Should you go to college!? James Debates Jim Keyes

[00:00:00] For 20 years, I've been writing about how much I think people should not go to college,

[00:00:15] that college is not the only solution out there for a career.

[00:00:18] In fact, it could be the worst solution because tuition has risen faster than inflation every

[00:00:24] single year for the past 50 years. But he presented some very good arguments, and I have to give him all credit for that. But I'll let you hear the conversation, and it's well worth listening to particularly if you've been wondering about this issue. So here he is, let's talk about college.

[00:01:42] This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host.

[00:01:45] This is The James Altager Show. paying attention. The stock was just floundering at about $4 a share. We ended up selling it at $37.50, almost $40. So yeah, you did well. I did well. Yeah. I remember you say in the book, the CEO of Southland, which owns 7-Eleven, before,

[00:03:01] went through various management changes, including you crazy things? Kids were all over the scooters. We literally,

[00:04:20] no one could find them. We sourced them in China and we had a 747 full of razor scooters.

[00:05:25] which involved Blockbuster. I forget, were you the last CEO of Blockbuster?

[00:05:30] No, there was one more after you, right?

[00:05:35] Yeah, we sold the company to Dish.

[00:05:40] I remember that in most places. Now, if you've got really robust 5G service, like if you're in China, you could do an insulin. But here in the United States, it's still a little clunky. And we're getting there.

[00:07:00] We're getting there full on 5G capability. all these how-to videos on YouTube. This relates to the content of your book. They start learning. It changed their lives. Exactly. In fact, the subtitle to the book, I don't know if you've seen the final copy, I just got them, so I'm all excited. I just have the PDF version. Yeah.

[00:08:20] The subtitle is,

[00:08:22] The Future is in Your Hands.

[00:08:24] I kind of, on the cover,

[00:08:26] represented this sort of connected education, but just higher education itself, because of the way student loans have been structured by the government, there's no incentive for college presidents to lower tuition. So tuition's gone up faster than inflation every single year since the GI Bill. And now kids are going broke studying East Asian studies and then getting $200,000 in debt.

[00:09:42] Come on, James, we've got to do applicants. I need to at least, they weed out quickly. Anybody who didn't go to college, they say, okay, just weed out first the people who didn't

[00:11:02] go to college, then we'll start looking.

[00:11:04] From a very practical viewpoint, you're saying, exactly. And it could have been a can of RC or it could have been an unbranded cola.

[00:12:20] But the point is, I know what's in that brand.

[00:12:23] And if I'm at a glance, I have to pick likely to hire that person than someone who went to a different college. So all the managers that are out there right now, they probably all have college degrees. And so you're right, for the next generation, it's like it takes a generation to slowly shift if it's going to shift at all. It does. And it'll take at least a generation before most managers say, perhaps don't have college

[00:13:44] degrees.

[00:13:45] Exactly.

[00:13:46] But 10 years or another...

[00:13:47] Go ahead.

[00:13:48] I was going to take it down. kids to, ah, don't worry about college, you can drop out. And our college graduation rates have literally gone from the high 50s to down in the low 40% range. In the same period since 2012, China's gone from the 40% range to the 60% range. So they're going in the opposite direction and doubling down on the importance of post-secondary

[00:15:02] education, as is India, as went to graduate school for computer science. And then when I actually had a job in the real world where I had to program, I was such a bad programmer. I had to take remedial classes in programming. So I went to like the best undergrad for computer science, the best graduate school for computer science. I knew I had spent my 10,000 hours on computers,

[00:16:22] programming them, building them.

[00:16:23] Then when I actually had a job, I couldn't program

[00:16:26] to save my life.

[00:16:27] I had to take remedial classes for a month or two their financial investment in their education is much higher relative to their incomes, everything. It goes up so much faster than income and inflation goes that it's ridiculous. Combined with the fact that they're not really learning anything made me really a skeptic. So here's my quick response.

[00:17:41] Neil deGrasse Tyson, physicist, right?

[00:17:45] Former guest on this podcast.

[00:17:46] Oh yeah, okay, perfect.

[00:17:48] He talks about this. What school teaches you to do we mistakenly sometimes think about Verily very narrowly the subject computer programming Gosh, look we were punching punch cards when I was in school. What what value was that? But the process the thought process the understanding of how the computers work that was all

[00:19:02] knowledge that is still very relevant to me today and so I learned how to learn basically as

[00:20:04] my English classes, I can write because of my history classes. So I may never remember those things, but it taught me to write.

[00:20:08] Interestingly. And let me ask you, like in your history classes,

[00:20:12] like you probably loved history is my guess.

[00:20:16] Not really. I couldn't remember Chalamet neither. I would never be able to answer that question.

[00:20:20] But it's because it taught me to think and read and write.

[00:20:24] So let's, than by text and by books. And what he did, though, is instead of saying, well, I don't need those books, he supplemented the books with his video and made it more interesting as a result. He's now, as you may have read in the book, he's a freshman at Harvard. And I was so proud of him. Right. So this was the question I was going to ask you about Will.

[00:21:40] Yeah.

[00:21:41] Is that he already was learning his topic at a very advanced level. based on future earning streams. This is business 101. Everybody forgets this. A college education is just like investing in a business, but you're investing in yourself. Your salary in the year 2040 is not going to be the salaries of today. Your salary in 2040, especially if fewer and fewer people

[00:23:02] go to college, your salary is going to be significantly

[00:23:06] higher than the minimum wage is. I don't know. Maybe that is 17 an hour. I don't know. Hard to hire anybody for less than $12 to $15 an hour, let's say.

[00:24:22] Again, it's not not in the same level as Harvard. Most colleges would agree with that.

[00:25:42] And then you're going to major in XY you won't get into debt, it'll be much cheaper, and life is good. But what category shouldn't go to any of these schools? So I think, and I'm one of these people that believes we're all capable of anything we want to accomplish.

[00:27:01] Unless you have some sort of a true mental for pilots. You can make $150,000, $200,000 a year being a pilot. I'm a pilot, but I'd rather own the airplane than work for somebody else and fly it. Right? Right. But let me ask this. What was your first job out of college? What was your first

[00:28:21] job?

[00:28:22] Well, first job, ended up in Gulf Oil. And so my question for you then is, did you ever have a job ever again where they asked you what college you went to? Yes, I asked them. Still, it matters today. So when you went to Southland, they already knew who you were, right?

[00:29:41] They knew you were great, they knew who you were,

[00:29:42] they wanted you to help run 7-11.

[00:29:45] They didn't really need, but he or she still sold it for a couple hundred thousand, or he or she made a living and had like 500 customers for whatever their services were. And who am I going to be more impressed by? I might be impressed by the entrepreneurial person. You might be, and every circumstance is going to be different. Think about it.

[00:31:00] I could also say I want to go be a professional basketball player because I don't need to

[00:31:04] agree.

[00:31:05] I don't need to do anything.

[00:31:06] I'm just going to go be a pro going to manage some division that has 5000 employees, or even be Yeah. But I agree they're outliers. Yeah. And skills. They don't teach a lot. In your book, you mentioned all these things about what we need to learn, why we need to learn them, how we need to learn them. None of those things are taught in college. Yes, you can argue algebra teaches you some element

[00:35:00] of critical thinking.

[00:35:02] Writing history essays and having them graded

[00:35:04] teaches you critical thinking,

[00:35:05] hopefully teaches you curiosity.

[00:35:07] That's questionable in the college environment Very possible very possible. I could have and again, it's it's all about probabilities. I'm a business guy. I Looked at it as an investment and the probabilities of success without that investment We're substantially lower than the probabilities of success with it I can start a business without putting without having sufficient capital whether it's debt or equity

[00:36:24] I can start that business and struggle along for a whole lot of years and maybe I'll get lucky

[00:37:24] I would have followed the same trajectory that many in my family did. I would have struggled and eventually I probably would have given into my own self-doubt because

[00:37:33] that's the biggest killer of people that aren't able to get that education.

[00:37:39] There's that self-doubt, that nagging, I didn't get a degree, blah, blah, blah.

[00:37:44] They start talking to themselves.

[00:37:45] They convince themselves they're not smart enough.

[00:37:47] They're not so practical. No, maybe this is practical. The things that you learn that we don't have the discipline necessarily. Some would. Some would have the discipline to get online without any instruction, without a teacher,

[00:39:01] without a formal process and learn more than you or I would have ever learned.

[00:39:07] There are some people that can do that. I've learned 10 times more about collaboration in the real world than in a college thing. I feel like I didn't really learn real world computer programming until I was in the real world. I don't know if I really learned collaboration. For instance, shortly after my first real job, I started a company and I was an entrepreneur.

[00:40:21] I don't think I would have been able to learn

[00:40:23] any of those skills in college.

[00:40:26] I took some business school classes, pretty comfortable and then you do something else that scares you to death and you almost crash and you go, oh my gosh, thank God I learned from that, right? Or you come into a crosswind or something. The pilot's license is a license to learn. It basically gives you that core kind of skill that then turns you loose in the real world

[00:41:41] to go learn from the experience of flying.

[00:41:44] And that's kind of got a crappy math teacher. It doesn't matter. I'm going to supplement this knucklehead with my own learning, but I still come out with that degree, the credentials, the ability to get into a quality graduate school, et

[00:43:03] cetera. fourth of time on computers. So would you take someone who had a Google certificate, so this is an educational program modeled by Google about what they need to hire, would you do that over a college degree or consider them equal or how would you consider it? You know, I honestly don't know because I think every situation is going to be different

[00:44:20] and that may be a case where I would say, sure, I'll take that Google certificate. Maybe they don't have to go to college if their only reasons for going would have been practical as opposed to learning oriented. But what about someone who really wants to be an actor, for instance? And the years 18 to 22, that's a critical age for a lot of people who just go to LA and audition, have more opportunity than someone who waits four years and starts at 22.

[00:45:41] Because you still need like five to 10 years of auditioning before you break out in many

[00:45:45] cases. circumstances. And I'm an outlier, James.

[00:47:02] There are going to be people sitting here that are on stem they want. They want the next genomic and a people they don't want them to go to america and stay in america so they've been doubling down on on stem but. If someone here is it is an entertaining person has no interest in stem.

[00:49:28] services. I mean, it's my answer is for everyone, shoot for the moon, learn as much as you possibly can. Shoot for the stars. Learn as much as you possibly can

[00:49:33] to give yourself the optionality. And this is what it's about. It's not about money.

[00:49:38] And this is the difference. Education is not the book. Education is money.

[00:50:44] learn on YouTube videos like your friend will,

[00:50:46] and then they could have started some career six years earlier that needed a more youthful

[00:50:51] initiative to start.

[00:50:53] I think the simple answer is you'll know.

[00:50:57] Hopefully you as an individual know.

[00:51:03] Two years, four years of college. Like you could learn, like, by, you know, there's a great site, I was just playing with it last week, you'll appreciate this site, Learningverse.ai, you type in, I want to learn all about the Roman Empire.

[00:52:22] And it'll ask you some questions, and then it comes up with an entire class curriculum, Now, I agree with that. The practical side of that though is there are realities in society of measurement systems. Whether you're borrowing money for a new business or you want to get into a country club, they're going to look at who are you and what are your credentials.

[00:53:41] Maybe you're successful enough that you don't know, and yet, let's say you're always interested in learning. So that's taken care of because you could just read books, watch YouTube videos. But the practical side, if you don't know if you're going to be a successful actor, but you happen to have majored in accounting, at the very least, you could get a job as an accounting firm

[00:55:00] and then a CFO and then so on.

[00:55:02] Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[00:55:05] Although there may be opportunity costs there

[00:55:07] where you could have been auditioning, Then I can go to college if I want if I don't if I bomb out of the NBA exactly exactly So but there is it is interesting because You know when I'm going through your book, okay We're obviously debating about college and education right now, but your book is not really about that I guess you mentioned college a couple times

[00:56:21] But only a few times and you really say the important thing is learning critical thinking learning

[00:57:22] go to college and to do well in college. But then I started realizing, you know what, they don't teach you this stuff in college.

[00:57:25] These are the soft skills.

[00:57:27] They are the soft skills.

[00:57:29] And actually, it was somebody that runs a very large academic institution that said,

[00:57:35] Jim, I want to buy a thousand books.

[00:57:38] I was like, really?

[00:57:39] And they said, yeah, I want to give that. It gives them hope that they could do it. How would you teach curiosity? I think we all have innate curiosity when we're little kids.

[00:59:00] What do we do?

[00:59:01] We ask, why?

[00:59:02] Why?

[00:59:03] How come?

[00:59:04] Why, why?

[00:59:05] Usually, we tell the kids, shut up because we're sick of hearing why.

[00:59:08] But we're curious about everything. But does anybody step back and go, hmm, I wonder why they reported that way, that tone? Oh, maybe there's a constituency. Maybe there's an advertising audience that they're appealing to or a core viewer that they're appealing to that makes them put that spin on it.

[01:00:20] Why did they report in that fashion?

[01:00:23] It's natural for us to be able to ask why.

[01:00:26] Some people actually take it to an extreme. now and this has been kind of been in the new media lately where there's a bias and okay I agree just because you say the world is round doesn't mean you have to have another class saying the world is flat like you don't have to give every single subject both sides but this bias does seem to be a bit extreme right now

[01:01:42] on some college campuses and it doesn't even matter your political affiliation is that it's a very liberal institution. And you go, wait a minute, now these conservative board members are not going to allow this to be a liberal institution. And yet the perception is there. So I step back from that, and in the book, I have a whole chapter on fear, because a lot of these perceptions are fear-based.

[01:03:03] And I mean, I'll give you a classic one.

[01:03:06] It's this issue of, are socialists When you and I went to college, and I'm a little bit after you, but I think the same kind of environment, yes, professors might have had a bias, but it stopped there.

[01:04:22] And I sort of feel like professors now are activists. and everybody believing that the world was going to hell because all of us our age were a bunch of hippies smoking dope and wearing funny clothes and growing our hair long. You still have your long hair. I don't know how you got away with that. I wish I could. I don't know either. But the older generation thought we were just lost.

[01:05:42] We were lost.

[01:05:43] And that this was coming from teachers who were filling our heads with crazy stuff. Like the Vietnam kids and the hippies, dope smoking hippie freaks all grew up, made a little money and became conservatives. And now they're complaining, one of my best friends from high school, just complaining is like screaming about his kid, being a law.

[01:07:00] Yeah, I guess you're right.

[01:07:03] I look at, so my father was born in 1936.

[01:07:07] So I look at his voting record, Instead of complaining about schools and teachers and teachers unions and all this stuff, we should be doubling down on our investment in technology to make those schools more effective. But instead of rallying around the opportunity to transform our public education system just

[01:08:20] as we've transformed retail or automobiles or whatever, instead, no, we're fighting about The United States is very resilient. Our economy, to a large extent today, is driven by some fundamentals like technology that we at least today still do have an advantage in socially-fronts of technology. Technology is not going to go back in the bottle. We're not going to go backwards.

[01:09:40] We're going to continue, and as long't manufacturing things. So of course, if you don't cut down trees for two years, price of timber is going to go up. Exactly. And everybody was like,

[01:11:00] oh my God, having spent a lot of my career in the petroleum industry, I looked at,

[01:12:05] right now until you see where things stabilize out.

[01:12:10] As a result, we overreacted from negative crude oil prices to $100 a barrel and gas prices went up to five bucks.

[01:12:15] Everybody blamed inflation and blamed the government,

[01:12:18] blamed all kinds of stuff.

[01:12:21] I wasn't worried because it was an overreaction that was likely

[01:12:26] to swing back into a more normalized range. My final question, I have one more question,

[01:13:41] but I want to just say the title of your book,

[01:13:44] Education is Freedom, the product in my life that I have probably bought the most into 7-Eleven is Twinkies. And I'm convinced they've changed the formula

[01:15:00] some time in the past 30 years on Twinkies.

[01:15:03] Because it doesn't taste as good as when I was a kid.

[01:15:05] Now is that just because I had a, direction because it doesn't feel like as fresh. It feels like artificially fresh. They put flavoring in to make it flavor. This has nothing to do with Hostess. Maybe they're doing anything right. It's just my experience. Hostess ended up going under, changing hands, being bought out by somebody else. It's a very different company than it was. Honestly think about it a lot. I have two kids, three step kids. They're all thinking about these issues. And it's a topic of conversation a lot in my life. So thank you for humoring me on this. Your book is excellent though for so many other reasons about learning and education. And also thank you for sharing your experiences.

[01:17:42] Thank you for being the CEO of 7-Eleven

[01:17:44] when I was a shareholder.

[01:17:45] And then the CEO of Blockbuster.

[01:17:48] We didn't even get to that,