The Rise of Contract Work, Why College Is Making People Miserable, Another State Getting Rid of Degree Requirements (DF#94)

Hannah:

Welcome back. Welcome back to the podcast. We are stoked to have you on with us. As always, let's jump right into it. College shame spiral. Academia is making people miserable. What else is new? More than 40% of students currently enrolled in an undergraduate degree program have considered dropping out of college in the past six months. Breaking out, as we say. This is according to research done by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. They publish this article on CNN. Two out of five undergrad students currently in school are considering breaking out of college. Now, you and I see this all the time, and this is why I wanted to talk about this. But if people post about this or if they ask for feedback, we see it on Reddit, we see it on TikTok, we see it on Twitter. If anyone asks, hey, should I finish my degree? Everyone's knee jerk reaction is, yeah, absolutely. You need to. You absolutely should. What that is, and you and I have talked about this before. It's sunk cost stop paying for something that's making you miserable. It's wasting your time. It's wasting your energy. It is wasting your money. You do not have to keep going to school if you do not want to keep going to school, you can stop. You can leave. You are not going to ruin your life. You are probably going to be fine and you're probably going to be more fine than you're going to be if you continue going into debt to purchase something that is making you miserable. So with that in mind, here are the five things you can do other than continue to go to college and pay for paper while continuing to be miserable. So you can go and you can get a job. You can find apprenticeship or on the job training. You can earn a license or certification. You can build a business or you can learn a skill. All of these are better options than going into debt and spending money. You do not have to pay for a piece of paper that does not guarantee you a job, and especially if you don't want to be there. It's just such a drain on people's mental and emotional energy. And that, I think, is not really addressed. But there's also a time cost. So that time in your life when you are that young, when you're usually going to school, that time is so valuable because there's so much you can do and you have so much energy, and you have more time, even though it doesn't feel like it. A lot of the time, you have more time than you will later in life. And it is important, I think, for people to use that time wisely. If you spend it in college being miserable, that is a huge waste. It's a huge waste, and you could do anything else with that time. Even working a minimum wage job that does not stress you out is better for you than going to college and paying for paper while being miserable.

Ryan [00:03:05]:

Yeah, there's a bunch of things there. But the first thing is that those five options that you gave, those are the five degree free pathways. We get asked all the time about what can you do other than college? What can you do other than the job that you currently have? And we would always have the answer, oh, well, anything. And while that is the truth, that is the honest truth. You can do anything, doesn't matter, and you can figure out a way to do whatever it is that you want, but that's not super helpful. People's eyes would just glaze over, and they would just roll into the back of their heads and be like, really? That's not that used to be useful, which I thought we were being helpful, but we really weren't. So I'll just go over those again real quick. The first degree free pathway is get a job, any job. The second is find an apprenticeship or on the job training. The third is going to be earn a license or certification. The fourth pathway is going to be build a business, and number five is going to be learn a skill. And we will go over all of these more in depth in a future episode. If you want to sign up for a free course that we're going to be making on these five degree free pathways, we think that everybody should learn about your different options other than college, and it should be free. So go to degreefree co pathways and sign up for the waitlist. If you are listening to this when this episode comes out, if you're listening to this in the future, it might be a legitimate landing page where I have it all lined out, and then it'll be a link to the course. But at the beginning, it's probably just going to be like a form with your name and email, and then I'll email you once the course is actually up.

Hannah [00:04:50]:

Yeah, we've been working on that. Ryan specifically has been working on getting that up in the course. But the main reason that we did that was because, like Ryan said, people would ask us, okay, well, I don't want to go to college anymore. I'm done. I'm breaking out. I'm done. And then they'd say, so what can I do? We'd be like, oh yeah, like he said, anything you want. And people just it's so overwhelming that's an overwhelming answer. And so what we did was we sat down and we for weeks, we tried to we tried to nail this down and we finally came up with these pathways and we realized that that for most people is going to encompass any path that you want to use to get work or education without having to pay a college. And this will help you figure out which one's the right one for you. If you are trying to figure out what to do with your life, if you're trying to change jobs, if you are trying to figure out what to do with your kid, or if your kid is trying to figure out what to do with themselves, this is a really good fit. If you know anybody who falls into those categories, please send them this. It's a free course. It will help them figure out and sort through what they want to do with their life in order to educate themselves or earn money to make a living. So we feel pretty strongly about it.

Ryan [00:05:57]:

Yeah, absolutely. And I want to correct with one thing that you said there. You said for most people, and that's erroneous it's for everybody. We've spent a lot of time and it's not just weeks. I've spent months thinking about this framework and thinking about every single opportunity and every single thing that you can do. And literally these five degree free pathways you can take from your very first job, from your very first work, because it's not just a job, right? Number four is build a business and you can do it all the way until the day that you retire. And every single person under the sun, even if you're a doctor, even if you're a lawyer, you look at this framework and be like, yeah, okay, well, those are learn a skill or earn a certification, those types of things. Okay, so the second thing that I wanted to hone in on what you were talking about was kind of just the nomenclature or the vocabulary that you were using. And one of the things that is really important is language. And the language around dropping out, or what we call breaking out. And it sounds semantic because it kind of is, but it's really important because dropping out, when you look at it, it has such a negative connotation of, okay, well, you dropped out of college when it's like, no, I didn't have to go, I broke out.

Hannah [00:07:16]:

What's crazy too, is if someone was purchasing a house and they realized that they didn't want to live in the house and then they stopped the deal. Do we say they dropped out of the deal? No, we say that they decided not to go ahead with the purchase.

Ryan [00:07:27]:

You think that you dropped out of the deal when you're on the other side and you wanted it to happen.

Hannah [00:07:33]:

When you want to make money off the deal, when you're trying to sell.

Ryan [00:07:35]:

Yeah. So it's a negative connotation that makes everybody feel bad, which is the whole reason why we created degree free. It's the entire reason, or one of the biggest reasons why we created degree free, because there wasn't a word that wasn't dropout before we did this. There was no word or words to describe somebody that dropped out, quote, unquote, or that broke out of college. And we were just that. We need to reclaim this and we need to make it empowering for the degree free people and for people who chose that path in life. And that's what degree free is.

Hannah [00:08:10]:

Colleges do not define who you are if you did not purchase from them. That is something I think is really important to drive home here. I did not buy, I did not complete a purchase of a debt product from a company, a corporation that sells it. They do not get to tell me who I am relative to society because I did not purchase from them. They do not all of a sudden now decide who I am relative to my work, relative to my career, relative to my profession, relative to my level of education. It is kind of crazy that we have allowed colleges to own this label because that is why we are in such a predicament with the $1.7 trillion of student debt. That's why colleges and universities have gone under the radar with their $848,000,000,000 hedge funds, and they can pretend like they're nonprofits and they can pretend like they're interested in the common good when they're actually just out for the cash like everybody else. And I think that that kind of sums up why it is not college dropout. It is degree free. It is college breakout because you dodged a bullet. You dodged debt. You decided not to purchase because that is what a degree is. At the end of the day, a degree is a purchase and deciding not to make it does not define who you are as a person in the same way that purchasing it does not define who you are as a person. It is a purchase. Some people make it, some people do not. And I think that that's very important.

Ryan [00:09:33]:

And yes, college doesn't define who you are if you didn't purchase it. And just like how you said, college doesn't define who you are if you did purchase it as somebody who did purchase a degree, it doesn't define me. If you spend five and a half years of your life and you go into debt to get it, it doesn't have to define you.

Hannah [00:09:49]:

That actually brings up another point. I'm going to ask the audience, too. I'm going to ask you folks something I've always wondered about, and I'm going to look into it after this. But if you know holler, let us know. Go to YouTube, leave it in the comments, shoot us an email. But when I look at labor statistics when I look at BLS data, when I look at US. Census data, and I look at it, we look at it a lot, we live on those sites, reading this information, reading this data, reading these reports. And something that always struck me as strange or more recently, after I've been reading them so much, is how they've been allowed to delineate the entire US. Workforce by college degree. That is the defining factor of work data, which is so interesting, right? Because who decided that that's how we measure people's work? Why is that the most important factor in measuring someone's success? And I would bet I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that this goes back to the 1960s when the government started subsidizing student loans, and that is when they started to use that as a measuring stick for employment, as a measuring stick for wealth, for net income, for all of these things, because they're trying to sell it. And that is why now you divide people based on a college degree category as opposed to any other category, like skill or length of time in the workforce, or whether or not the age that somebody started working, which I think is probably more important than anything else, actually. And so I think that if you know, please let us know. If you have some experience with data and you know the answer to this, or you have a different opinion about what should be used instead to be more accurate, let us know, because I'd be curious.

Ryan [00:11:27]:

Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. If you think about it another way, it would be just as crazy, or it would be apparently crazy. It would look crazy on the surface if you inserted a company's name or like a company specific certification. So, for example, instead of taking college degrees and saying that this is the rubric, or this is the metric that we are going to use and define success for, let's use a Google certification instead. Let's use insert Google Data Analytics certification. Insert a Salesforce Admin certification. Insert an AWS certification. And then if you do that exercise and you look at that, you're like, yes, I see, that's ridiculous. Who made that decision? I just want to point out for those listening the absurdity of it or why it is such a big deal.

Hannah [00:12:32]:

That is a very insightful point, and I wish I had thought of it, because that is a great way to illustrate that exact thing. So like I said, people, if you know if you know the answer, if you know when that started, holler at us. We'd like to know before we get.

Ryan [00:12:44]:

Into our next topic, if you want to learn how to get hired without a college degree, if you want to learn more about degree free, different jobs that are out there and different tactics that you can use on your job search to get hired and land that work you want go to degreefree. Co newsletter. To sign up for our free weekly.

Hannah [00:13:02]:

Newsletter, let's talk about Josh Appearo, the degree free hero of the hour. Josh Appearo is the new governor of Pennsylvania, and boy, do I love this guy. His first act as governor of Pennsylvania was to remove degree requirements from state jobs in Pennsylvania, freeing up 92% of state jobs to degree free people. And like I said, I watched his speech about this on ABC, and I was amazed at the way that he spoke about this and his passion behind this issue, because that is how everybody should feel about it. Because it's ridiculous that people have been kept out of these jobs for absolutely no reason except for corporate college greed. And Josh Shapiro, in another brilliant move, and Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, has started an apprenticeship program for teachers. What this does is it pays paraprofessionals and teachers aides to apprentice and be trained and to become certified as teachers in the state of Pennsylvania. And I love this, because what this does is it cuts down the financial risk and burden on people who want to be teachers, which is a huge problem.

Ryan [00:14:05]:

Yeah, absolutely. One of the biggest problems with the teacher shortage is that in order to become a teacher now, for at least majority of the teachers out there, especially in the public school systems, is that you need a college degree. And that college degree is a really heavy burden, and it's very weighty because you go into $40,000 worth of debt, $100,000 worth of debt, depending on where you go and get your degree. And then you go out and become a teacher, and then you hate your job, one. But then, two, you're not getting paid enough because you have this drag on you, because you have six figures worth of debt. And on a public school teacher salary, you're not going to be able to pay it off. Sure, maybe we need to be paying our teachers more. I don't know.

Hannah [00:14:52]:

And I always say this, people what about and I'm like, okay, yes. All these things. What we're doing right now is we're dealing with the core of the issue, which is that you can't charge people who are going to make 40 to do their jobs. That's literally insane. That's insane. It's insanity. And it shouldn't be allowed. People should not be allowed to do that. And what's happened is, what people don't see on the back end of this is that just like, there's lobbies for everything else, there are educational lobbies. And what happens and this happens with it's not just teachers. It's also nurses. They went after the nurses, and this is what happens. Colleges got greedy, and this makes sense because they just want to make money. And so what they did was they went to unions, they went to state, they went to the federal government, and they lobbied to make sure that not only do teachers have to have bachelor's degrees. It didn't used to be like that. You have to have a bachelor's degree. And then now they want to push people to get master's degrees, too. And now your raises as a teacher are contingent upon your holding of a master's degree and not your performance, which is just asinine. That is so ridiculous. And so they've put a payment boundary in front of people who, if they're just good at their job, should get paid more. And like I said, they did the same thing with nurses. This is something I'll probably cover in another episode. But basically what happened was colleges went back to people that have already purchased college degrees because your best customer is one that's already bought from you. And what they said was, hey, now you're trauma. Hey. The status of your hospital, the rating of your hospital is now dependent on how many of your nurses have additional education. And really, what that is is a money grab. They want to make these people who already went to nursing school go back and get a bachelor's degree, go back and get a master's degree, even though they've already been successfully doing their jobs for years and years and years, decades, some of them, anyway. I have strong feelings about that, but I'm excited to see what happens with this, because this is now the second state that has instituted a teacher apprenticeship program, which is kind of back to the future, right? Like, the future is actually the past, which is going to be paid apprenticeship for all jobs like this. Paid apprenticeship for social workers, paid apprenticeships for teachers. I think potentially paid apprenticeships for nursing, too, because there's just such a need in the same way that there's such a need for teachers.

Ryan [00:16:54]:

Yeah, that's actually kind of a perfect segue into what I wanted to talk about. But before we get there, one of the biggest things that we hear is that I don't have any network, and I don't really know where to start. So start with us. Connect with us on LinkedIn. I'm Ryan maruyama. She's hannah Maruyama at LinkedIn. I will put links to everything in the Show notes, degreefree codcast. You can connect with us on LinkedIn there. When you connect with us, drop us a note. Let us know that you're listening to the podcast, what episode, what you like about it, and more importantly, what you don't like. That's way more helpful, actually.

Hannah [00:17:27]:

Yes. We love to hear your complaints.

Ryan [00:17:30]:

It's not just complaints.

Hannah [00:17:31]:

This is the complaint hotline.

Ryan [00:17:33]:

Yeah, exactly. That's so funny.

Hannah [00:17:35]:

Yeah, the Complaint hotline is us.

Ryan [00:17:38]:

But it does help if you have anything that you don't like about the podcast, because we make this podcast for you, and we want it to be better.

Hannah [00:17:46]:

Yeah. And we don't want you to not like it. So tell us if you want us to fix something.

Ryan [00:17:49]:

And once again, the links to everything that we talk about in this episode can be found at degreefree co podcast getting into what I wanted to talk about was actually that New Jersey is getting rid of college degree requirements for a bunch of their jobs.

Hannah [00:18:05]:

I am shocked.

Ryan [00:18:06]:

I know, exactly. And I say a bunch of their jobs. I can't give a percentage because they don't know yet, or at least at the time of this recording, they don't know yet how many they are going to within the next six months. This executive order just came out. And within the six months after this, they are going to be looking and doing an audit of all of their state jobs and figuring out which ones do not require college degrees. I am going to be disappointed if it's not the vast majority of them, but it sounds like from the pest conferences and from the executive order itself, it sounds like it's going to be a lot of them that they're going to be getting rid of the college degree requirement for.

Hannah [00:18:51]:

Keep in mind that these state jobs are not all going to be admin style jobs and office work. Some of them are going to be people that operate toll bridges like small bridge operators. It's going to be state park rangers, probably librarians. These are all the type of jobs that are way over credentialed and ridiculous because it's so silly that somebody would require somebody to be to have a bachelor's degree to work outside in the forest when somebody could just be an experienced woodsman woodswoman and want to do that. So I'm excited for this because we're excited to see this across states because it's kind of awesome.

Ryan [00:19:23]:

New Jersey is following Utah, Alaska, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Colorado and North Carolina as far as the states that have dropped degree requirements for a bunch of their state jobs. And it is the I don't know, I can't count. So what is that, like seven? I don't know, whatever, doesn't matter.

Hannah [00:19:44]:

Math in public.

Ryan [00:19:45]:

Yeah, somebody count that for me. It's the 7th state that's dropping the degree requirements, but it's not going to be the last.

Hannah [00:19:54]:

You know what's so crazy about this is this is happening so quickly. That one, you stole my next point. But that's okay because actually I can add to your point because this is literally happening so fast. I remember I got a TikTok comment last year when I believe it was Maryland was the first state to do this and the person was like, state? You can't get any state jobs without a college degree. And it was literally 30 minutes after that the state of Maryland was like, whatever job you want without a college degree. Anyway, I thought that was funny. But this has bipartisan support. This is Democrats, Republicans, across aisle lines. People are realizing that this is a huge issue and it's just so ridiculous to keep people out of jobs that they could absolutely do for no other reason. Than they didn't make a purchase. And on top of that, 62% of the workforce over 25 is degree free. So it's the majority of people, and you're passing up a majority of the unemployable workforce. And I think companies and states are both realizing that they're going to have to utilize this workforce in order to actually continue to have their economies run. So that's why they're all in a rush to get this done. And probably, too, what's happening is once Maryland did it, the way it works is usually people will just take drafted legislation and then they'll just change it to make it passable on their own state, in their own state houses. And so they probably just took Maryland's and then have just revised it and now it's just making the rounds. That's usually what happens with things like this.

Ryan [00:21:12]:

Right? Exactly. And it's probably the same way that we got into this mess, to be honest. Where the colleges, one state started requiring college degrees or one company started requiring college degrees and then they were like, oh, okay, well, we'll do that too. And one of the things about the college degrees, they're kind of shooting themselves in the foot, the colleges, is because they are getting greedy. And they've gotten greedy for the past 60 years. And because the price of college has skyrocketed and they are now pumping out an inconsistent product. So inconsistent that it can no longer be the metric that you use to hire against or to hire with.

Hannah [00:21:53]:

Yeah, it's so unreliable. It used to be a stand in for hard skills and it stopped doing that and then it was a stand in for soft skills, but now it's not even a stand in for that anymore. And people are screening people to see if they have soft skills. And employers are reporting that across the board, grad graduates do not have any of the soft skills that they're looking for. Like, by and large, the majority of graduates do not have them because they're not teaching it in college.

Ryan [00:22:11]:

It's such a glaring and obvious fact that colleges are businesses just like anything else. When you see this in businesses as well, where the demand is so high that they start pumping up supply and the quality of their product goes down and to fill demand. And here we are.

Hannah [00:22:30]:

Yeah. And to be clear, we're saying the product is the degree, not the people. That's what we're saying. But I think to make this not discouraging to people, too. Just because you didn't learn soft skills in college does not mean you don't have them. And so you need to really focus on honing the natural soft skills you have, teaching yourself some more on your own time, and then adding one or two crucial hard skills. You can go back. Please listen to past episodes. We talk about this ad nauseam. But if you are a college graduate and your degree is not serving you. You can, like I said, work on your natural soft skills and add one or two hard skills by looking up in demand professions right now, like data analytics or drone pilot. Use one of the pathways, use certifications, use skills. Find something that's one crucial skill that's valuable and then practice your soft skills and that is going to get you further than any degree.

Ryan [00:23:17]:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And to make this episode not just us bitching about college the entire time.

Hannah [00:23:25]:

But these are my favorite episodes, right?

Ryan [00:23:27]:

I know. I did want to talk about one more lighter topic, which I just found hilarious. This was an article in CNBC and I'll link to everything at Degreefree Codcast for everybody, but this is about a New York City worker saw her company was hiring for her job but paying $90,000 more.

Hannah [00:23:52]:

What?

Ryan [00:23:53]:

Yeah, this was a few weeks ago and like I said, I'll link to the article.

Hannah [00:23:57]:

How did you find that out?

Ryan [00:23:58]:

Well, great question. She found it out because New York City has the wage transparency laws like.

Hannah [00:24:07]:

Colorado when they have to post the range.

Ryan [00:24:09]:

Yes, exactly. And if you listened to our episodes before, I really like the salary transparency you go back to and listen to the salary depends on experience. Like it's one of the biggest job lies out there. Salary depends on experience. That's just a lie. It is just a lie. Salary depends on experience within a range.

Hannah [00:24:33]:

Make sure you clarify that. You got a lot of hate last time.

Ryan [00:24:36]:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly.

Hannah [00:24:38]:

I know YouTube was furious.

Ryan [00:24:42]:

Yeah, exactly. So if you have issue with that.

Hannah [00:24:44]:

Please go to take it up with this beard.

Ryan [00:24:46]:

Yeah, go to YouTube and comment and tell me. And I'm an idiot. And the salary depends on experience. When you see that on the compensation, that's just a lie. Salary depends on experience within a range is accurate. Because every company has a range for that role. What I mean by that is just because you are some CEO of a Fortune 500 company or a Fortune 50 company, it doesn't matter if you apply to a data analytics, entry level, data analytics role. They are not going to pay you the salary that you were making as a CEO because it's not within their budget. It's not within their range.

Hannah [00:25:24]:

Right. You don't make half a million dollars a year just because you were one at one point.

Ryan [00:25:27]:

Exactly. It doesn't matter if you have way more experience in that role. So it doesn't depend on the experience. It depends on your experience within the range that they have budgeted for it and why they don't just tell you the range that they have for that role is just because capitalism and because they want to get you at the cheapest price possible.

Hannah [00:25:45]:

And you want to get them at the highest price possible.

Ryan [00:25:47]:

Yeah, exactly. It's just a power exchange, but it just doesn't. Make sense that you would hold that information back from people because you are trying to get candidates within a certain range. So why don't you just tell them what the range is?

Hannah [00:26:01]:

I think that's going to end up being the future similar to having maternity leave at companies. It's just going to be like this is a basic polite rules of engagement that employees and companies do between each other. I think that we'll get more towards that.

Ryan [00:26:13]:

But the main reason why I wanted to bring this up, the salary transparency is nice and it's awesome, but it highlights something that we talk about on this show all the time, which is that retention raises, and those are raises to keep people that are already in the company that is doing the work, they are much crappier than new higher budgets.

Hannah [00:26:38]:

Yeah, it's like 3%.

Ryan [00:26:40]:

Yes, because they are already thinking that they have you at this price and so why are we going to pay you the market rate now? And so if you are trying to get a raise, the best way that you can get a raise is by leaving the company. This isn't necessarily true for all companies because some companies have it right. And what I mean by that is it is much more expensive to hire somebody new to get them into that role. By some surveys, by some estimates, it takes six months before a new hire is ever productive enough to start making a positive economic impact on the company's bottom line. And if it takes six months more and you're paying them X amount $90,000 more, then you're wasting a lot of money when you can just give that same person a $90,000 raise and they can be effective in their new position.

Hannah [00:27:42]:

We are getting closer and closer to a contract economy all of the time because what that would do is it would fix two things. One, you frequently reassess your contract with the company and you have opportunities that are built in to negotiate. And then two, you will know the market rate because you will be a contract worker. And that is something that I see coming closer and closer. And then to wrap it up, that was my last thing, is that NPR estimates that by 2028 over 50% of the US workforce will be contract workers. And I think that that has a lot to do with it. People are starting to realize that they don't have as much when they're employees. There are not built in ways for us to renegotiate our work, not the boundaries of work, not responsibilities and not pay. And I think that everything is pushing us into this more gig economy, this more contract work, where people are 1099 more often because they have more authority over their pay and they have more options to just get right to work and to renegotiate their salaries more often.

Ryan [00:28:41]:

The biggest pushback that we get here is that you don't have access to health care easily, which is a very valid point.

Hannah [00:28:49]:

It is, and honestly, this is the most political we'll get on here, but health care should not be untied to your employment. It's nobody like it shouldn't be because it's a tool that is used to keep you in a job when you could be in a different job.

Ryan [00:28:59]:

Yeah, exactly. It's very archaic and we are swiftly coming to the point where it makes no sense. Maybe in the past it made sense because it was all employment, people were just mobile and there was no contracting. But now it is going towards the gig economy and health care shouldn't be tied to your job.

Hannah [00:29:19]:

Yeah. So when we find out the solution for that, we'll let you know. But as of right now, we don't know.

Ryan [00:29:23]:

But going back to the point of this article of this person that applied to her own role but going back to this article about this New York City worker that applied to her job to get a $90,000 raise, it's just a good reminder that if you want a raise one like we already said, the best way to do it is to leave the company. And I know that it sucks. I know that it sucks. But getting out there, applying to jobs while you have a job is going to be a lot better. And it's a lot easier than when you wait until you're unemployed, if you ever become unemployed. But then also going back and negotiating with your boss, negotiating with your company and saying, hey, I saw the range here, I want a raise up to this level as well, and here's why. And it's an argument for you keeping tabs on the things that you're doing and the responsibilities that you are currently doing in your role. You need to be having a document, a living document, and that's supposed to be your resume. But I find it's a lot easier if you keep an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Doc that just has your daily responsibilities and that has different numbers and statistics that you have positive impact for and about your company. And you can go and say, these are all the bullet points of what I do here's, the value that I bring. And you can make it very concrete and you say, because I do all these things and nobody else does it, or because I do this better than anybody else in the department. This is why I deserve $90,000. Just like the person that you're hiring off the seat, joe Schmo off the street.

Hannah [00:31:11]:

Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more. I think that that's fantastic advice. That's fantastic advice. We should all be doing that.

Ryan [00:31:16]:

Also, it helps to build that resume for when you go and apply to different companies outside.

Hannah [00:31:22]:

Well, it's never been easier. Now you just pull those things from the Excel sheet and plug them into Chat GPT and tell it to make it pretty.

Ryan [00:31:26]:

Yeah. And that's this week's episode. If you want to get more tips and tricks on how to get hired without a college degree, go to Degreefree co newsletter. To sign up for our free weekly newsletter, once again, connect with Hannah and I on LinkedIn, ryan Maruyama on LinkedIn and Hannah Maruyama on LinkedIn. And if you want the Show Notes degreefree codcast, you can get all of the links to everything that we talked about. Last but not least, if you want access to the free course about the five degreefree pathways, go to degreefree co pathways. If you are listening to this immediately when it comes out, it's probably just going to be a form with your name and email. But if you're listening to this later into the future, hopefully it's a proper landing page by now.

Hannah [00:32:15]:

And once again, thanks so much for listening.

Ryan [00:32:16]:

Until next time, guys. Allah.