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The Homeschool How To
I don't claim to know anything about homeschooling, so I set out on a journey to ask the people who do! Join me as I chat with homeschoolers to discuss; "why are people homeschooling," "what are all the ways people are using to homeschool today," and ultimately, "should I homeschool my kids?"
The Homeschool How To
#120: Skip the Loans, Keep the Dreams: Hannah Maruyama's Degree-Free Revolution
Hannah Maruyama joins The Homeschool How To podcast to challenge everything you thought you knew about higher education and career success. Having walked away from college at 16 after discovering its politicized environment and questionable academic value, Hannah shares her journey to developing a groundbreaking approach to career preparation that's saving families hundreds of thousands of dollars while launching young adults into thriving careers.
The conversation reveals shocking statistics about our student loan crisis. Despite the cultural push toward college, only 7.7% of jobs legally require degrees—a mere 0.3% increase since 1965—yet we've accumulated $1.7 trillion in student loan debt. Hannah exposes how government subsidization of student loans created artificial demand, leading to bankruptcy-exempt debt that follows borrowers for life. Most disturbing is the poor return on investment: only 27% of graduates use their degrees, while the average bachelor's degree costs $104,000 and takes 5.5 years to complete.
For homeschooling families, this information is especially valuable. Rather than measuring success by college admissions, Hannah suggests focusing on four key questions: Where does your child want to live? How much money do they need? What schedule works for them? What work environment suits them? From these answers, families can identify careers that truly fit their children's goals and strategically acquire the specific skills employers need—without unnecessary degrees.
Through her company Degree Free, Hannah has helped hundreds of young adults identify their ideal career paths and secure high-paying jobs through targeted skill acquisition, often out-earning their degree-holding peers in a fraction of the time and cost. Whether your teens are approaching graduation or you're just beginning your homeschool journey, this episode offers a refreshing perspective on preparing children for genuine success in an economy that's rapidly changing beyond what traditional education can support.
Hannah's Instagram TikTok: @DegreeFree
What is the most important thing we can teach our kids?
HOW TO HANDLE AN EMERGENCY!
This could mean life or death in some cases!
Help a child you know navigate how to handle an emergency situation with ease:
Let's Talk, Emergencies! -and don't forget The Activity Book!
The Tuttle Twins - use code Cheryl15 for 15% the age 5-11 series!
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Welcome to this week's episode of the Homeschool How-To. I'm Cheryl and I invite you to join me on my quest to find out why are people homeschooling, how do you do it, how does it differ from region to region? And should I homeschool my kids? Stick with me as I interview homeschooling families across the country to unfold the answers to each of these questions week by week. Welcome, and with us today on the Homeschool How-To, I have Hannah Mariyama. Hannah, thank you for being here. Absolutely. I've been looking forward to this all week.
Speaker 1:So I don't even know much about like your brand. I just know that you promote the degree free kind of lifestyle for students here. And actually you were recommended to me from one of my very good friends we both homeschool our kids and she was like have you heard of this lady? She maybe, maybe we're on like the Thousand Hours Outside podcast or something, and she's like you've got to listen to this. Get her on your podcast. So I was like okay, and I just sent you a message and then I watched a couple of your things on Instagram and I love it because I was that person that was told to be, somebody.
Speaker 1:You got to go to college. Got to go to college. You got to go to college and back in you know 2000, that was kind of that era where, like people were, everybody was starting to go to college, or they look at you like you're just going to be a scumbag for the rest of your life. So you did it and then you come out with $200,000 of debts and then we wonder why nobody can afford houses or nobody can afford to be a one income household, you know, and be able to stay home with our kids and homeschool them, because we're all in a million dollars of debt. And that's even before you're home. So I love what you're promoting. Where did you even get into this idea or have the realization that we can have a successful lifestyle without the college degree?
Speaker 2:Well, my experience actually comes from my own background. So I had a teacher in high school who told me that I was bored in high school and that I was wasting my time, and so he said okay, well, you need to clip these classes and then go ahead and do enroll at the local university. And so I did that, and so I actually was accepted into college when I was 16. And so I started going full time my senior year of high school. I didn't go to high school at all, I was full time on a college campus, and that experience was really eye opening for me because one I saw that there was very little academic or scholarly value. I will say. I saw that open thought was not something that was welcome on a university campus and that asking questions was frowned upon and that everything was incredibly politicized, which I found rather shocking. I was not expecting that when I went Ended up doing really poorly in some classes because I was given bad grades because of the opinions that I had and the questions that I asked during class. Grades because of the opinions that I had and the questions that I asked during class, I ended up taking those things that I had written that had gotten me those poor grades and instead they got me a paid job at the university paper. I was the youngest paid writer on the staff of the university paper. And then I was just sitting in a class one day about to take a sociology midterm what would have been my. I think it was on track to be a sophomore at that point, but it was during my freshman year of college. And just sitting there with a sociology midterm, with this absolutely insufferable professor who I could not stand and I just went what am I doing here? So I tore the midterm in half, I threw it in the trash and I left. And that was actually my experience with I no longer call it higher education, with college. That was my experience with the college industrial complex. And so I left not knowing, not having a clear plan which is something I've now fixed for young adults.
Speaker 2:But I left with no clear plan. I was just working. I was working, I was putting myself through school at the time and I was. I had moved out, I was living with roommates and I proceeded to work a series of jobs, a ton of different kinds of jobs. I worked as a, I worked on a dolphin boat, I worked as a surf instructor, I worked at a jujitsu gym, I did all kinds of stuff and ended up that I I ended up working in tourism and sales and then COVID hit in 2020.
Speaker 2:I was living in Hawaii at the time and I realized that my job was not going to come back because tourism was absolutely decimated and, at that time, having held several jobs already that required a college degree but obviously did not, because they had hired me, and I had really begun to question the validity of okay, you know all these people, people love the college, oh, but degrees are required for all these jobs. Yet I had held already at that age I was I think I was 25 at the time and I had held multiple jobs that said they required degrees and profits, you know like big, big kid jobs basically and ended up 30 days I reshuffled into tech with no technical background whatsoever Zero. I cannot stress enough how little technical background I had. 31 days of study, $362 later I had a remote, four day workweek job that was out earning the median master's degree holder.
Speaker 2:On my offer letter it said college advanced computer science degree required and that told me that there was further to push this envelope and also that it wasn't real to begin with and that just led me to developing a process for helping people figure out how to strategically figure out what jobs actually require degrees, and then how to learn skills necessary that employers are actually looking for, because they don't hire based on their job descriptions.
Speaker 2:They hire for other things and so being very strategic in figuring out what you need to learn, the order you need to learn it, and then figuring out whether degrees are legally required for that or not. And then I have now used that process hundreds of times with young adults 16 to 20 years old to help them figure out what they need to be learning, save them hundreds of thousands of dollars years in college and get them into old. To help them figure out what they need to be learning, save them hundreds of thousands of dollars years in college and get them into jobs that help them actually live the way they want, as opposed to having to wrap their entire lives around work.
Speaker 1:I love that. I love that and you know, on this podcast, I primarily interview homeschooling families. But if there's information that can help homeschooling families, this is it, because one of the things that we hear as homeschoolers is oh well, how are you going to get your kid into college and I've created posts on this before that one your kid is going to be accepted into college if they want to go to college. As a homeschooler, you know, if anything, colleges want them more because they show a little bit more independent thought and initiative. However, why do you want your kid to go to college should be the question. What is it that? Are you just pushing them Like?
Speaker 1:I was kind of pushed like go and do the thing and then when I came out, I was twiddling my thumbs and I was like I guess I'll take a government civil service exam because that's what my parents did and pushed me to do because they had pensions, even though my mom is 77 years old right now and trying to work at a grocery store. And I'm like what was the whole point of working 35 years for the government to get a pension and you're 77 now and still so bored that you need yeah, that you want a job, just to have a reason to get out of bed in the morning, because it's like you didn't spend those 35 years finding something that you really loved to do. And I think it goes right down to the school level. And when we push our kids to go just to regular school, just primary education, why, why do we do it? Why are you sending them there?
Speaker 1:Some people might have valid reasons, but mostly we don't think about it, we just do what the masses do and it's like well, what do you want them to come out? Knowing to be self-sufficient, to run a business, to be, you know, a world traveler? What are the things that you want for them? We never like really stop and think about that. So that's why I love what you're pushing so much, because it's like at the point now where we're investing tens of thousands of dollars and then you get behind the whole college loans, I mean where else will they just let you take out that kind of money with no security? Well, they do have security. They take our tax dollars and they pay themselves. It's just like so convoluted. I love this. So I mean that is a big undertaking. To start a business, to learn, where you need a degree. And where you don't, how did you even begin to find the job? Like you know, did you go undercover. Do you really need a degree for this?
Speaker 2:Well, so after I got that initial tech job, I ended up at an AI and machine learning startup that was training really complex software that essentially reads legal contracts for Fortune 500 companies, and so I saw some things while I was doing that, because I did that for about three and a half years and that taught me a lot about product, about problems and also about the way that those companies were hiring, which I thought was interesting because I saw quite a bit of change while I was there, and some of it was definitely brought about by COVID, but, upon further research, actually the removal of degrees in general has been going on since 2014,. According to the Burning Glass Institute, this is not a new phenomenon and it's all starting to. The market's basically starting to level out, and because the addition of degree requirements all goes back to a legal precedent that was set by the Supreme Court in 1971. And it's a case called Greggs versus Duke Power, and basically what happened was a company was using a skills assessment to discriminate against certain people that they were hiring.
Speaker 2:This is a civil rights issue and they were in the wrong for sure, and so what the Supreme Court ruled was they could no longer use skills assessments, and so companies began to use degrees because the only people that could afford degrees looked a certain way, because the only people that could afford degrees looked a certain way, and so that is something that was very much the motivation behind all of the degree requirements. And still to this day, the result of that was companies relying on it and not even understanding why they were used as requirements in the first place. And so a huge thing that happened was that, as a result of that case which had happened I believe it was because in 1965, the Higher Education Act. I'm going into a little bit of history because I think parents really need to understand where this all started.
Speaker 2:So in 1965, the problem started. That's when the government started subsidizing student loans and that is when there was an explosion of, because about that time, only 10% of high school seniors in the US were going to college and only 7.4% of the jobs required degrees.
Speaker 1:And if you can really get down to what that means. The subsidizing the loans is basically they were paying for them with our tax dollars, right? So if the student defaulted, the university was still paid and the bank was still paid. They were taking our tax dollars. So this whole thing with Biden trying to do student loan forgiveness, to me that sounded like kind of a joke, because I'm like we've been doing that the whole time.
Speaker 2:Yes, because the government is the one that funds the loans. Yeah, they're government-backed loans. The whole history of the student loan crisis is what I'll call it, because we do have $1.7 trillion in student loan debt, and so having people taking them back towards the beginning so they understand the root of the problem is really key to me, because if you go to the how did this start? Why, whenever you have economic systems that are not behaving naturally because they're not behaving naturally right now what is it that caused this to occur? Not behaving naturally right now? What is it that caused this to occur? And so what caused it to occur was fake government incentive, which is the government incentivized people to borrow money that they didn't need to buy things they didn't need and, as a result, and also to be fair at the time, what they did was they just identified demand for something that looked on the surface like a good idea, because we, as a culture college, we just went wow, this is almost like different. We've removed it as a product. We don't even think about it like that.
Speaker 2:People do not have a rational view of purchasing degrees. They do not, and so people are hyper irrational about it. Not only did you have all these returning GIs from World War II who were coming back and buying degrees to become lawyers, to become doctors, to become civil engineers, to get professional engineering license. That required degrees for licensure. They were going into things that legally required degrees for them to become professionals with additional educational experience Not the same thing as just going to get a bachelor's degree. Not the same at all. Not the same thing as just going to get a bachelor's degree. Not the same at all. And so what had happened was people were going. Well, when people buy college degrees, they get really good jobs. And really what they saw was they were able to build businesses because CPAs, lawyers, doctors, all had these licenses. That protected them and gave them increased business value. Right, because now they had the ability to build their own practices, their own firms, their own dentist office, etc. And so they saw oh wow, if you buy a college degree, you do really well. And so people just began to associate that. And also we had an almost equivalent supply to demand. So 7.4% of jobs required degrees. 10% of high school seniors were going.
Speaker 2:Now, if you fast forward to 1976, 13% of the population was now going to college. So it went from 10% or sorry, it was more than that. Actually it more than doubled. So it went up to almost 20%. Almost 20% of high school seniors were going to college and the default rate went from 2% to 9% in that time a 450% increase in defaults. At that point the government had to amend the Higher Education Act to make them bankruptcy exempt, because so many people were defaulting on the loans because it was not paying their money back. And so we have been running on artificial, on something that's completely artificial, since 1976, because people would be defaulting on the loans, people would be. Nobody can pay their loans back, and that's the thing that we're obscuring, because the government made it so that you can't discharge them in bankruptcy. So now the current default rate on student loans is 2%, but that's because you can't discharge them in bankruptcy anymore, and so Okay.
Speaker 1:So to lay that, out if I went to school for four years and I defaulted on my loan. Now I can't claim bankruptcy and just have it wiped.
Speaker 2:But what they will do, you can't default on them at all. So how do you mean? So? Lay it out for me, like in a scenario so there's no way for you to escape the loans? Because, when they amended, the only way for you to do so is to prove that it causes undue hardship, which is almost impossible to prove in a court of law.
Speaker 2:It was designed that way on purpose, which is why the government still issues the loans, because it's safe for them to do so, because people can never escape the student loan debt. They just can't. It doesn't matter If somebody dies and they have student loan debt, it's still. Your parents will still have to pay it. Whoever's co-signed on the loans will still have to pay it. It doesn't matter, they will get that money from somebody. And it's one of those things where it's so insidious, because it's just this tax and this drain largely on the middle class, because that's who sends their kids thinking that a four-year degree is going to guarantee them some sort of result, when in reality it's going to do nothing of the sort.
Speaker 1:Hey everyone, this is Cheryl. I want to thank you so much for checking out the podcast. I'm going to keep this short and sweet because I know your time is valuable. I want to ask you a serious question Do your kids know what to do to actually save their life in an emergency? The most important thing we can talk to our kids about is knowing their first and last name, knowing mom and dad's first and last name, mom's phone number, dad's phone number, their address, what to do if they get lost, what to do if someone who's watching them has a heart attack, a stroke, an accident where they fall and your child needs to get help.
Speaker 1:We live in a world where there's no landline phones anymore, basically, and cell phones a lot. Does your child know how to call 911 from a locked cell phone? It is absolutely possible, and my book demonstrates how to do that, whether it's an Android, whether it's an iPhone and, most importantly, it starts the conversation, because I was going through homeschooling curriculum with my kids, realizing that, gee, maybe they skim over this stuff, but they don't get into depth, so my child's not going to remember this should an accident occur, right? I asked a couple of teachers what they do in school and they said they really don't do anything either other than talk about what to do in a fire during the month of October fire prevention month. So I wrote a book because this is near and dear to my heart.
Speaker 1:I have had multiple friends that have lost kids in tragedies and I don't want to see it happen again, if it doesn't have to. We were at the fair over the summer and the first thing I said to my son when we walked through that gate was what's my first and last name, what is your first and last name and what is my phone number? And if you get lost, what are you going to do? You can get my book on Amazon and I will put the link in my show's description Again, it's called let's Talk Emergencies and I really hope you'll check it out because there's just no need to be scared when you can choose prepared.
Speaker 2:And again this all goes back to this cultural value where people believe because it's been grandparents, parents and kids and we've just been told, oh, you go to college, you go to college, you get educated. And also the assumption that college educates you is a massive leap to. Anyone who stepped foot on a college campus anywhere in the last 10 years knows that you're no one's getting educated on a college campus. I don't know what's going on there, but it's definitely not education, which is why I no longer call it higher education, because it's. It's not. I don't know what it is, but it's not that.
Speaker 1:I went 20 years ago and I can't say I learned very much. There's a lot of partying going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's what happens when you get a bunch of 18 year olds who are living on their future borrowed income that they haven't even made yet. You know, it just doesn't incentivize a lot of responsibility, it doesn't incentivize people to actually examine what their outcomes are going to be, it just doesn't. So the only people who get real success from it are people who go in with a clear goal to get a degree, because they need it to do a specific job, and when I say need it, I mean it is legally required for that job. So again, 1965, 7.4% of jobs required college degrees. Currently, how many jobs do you think require college degrees?
Speaker 1:Oh gee, I'd guess at least 50%, 7.7%, Really.
Speaker 2:It's still seven. Yes, there has been a 0.3% increase in jobs that legally require degrees.
Speaker 2:Wow, there has been a massive increase in the types of jobs that there are, but there is not a legal. So a great example of that is and differentiating here between degree requirement and degree request. A degree request is when an employer is asking for a college degree for something that does not legally require a license to do it. There's no reason that somebody who does not have a degree cannot do that job. You're not legally barred from it, okay now let me ask you this.
Speaker 1:So my niece right now was just telling me she's 22 and she spent some time in the military and I think she has some college credits from high school. She wants to become a police officer and they told her that you cannot take the exam. You can take the exam, but you can't get hired unless you have the two years. They didn't say a degree, but it must be. What do you take? A semester? Sixty credits in a year, I mean. So one hundred and twenty credits or whatever. Whatever the number was. Basically, she needed two years of college credits in order to become a police officer. So do you think that's accurate? Or would that be something like if we looked in the fine print?
Speaker 2:That is highly, that is highly dependent on the police department you are applying to. So, by and large, police departments don't have those types of requirements, unless it's maybe a large metro area and they recently added that or it's just it's a policy change, but no, by and large, police officers, detectives, anybody like that is not going to have an actual degree requirement. But that is a legal requirement because that is an actual government department and they say you cannot hold this job unless this, and so typically those types of jobs are going to be ISTs, like audiologists, ophthalmologists, cardiologists. Those are the ISTs, all the ISTs. Speech, language pathologists.
Speaker 1:Those need the degree Psychologists.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because usually your ISTs are tied. Your IST jobs are tied to some sort of legal license. Now, this is a big jump for parents, I know, because this is massive information for them and it's new, and again, nobody talks about it. There's just all these repeated talking points about where people just think that there's all these jobs that require degrees and there's a massive difference between a job posting that a degree is required and actually requiring a college degree. That's not how ATS works, which is applicant tracking software. It's also just not how companies hire. Companies do not hire people that look like their job descriptions, so they don't actually screen for people.
Speaker 2:Harvard Business Review did a study where they found 63% of people that hold degree required jobs are actually degree free, which is reflective of how much of the employed workforce is degree free, which is 60%, and so that's about right.
Speaker 2:It's actually a little bit higher, and one of the big things that parents need to understand is that, like I said, degree requirement, degree request, not the same thing. A request for a degree should be ignored, always Apply anyway, and one of the biggest things, too, is that people self-eliminate a lot Women specifically do this, and so it's hard to get a gauge of what the real amount of jobs that require degrees are, because so many people that do graduate college don't even try to apply for the jobs that they would try to apply for until they buy a bachelor's degree. So a great example of that would be a marketing. An entry-level marketing role does not require a bachelor's degree, but people who buy marketing degrees never try to apply for those jobs until they've bought a bachelor's degree. So you really don't know, because people don't try, and that's the thing that I want parents to take away is all your 18 year old has to do is try, and you will be shocked at the results of targeted trying and strategic skill acquisition. Wow.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, and I feel like I've always complained about this Schools never really even teach us all the jobs that are available. College definitely doesn't teach us about all the jobs that are available. To think that we need to take out the $200,000 in loans to, uh, for a degree in the field that we want to go into when we're 18. And we don't even know what kind of you know clothes we're into, or just silly things like what color hair we want to. You know, dye our hair next time we get it done. But yeah, but take out the 30 years that you're gonna have to pay this back for what you want to do today. It's so asinine. So, like, where would you even go to, like, find the list of all the jobs? Or even and I would imagine it's changing because, like, there wasn't a podcasting job when I was 18, you know that's 23 years ago. So jobs, new jobs come up all the time. What are? What should parents do to even help their kids find what they want to or could do for careers?
Speaker 2:So this is a great, this is such a good question and the way that I answer this now and it's funny you bring up that we don't know at that age what we want to do and I get that comment a lot when I tell you what I'm about to tell you, which is so funny because I think that if you can't answer the questions I'm about to explain that parents should figure out with their kids. They should definitely not be going into bankruptcy-exempt debt. There is no argument that that is a responsible thing to do. It would be more responsible to buy your child a Ferrari than it would be to buy them a bachelor's degree, because a Ferrari they could actually drive Uber with. There is no guarantee that you can use your bachelor's degree for anything. All you get as a guarantee of that is money out the door and time spent. That's it. That's the only guarantee you get out of a degree and that's why parents so interesting.
Speaker 2:How people and how great of a job they've done at college is just objectively speaking and marketing their product. Right, Because there's no other product that fails at a 50% rate at least. Right, Because at least 41% of college graduates or sorry, 41% of college students don't even graduate right. And then 60% of them take at least five and a half years to graduate of a four-year program, which is staggering. And then I think it's one in four of them are underemployed, in that they make less than $32,000 a year. And then of that, only 27% of them use their degree. A tiny, tiny fraction of people escape unscathed from the college industrial complex. There's no other industry that we would let target children in this way and turn a blind eye to the poor result that they have gotten. But they spend so much money on marketing and they rely so heavily on this generational marketing. It's almost like you. It's almost like relying on grandparents to sell timeshares to their kids, to sell timeshares to the grandkids. It's wild. It's wild and it's amazing. And it's just cloaked behind this veil of oh, this is education and therefore it's different. No, it's the same, because they're in writing.
Speaker 2:On the fact that you're going to buy it, Parents, a lot of people will say, oh well, you know you can't put a price on education. I said, yes, you can. It's $104,000 on average for a bachelor's degree. It takes $156,000 on average, according to the NCES, if it takes five and a half years. And the total all-in cost tuition, lost wages and interest is well over half a million dollars. For that, just go. Oh well, you know they earn so much more. I'm like, no, they don't. Actually, what you have is you have a wrap-up study from Georgetown University from 2012.
Speaker 2:You've probably heard this. Everybody has. It's the talk, this is the talking point. They earn over a million dollars a year. I call it the million dollar earnings myth because this is what they say.
Speaker 2:One, it's an average. Why is it an average? Because they need master's degree holders, PhDs and doctorates, actual people of professional practice, in order to obscure the real results. There's a reason it's not just bachelor's degree holders, which is the majority of college graduates. There's a reason that they didn't pull out bachelor's degree holders of business degrees, which is the majority of people who graduate from college. Right, there's a reason they didn't do that because if they did, it would be abysmal and you would quickly find that your premium that you get is less than $100,000. So your lifetime earning premium for all of that is $100,000.
Speaker 2:And a lot of people are not going to be positive. They're not going to have a positive net worth until they're 55 years old. For what, Literally. For what Is that worth it? It's not, no, yeah, and that's why. And then there's just so many different. I always get lost in the sauce when I'm talking about this, because it's so. There's so many different problems here.
Speaker 2:But how parents can help their kids with this is four simple things. Where do they want to live? How much money do they want to make to live the way that they want? Buy a little homestead, live in Japan, you know like build a house of their own Doesn't matter how. What kind of schedule do they want to work? This is huge. That impacts your life so much. If you want to be a stay-at-home mom, you need a schedule that actually works for that right. If you want to travel for work, you need a schedule. Oh, I'm going to go be a nurse, I'm going to go work in the medical field, and they're going to be absolutely miserable because they're going to be in a windowless area with fluorescent lighting all day long and it's going to make them really hate their lives. Some people are fine with that. Some people are okay with those trade-offs because they're getting something else out of it.
Speaker 2:But not thinking through all four of those criteria we call them the degree-free. Four is really going to make your child unhappy. If they cannot answer those four things, they have no business buying a college degree because they don't know what they want yet. And then, once you do answer those, then the ugly answer is that you have to go out to the Internet because that's the best available resource for this. We're working on some things to fix that, but the best available resource that is the most up-to-date, that is, the most comprehensive of current job titles and of current roles in your area. Right now it's going to be the internet.
Speaker 2:So you have to go out equipped with these four things and look through okay, my child needs to make $60,000 a year. My child needs to make $120,000 a year. You know, my child needs a four-day work week, whatever that looks like. My child needs to work in a work environment where they're working with an internal team. They don't want to be customer facing, that's just not their speed.
Speaker 2:Or they want to work in sales. They want to talk to everybody, that's just what they want to do. Or they want a work environment where they go out during the day, they're not sitting at a desk all day to do a job, these types of things. And once you stack those things together, you get a very clear picture of what you're looking for in the internet, Cause it's like an Easter egg hunt You're looking for a specific thing that fits those criteria, but you have to know what you're looking for in order to find it, and so it just does take a lot of research, and that's one of the things that we do actually for our business is, we do that research for people, but parents can do it, especially homeschool parents. They're very well equipped to research, they're very good at it. So Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And something you mentioned earlier which I hadn't thought of when I was in college because I was on that side, was that college is so one sided politically and it was political and I don't think I realized it at the time because I just went with the masses. You know political, and I don't think I realized it at the time because I just went with the masses. You know, I live in upstate New York and very liberal high school Our teachers pushed I remember it was during the um, my 11th grade English, uh, 11th grade history. It was during the Bush and Gore must've been election and my teacher would call Bush little shrub and you know so to us it was, and she was also my cheerleading coach, so of course I was going to take whatever opinion she had, you know, and I was like, oh yeah, so he's the bad guy and you know it's so funny because then I just took that with me to college and never thought anything. You don't even realize it's political going on when you're in it.
Speaker 1:It wasn't until later in my life, probably COVID, that I kind of like woke up to some things and media not really telling us the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So I started seeing things and at work I would kind of be a little bit more vocal and I worked for the government. So it was kind of like everyone started like putting a wall around me and like we don't talk to her anymore. And it's just so funny that I guess I never realized it until I was on the other side and then I was completely alienated. And I've talked to some parents homeschooling parents on my podcast who have their kids, have grown up in homeschool and then they send them off to college and now the kids are in this whole dilemma like wow, this isn't how I grew up and everybody has the opposite opinion of me and some switch over and some are just going through that internal battle. But I mean it's so funny because there's just supposed to be this separation of it and there absolutely is not.
Speaker 1:And now that I look back at it, our whole system you know you were mentioning understanding the history of it is so important. And I love doing that with the education system itself, because when you look back to the history of why we even have a government education system in the first place, it was, you know, horace Mann and John Dewey bringing this model over from Prussia and they wanted to create the obedient worker someone smart enough to do the job but not too smart to question it. And then the Rockefellers and Carnegie's were investing millions of dollars back in, like the early 1900s, into the education system. And just think logically if I'm John D Rockefeller, why would I want to invest millions of dollars into a system that could potentially produce competitors to my business? Like I'm not going to do that, I that I'm going to want them to dumb down so that they'll do what I need them to do without rising up and being a competition to my business If you ever want to be in for a shock.
Speaker 2:this is one of the things. A lot of stuff I do is just research for things I'm curious about. The literacy rate has been something that's been really interesting to me and if you look and you notice, when they started requiring degrees for primary school teachers, the literacy rate went down higher. The more degrees the teachers have, the less literate the kids are. That one's interesting. That's an uncomfortable chart that nobody wants to talk about, but I find that to be very interesting because basically, when we cross the threshold of your teachers having master's degrees, there's very much a notable decline in the literacy rates of kids in K-12 school.
Speaker 1:And that's interesting. I know teachers in New York need a master's degree, but are there states that they don't need one? I know teachers in New York need a master's degree, but are there states that they don't need one? Because that would be interesting to look at the literacy levels of the states like in New York versus another one where they might.
Speaker 2:I never thought to look at that. Oh, I never thought to look state by state. I never thought to look state by state because I know it's not always a legal requirement. I think it depends on the union. Maybe Is it the entire state of New York.
Speaker 1:Is it under the same?
Speaker 2:union. I believe so, actually Mississippi and Louisiana, which is interesting because for years people have made fun of them for being, you know, behind, except for most of their kids can read. So they're doing something right and everybody else is doing it wrong. And it's one of those things where, if I had to guess, if I had to guess is that the teachers are less papered in Louisiana and so they're more tailored to education. The other thing, too is I think you get a real amount of and this is a caution for parents whose kids are really fixated on going into a specific type of job that requires a degree, especially if that job is not going to pay their degree back, if that job is not going to pay their degree back.
Speaker 2:Because people who go into jobs and I think a lot of people, I think a lot of people go into teaching because they uh, public school teaching, specifically because they are not doing well in another major or they're undecided, and then they go become teachers and then and this, this is just true people can say, oh, it's my passion, like sure it is, but a lot of people go into education and and those things because they weren't doing another, you know, they weren't doing well in another major, or they just weren't sure what to do, so they just did that because they knew it's a job and it's there.
Speaker 2:I think too, when you see, I would guess we're about to get another flood. I just read an article that said that there's a massive uptick in people going to grad school because they're afraid to go into the job market. And that's always a disaster because what happens is those people are four-year bachelor's degree holders, general education, they're gonna go get a master's degree in education and then they're gonna go into the public school system because there's work, because there's need and then you're gonna get people who are bad at their jobs.
Speaker 1:And there is such a need for teachers right now. And I remember when I graduated college in 2006, everybody was a teacher and you're so right, it was because I even went for teaching for a little bit. Not for teaching, I think. I was like, oh, let's see, accounting didn't work out, maybe I'll teach history. I like never even read a history book in my life. So it's like yeah, yeah. And then I ended up just my last semester going into the dean like here's all the classes I've taken, what can you finagle so that I can graduate on time? And he was like, if you take six classes in communication, you can graduate with a communication degree. So I was like all right, sold Going in for communications. So like that's literally how it was decided.
Speaker 2:But you're so right.
Speaker 1:And it's kind of like that thing I was saying with. My parents were government workers, so I took a civil service exam when I graduated. Same thing with teachers instead of their parents being the teacher. A lot of times it's just well, I know teaching. It's familiar to me because I spent 12 or 13 years in the school system, so I know the job.
Speaker 1:I don't have to go looking for a you know, curator of a IT or whatever. I don't have to go looking for a um, you know, curator of a IT or whatever. You don't have to make up something or actually investigate. You're like well, I know teaching. I saw them for a few years. I know what they do. Yeah, I never thought about that. So it and then and I've interviewed so many teachers on my podcast who left teaching to homeschool their kids. It's insane. The first teacher that contacted me that left her job to homeschool their kids. It's insane. The first teacher that contacted me that left her job to homeschool her kids. I thought it was like a diamond in the rough. I'm like you'll never believe what I have here. 50% of my interviews are teachers who left the system and they all say you don't need a teaching degree to teach your kids.
Speaker 2:Well, it's that, for a lot of teachers are like that because they and again, this is an incentives and expectation problem, which is something that we solve in our launch program, where we're making sure that people know what they're going to get out of work, because people work because they must. That's why people work. And so if you're not getting something that you need from your work, why would you do it, unless you are a business owner which, again, is still giving you something that you need from your work? Why would you do it Unless you are a business owner which, again, is still giving you something that you need and or want? And that's actually a better combination. But you have to first cover your basic needs in order to be able to do that.
Speaker 2:And so one of the things that I've noticed about teachers and people always you know, it sounds like I'm ganging up on teachers all the time I have one of my best friends is actually a speech language pathologist, and this is why I speak about this so often because it's been really painful for her to go through the process of realizing that she does not like her job, because she didn't know a lot of the other options and she had to go get a master's degree to become an IST right A speech language pathologist, underpaid, overworked, unable to be a stay-at-home mom, which is actually what she ended up wanting to do, and it's because she did not consider what kind of schedule works for you.
Speaker 2:What sort of work environment do you want, which, if none, is the answer, that's totally fine, or if more, in this day and age, which is more appropriate is what's flexible and fits into our household needs right, like what can I turn on and off? What sort of skills are high leverage enough where I can earn a high hourly that allows me to free up my time? Because my family is my priority, because everybody has different priorities in life.
Speaker 1:You guys know I am a big fan of the Tuttle Twins. I had Connor Boyack, the writer of these books, on episode 24. I reached out to his company asking to let me be an affiliate because I strongly believe in their books and their message. In the H5-11 book series, which I read to my son all the time I mean, he actually asks us to read these books with him.
Speaker 1:Book five, road to Serfdom, talks about what happens to a local town with local businesses when corporations start moving in. Book six, the Golden Rule, talks all about Ethan and Emily's experience at summer camp through a series of cheating and manipulation on certain races that they're required to complete. It talks about how the golden rule of treating others how we want to be treated ourselves is how we all should be conducting our lives. Education Vacation talks about John Taylor Gatto and the creation of the school system and what it was actually intended to do, which you get to learn about by following Ethan and Emily on a trip to Europe. And book 11, the Messed Up Market, takes you through the journey of kids trying to create small businesses as they learn all the laws and rules that government has put in place to actually make it very difficult for them. You learn all about interest savings versus borrowing, low interest rates versus high interest rates and supply and demand, and these are just some of the books in that series.
Speaker 1:Use the link in my show's description or at the homeschoolhowtocom under the listener discounts page. I also wanna let you know about some other books that the Tuttle Twins have out America's History, volume One and Two, which teaches all about the inspiring ideas of America's founding without the bias and hidden agendas that's found in other history books for kids and most likely in the schools. There's also books on how to identify fallacies, modern day villains all stuff that we want to be talking to our kids about. Whether you homeschool or not, these books bring up important discussions that we should be having with our children. Use the link in my show's description or, like I said, at thehomeschoolhowtocom under listener discounts.
Speaker 2:You know, but a lot of teachers did not give any thought to these four things. They just take the path of least resistance, because that is the path of least resistance and, exactly as you said, that's a huge problem that we've run into is that a lot of kids only can name about six to eight jobs, because the people to teach them only know six to eight jobs and in their minds they come from. These very structured like teaching is fake. It's a fake. It's a fake, it's a bubble. It's kind of like being in the military. I grew up in the military, in a military family. It's fake, like the career progression, the requirements. It's all fake because it only exists and it is only true inside this specific bubble of career, whereas outside of that it's not true. There's not all these rules, you don't have to do these stuff. It doesn't work that way. That's just not how the world works.
Speaker 2:In teaching, it is because it's a fake government bubble. And the same way in academia, right? So a lot of academics have the same exact problem, which is you have to do these specific things in order to get on tenure track, in order to do this, in order to do this, and you have to check these boxes in a specific order. But that's not true for most people. It's only true for certain professions. It's true for nurses, right, because you have to go up, you know you have to become an RN. You have to go up, you know you have to become an RN, you have to become a nurse practitioner, and you have to go through these levels to get licenses to do those things in the same way you do in teaching and in the same way you do in the military. And so their view of work is very structured and it's very, and for them it is true because this is how it works.
Speaker 2:But outside of that it doesn't work. That way you don't have to do all these things. You don't have to go buy a bachelor's degree. You don't and actually it's going to be a giant waste of your time to do so because other people are just going to go. What do I actually need to do? Oh, that'll take me three months, and then they go do it, and then they're employed, and then they're out earning the median teacher, and so it's teaching people to not go in this checkbox way, because that's just not how it works. It's not how it works for most people, and for those you have, you know, done some sort of, I don't know, really gotten into writing.
Speaker 1:Or the English you know, read all this stuff and I don't know. Or history. You've worked in museums, you've traveled the world and you're here to share your experiences with the youth, but it's not really like that, it's like here's the test I think teachers should only be retired people.
Speaker 2:I think that's how it should work. I think your mom would be a great teacher, right? Because she already had a career. I think that makes a lot more sense. I think you should have to go have a job in the real world before you go into teaching. That's what I think. That's what I feel.
Speaker 1:I think working for government is also like you said. It's not real, I would agree with that, for 16 years.
Speaker 1:I twiddled my thumbs and said can I have real work to do, not just like you're giving me something to keep my fingers busy so that you don't have to worry about what to do with me. Okay, well, here's a program we're doing. And then when I look at the program in total, I'm like, well, it doesn't make sense. A great example was I had worked for this card swipe program. We were going to have everybody that was on Medicaid every time they took went to go get one of their prescriptions or go for a ride in, you know, whether they were going to dialysis and back or whatnot, you'd have to swipe their card and we'd have to spend. We'd contract with people and spend millions of dollars to get these little machines everywhere, inside the vehicles, to the, to the pharmacies.
Speaker 1:Well, the machines never worked, but the but the funny thing was, as I said, it's not a requirement to be the person receiving the medication, to be the recipient to go pick up the prescription. So, like I, if my mom's bedridden, I can go get her prescription for her. It's not illegal for me or my neighbor to go pick up her prescription. So we're not going to have the card to swipe. Oh yeah, we've already spent millions on this and and not even on the products, but for, like, the man time, the manpower behind this program and all the people who contracted and UPS to ship out these Verifone machines. It's like nobody thought of this. And that's just in a nutshell. All these government like, I think, the people that work at the counties. They do the most work, they get paid the least and they actually have the benefit in the end user's life. Everything above that is just baloney.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's a combination of as with everything right, it's a combination of problems and artificial incentives and you get what you incentivize. So you incentivize people buying paper to do jobs that they don't need those papers to do. That's what they will do. You make it available for them to get funding even though they don't need those papers to do. That's what they will do. You make it available for them to get funding even though they don't need the funding because they don't even need to buy the thing.
Speaker 2:And I think the biggest problem too, for homeschooling families is that and I say this because I was actually homeschooled for a good amount of my school career, before high school, and my mom fell prey to this too. My mom was a nurse and so my mom fell prey to this and a lot of homeschooling families I think a lot of homeschooling moms specifically fall prey to the. I have to get my child into college and the best college and Ivy League colleges in order to quantify my skill at teaching them as a parent, and it just seems so insane to me to watch people homeschool their kids for 12 years and then hand them over to put them back on the conveyor belt into the meat grinder for absolutely no justifiable reason other than to feel good about themselves. And it's just such an interesting thing because I see these people do this, who are critical of everything else about the education system, but they have not held up college to the light and examined it, or they just believe what they've been told about it, which is so interesting to me and then they seem blindsided by one the poor results. And then when their kids are back home and in debt and also now don't hold any of the values that they sent them with, which is an interesting thing to pay for. That's a crazy thing to pay for. You go pay $100,000 to get that result. It's wild to me. And they just hand them right over to these people who, for lack of a better term I mean, like I said, I don't call it higher education anymore, it's more like a cult it's like you hand them over to this orthodox cult with these really dogmatic wild economic theories, wild political theories and I say theories because they're professional, most of them professionally useless people.
Speaker 2:You have very few actual professors who've worked in their industry, you have very few who've ever worked period outside of academia, and so they just don't know a lot about anything. Really, they don't know a lot about the like. If you ask professors now I've wanted to do this as a series but going around to different college campuses and asking professors what jobs the kids in their program will end up getting, they have no idea. If it's outside of a medical program, they don't know. They don't have a clue why? Because for anything that's not STEM, they've never worked in their field in the private sector ever. For anybody who is STEM, usually for them they're 10 to 15 years removed from professional work. In that and just to put this in perspective for people, for a STEM professor, for a computer science professor, the computer science market is getting rocked right now. For the graduates. The graduates are in real trouble and that's because they're not being taught anything that's useful and that's because colleges cannot keep speed with the pace of technology. They cannot keep up and the professors who are teaching it oftentimes unless they're currently active VCs, like they're venture capitalists or they are professors of practice, so they have a stake in some company that's building in demand technology which you're going to see it like, maybe MIT.
Speaker 2:Some of the, some of the Ivies have it. You know some of some of them have it, but most of them it's been years. Like there was no. There was no. Like there's a software called well, there's a framework called Kubernetes for, like, data storage. That didn't exist. Slack didn't exist. Airpods didn't exist. Slack didn't exist, airpods didn't exist.
Speaker 2:The last time these people worked just to put that in perspective for parents.
Speaker 2:And so you know, oh well, they're going into computer science.
Speaker 2:That is not defensible. Like, if your child is going to go into technology, get them literally anywhere into the market and applying for jobs, entry-level work, pay somebody to train them. Do not send them to college. They don't have four years, they don't have that time, and at this point it's even like the money is an afterthought. The money is six figures. That's the time that you're going to spend. You're going to put your child into the charge of these people who do not know. They're so far removed from the market they're about to send your kids into that. A lot of colleges now are spending more time trying to catch kids using AI than they are teaching them to use it and that is the craziest thing for me to watch parents spend their money on. It's crazy, like as somebody who worked in that, and I'm like you need to equip your children to do this. They need to be AI proof, and the way to do that is to teach them how to work on it or teach them how to build with it. You can't.
Speaker 1:You can't send them to police their usage of it.
Speaker 1:You're so right. My nephew's 18 and he is at a local two-year school and he's going for engineering. But again, I'm like what do you want to build? What do you want to do with it? I don't know. But at least he went to the two-year school, but I don't know what from there. But yeah, he was just telling me how, oh, oh, yeah, well, I wrote a paper with AI and you know, my professor thought I did. He gave me a C because he said he can't prove that I wrote it with AI. So he can't fail me.
Speaker 1:But it's like and I've said this forever too uh, school and work, a lot of the times it's just showing up and like putting on the look like you know it's showing up and like putting on the look like you know it's. It's almost like faking your way through, but you're still more ahead than like 70 percent of the people that don't even show up at all. So it's like, but yeah, the kid's really smart. But it's like, yeah, I use AI. But you're right, why aren't they teaching? They don't. They're not teaching the teachers how to use it, obviously because they can't figure out if kids are using it or not. But yeah, work with it and not against it. That makes so much sense. What is your opinion on like trades and that sort of thing?
Speaker 2:I have a strong. I have strong opinions on the trades. Actually, the main reason is because I see a lot of poor outcomes with the trade push. It's one of those things that's. It's a good soundbite these days. It gets numbers. So you see Mike Rowe, ken Coleman, charlie Kirk, like you see all the talking heads that just go on and oh, we have 11 million open trade jobs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2:I hate that because I'm like, stop telling people to go one, stop telling people that the only thing they can do is the trades if they don't go to four-year college. That's ridiculous, like it's so silly, as, as all of them are in media, as they sit there talking in media, in broadcasting, which also doesn't require a college degree to do audio engineering, to do av, to do lighting, to do to do like gaffer you know, to be a gaffer to do video production, to do script writing, to do product, literally anything, literally anything. So that really gets under my skin because that bothers me a lot personally. But then and I actually say this as my youngest sister is a structural welder, so she's the only female welder at a steel company. That's what she does, she's very good at it. She out-hurns, the median master's degree holder. She's 23. She has no debt Okay, she's, she's killing it. And the reason that's different is because she thought through what do I want? How much do I need to make? Where do I, where do I want to live? What sort of schedule works for me? And then she chose her work based on that and she found paid on the job training. I helped her do this. This was years ago and that is one of the things. So the trade school push is really not good, because really it's what it is is high schools and, as an extension, anybody who uses any sort of educational curation. Nowadays they use college. You want to go to college? Okay, well, there's the military. Those are the two. Those have been the two for a very long time. This is what they do. You don't want to do that. Now they've got a third bullet it's trade school. Why is trade school a bad idea? Because trade school debt is still student loan debt and trade school debt to get a trade that does not meet your needs is still a bad idea, and that's the thing that's so huge.
Speaker 2:I worked with a young man who was 19. He went to a four-year college. He got into a four-year college. Was doing that, hated it. Transferred to a community college two years, hated it. He goes to electrician school because that's the third option. He didn't want to go into the military. So the third option is trade school hates it, and then he's just like what's wrong with me? Nothing was wrong with you. Nobody taught you to think through what you actually need out of your work. He went through a four-week program with us. The end of this. This is how not wrong with him something was and how wrong the way that we're teaching these kids to pick their jobs is and how disjointed the incentives are and how their expectations are wrong. And that's actually why so many of them seem really unmotivated. It's because they don't know what they're doing, and then they don't know what they're going to get out of it, and that would be unmotivating to anybody. I'm unmotivated if I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing and what it's going to get me. What's the point?
Speaker 2:you would probably feel the same way yeah but this kid, he goes through the program then again three times. He's. He's employed this whole time. He was working. It wasn't like he was lazy. He's working 30 days. He comes into his final review call on that.
Speaker 2:I go through a different educational option. So the way our process works is we go what do you want out of your life, what do you want it to look like? We get those degree free for. And then I find a list. You know, we find a list of jobs that actually fit those things for them and we hyperlocate it to where they are. After they do that, they eliminate the ones they don't like and then we go through and find actual skills or licenses or certifications, things they actually need to do those jobs. If a degree is required, it's on there. You know I had a young lady who wanted to be a physical therapy assistant. So you need a two-year, you need associates to get your license to do that.
Speaker 2:But for him the thing that shook to the top was fiber optic installation. That was the one he was really. He was all about it. So the end comes, his review call comes his mom and his dad come on, we go over his top three jobs. He picks fiber optic installation as the path he's going to pursue.
Speaker 2:I found regional companies that were. They lived in a research triangle in near North Carolina in North Carolina and I was like, hey, this company right here has an opening that I think that you would be really good for. It's paid on the job, training, they're going to give you a company car, full benefits, all of this stuff you get paid during promotion. And he goes okay and I said yeah, so tomorrow is Monday, apply for it. He applies for it. They call him in Tuesday, wednesday. He's hired. He's been there a year. He's gotten promoted. He's gotten a raise. He's a trainer now.
Speaker 2:Now loves it because it's the right fit, because it helped him see, because he thought through what do I want? What he wanted was to stay near his family. He wanted to propose to his girlfriend, he wanted to buy a house in the next five to seven years. He wanted to make a certain amount of money for where they live and it fit all of those things. So he had a clear path forward to. This is going to get me what I want in my life. So then, when he gets the job, the connect is there, which is this is going to help me live the way I want. And then that's so easy to motivate someone when they just know that if they just do the thing that's right in front of them, they're going to get what they want. And that's the piece that's missing.
Speaker 1:Well, hannah, I thought that they already had this job that you're explaining figured out, and I thought it was called a guidance counselor at school, but clearly they don't know any of what you are offering they don't know the jobs and and if they don't?
Speaker 2:exactly they don't. If your kid, if your kid's not going to get into a four year degree, they don't care what's going to happen to them yeah right, because it's just another government job to a four year. Well, because schools brag about their college admission rates, their, their entire metric of success is wrong, which is how many kids do we put in student loan debt? That's a crazy success metric.
Speaker 1:Well, and they probably get more funding the more kids they get into college.
Speaker 2:Well, if you think about it downstream from this, like the college, so there are schools, there are public schools in certain districts where the entire economy is basically based on the admissions rate. The college admissions rate really shouldn't be the college admissions rate, it should be the student loan debt rate, it should be the student loan conversion rate to debt. That's where it should be. And so these schools will go. Oh, you know, 75% of our kids get into college. You know, get into whatever Texas A&M or whatever and then they get these kids into Texas A&M. And now people will move into the school district to get their kids into this public school so that their kids can take on bankruptcy exempt debt to go buy paper from a specific college. It's the most bonkers. So now the realtors will sell houses based on the student loan percentages of these high schools.
Speaker 2:It's the most insane thing. It's the most insane thing. Yeah, it's the most insane thing, yeah. And so, yes, guidance counselors, and also, to be fair to them, I will say they're overworked, like there's, there's one of them and there's, you know, 5000 kids. There's two of them and there's 3000 kids. There's one of them and there's 250 kids, you know, but they just don't have. They don't have the tools. They also don't have the mindset. That's the other thing. I find that people will limit, people will limit kids by their own limitations, which is, I think, one of the real problems. That's one of the real problems. They'll just say, well, I couldn't do it, so you definitely can't because you didn't get a this on the SAT, which is a stupid way to measure whether or not somebody can do something. That's a silly thing to do, I love everything you're standing for and what you're doing.
Speaker 1:I think this is so valuable. You kind of explained I was going to ask you, you know the process of what your business does, and you explained it a little bit in that with um talking about, uh, the student, that you had the fiber optics. But if somebody wanted to utilize your services for their child, like, what can they, what does your business do? And then get into how they can get in contact for you, and I will put everything in the show's description as well, so it's easily clickable.
Speaker 2:Sure. So basically what we do is we do custom career planning, and that's the piece that's missing, unfortunately. That's what everybody needs, because what and the thing is, parents can do that what I just talked through, everything that I just talked to their parents have the ability to do, it's just going to take them time. We just do it really fast because that's what we do. So for parents, you know, it's thinking through those four criteria, looking to find things that actually fit them.
Speaker 2:If folks would like to work with us and have our kids do this for them, basically what they do is go to degreefreecom, forward, slash, launch and you can apply for the program there. We interview everybody because we only work with people who want to work with us. People will try to get their kids to do it, and if the kids don't want to do it, I'm not interested in forcing anybody to do anything. I'm not about that. If somebody wants to do it, then we'll do some work. But you know, so we make sure that the young adult is really engaged and actually wants to commit to the process and then, once they do, then we go through this.
Speaker 2:It takes about 30 days to go through at this point and then we're actually building another version of it that's a little bit more accessibly priced and also that is faster, because that's one of the things that we really, you know, 30 days is pretty good, you know. It's pretty good for the amount of research that's going to get done, but we basically built out something that's going to execute a little bit faster and gets as more works better for how young adults currently interact. Right, they're on their phones, they're busy, they have a lot going on. Usually they're working and doing other things and so we've designed the program a little bit more to tailor to how their needs are and how they natively consume and interact with technology, and so that's actually been really cool too, because we've noticed that we're getting like better results faster, and so we're testing that too now, which is really cool.
Speaker 1:Awesome, so I will put that link in the show's description and people can follow you on Instagram too. Do you want to give your handle there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, it's at degree free on Instagram, but if you want to see the real spicy takes, that's going to be on TikTok at degreefree.
Speaker 1:I always forget about TikTok, because I was banned from there years ago and I never go on it anymore, it's easy to get banned on.
Speaker 2:TikTok, yeah, I get reported several times a week for things. Oh my God, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, hannah, this has been such an interesting conversation. I love this. I love what you're doing. Thank you so much for being here today and I will put links to everything that you mentioned in the show's description so people can head there. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for tuning into this week's episode of the homeschool. How to. If you've enjoyed what you heard and you'd like to contribute to the show, please consider leaving a small tip using the link in my show's description. Or, if you'd rather, please use the link in the description to share this podcast with a friend or on your favorite homeschool group Facebook page. Any effort to help us keep the podcast going is greatly appreciated. Thank you for tuning in and for your love of the next generation. Thank you.