
From 1989 to 2019, wages have only risen by 26% after adjusting for inflation. College costs, on the other hand, have skyrocketed. 178% for four state colleges, 108% for two-year colleges, 103% of non-private colleges all adjusted for inflation. According to a recent NBC News Challenge Success survey, 56% of parents cite tuition costs and financial aid as a top concern in their child’s school choice.
Has the issue of student debt gotten worse over time?
Yes. Student loan debt has soared from $260 billion in 2004 to $1.4 trillion in 2017; average debt jumped from $18,650 to $38,000 over that same period, and the number of people over 60 with student loan debt has quadrupled in the last decade from 700,000 to 2.8 million. That group’s share of the debt has skyrocketed from $8 billion to $67 billion and many are having loan payments deducted from their Social Security checks.
So, what do you propose to combat this problem?
Well, I came up with some education reform 10 months ago called The Every Advantage Plan. Several years ago, when I was working on a cold-calling campaign for software sales at my first job. My prospects were colleges. I became fixated with the relationship between ACT/SAT scores and the acceptance rate If you were to ask me what the ACT scores of the top 100 or 200 colleges are, I could probably name them all. A few years later, I would coach the Morehouse College Sales Team in Atlanta. Morehouse is where MLK Jr. went to college. A few years after that, I worked at a Walmart in a store. I was writing a case study for the company and wanted to see if ACT/SAT scores could determine if a worker there could do a certain job. In the process, I asked two of my former students what they made on their ACT’s. When the first one said 16. A 16 is in the 22nd percentile for the country. Not very good. I was very surprised that he made that low of a score because I knew he could go on to make six figures in software sales in his mid-twenties if he wanted. I then asked another student. He also made a 16. I couldn’t believe it. I knew I had some very powerful raw data that no one had ever analyzed before.
What happened after you figured out this connection?
Initially, nothing. But I knew I had this data that could change the way the United States looked at education/people entering the workforce. I just sat on it a few years. Then, when a fraternity brother posted that there had been a decline in people asking for student loans because of the pandemic, I posted that this could actually be a good thing because I thought college was overrated.
What happened next?
I decided to write a report, a case study of sorts. Many people talk about the value of trade schools and so forth, but the study that I focused on was about getting people white-collar jobs without a college education. I reached out to U.S. Representative Lizzie Fletcher, who is considered a moderate Democrat in Houston. I sent her a report, wrote an additional report, and got a call set up with her education staffer.
What is the gist of the reports?
A quote I use in the book is from a movie called The Big Short. “People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar.” Basically, I make the claim that Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that to succeed in life, one must go to college. I make the claim that this is not true at all. One thing that I focus on is when do most students drop out of college and why? Is it after a year, two years, or three years? If college is used to screen students, could we assume fewer people drop out in years two and three than in year one? Do people drop out because they can’t afford it?
The report also delves into the fact that many college courses don’t actually teach us skills that we need for our job. For me personally, I learned more fundraising for my high school than I did in any of my college courses combined.
Getting back to the relationship between SAT/ACT scores vs. worker readiness, how often do students who could excel in white-collar jobs don’t get the chance to because they make too low of a score on their standardized testing?
I also compare the cost of mediocre or even good colleges to elite private high- schools, which arguably do a better job of providing someone to enter the workforce at a fraction of the cost. Normally, people think elite private schools are very expensive, when in fact compared to what you get from a mediocre college, it is actually a good value.
You are obviously talking to a Democrat about this. Is the Every Advantage Plan a liberal policy in your opinion?
Absolutely not. This plan is about as bipartisan as it gets. 70% of people who end up going to college end up having to take out a loan for college. So many people don’t even try to go to college because they don’t want to take out a loan. Like I said earlier, only the upper 1% don’t have to worry about college costs; nearly everyone is affected by the cost of college. I think it could help out the upper 1% as well. I make the claim I had such a good education in high school that I could have gone straight to Emory or the University of Georgia School of Law. Instead of someone paying $70,000 a year for an Ivy league degree so they can go into Finance, they could just do a one-year boot camp at the fraction of the cost. Additionally, in June of 2020, President Trump signed an order prioritizing job skills over college degrees in government hiring.
Why not give everyone free college as Bernie Sanders suggests?
If everyone got free college, it would not only drive down the value of college, taxpayers would have to pay for it. A double whammy.
Talk about your own college experience at Samford University in Birmingham, AL
To be brutally honest, I deeply regret going to college. Like I said earlier, I learned more doing fundraising for my high school than I did in my college classes. Despite the fact that my books that I have been interviewing with you about deal with classic literature, history, psychology, and the Bible, I not only didn’t major in any of those classes in college, but I also didn’t even take a single course in them. My father spent $100,000 on my Samford University education. Looking back on it, had he just put it in mutual funds, that money would be worth $400,000 today. I’ve also seen the success that my mentor Bill McDermott has had in life, growing up in poverty and now being worth 9-figures, and in his biography Winners Dream he doesn’t attribute any of his success to what he learned in college, but rather on the job training. I was the same way. I made a D+ in Finance in college, but when I learned the same material when I worked as a contractor for the investment bank, I learned it immediately.
