We would be lying if we said that it is not at all satisfying to see such a large percentage of Americans finally come around to the idea that the ROI just isn’t there for a bachelor’s degree. 

According to a November 2025 poll from our friends at Overton Insights (part of the Libertas Network), only 14% still believe a bachelor’s degree is worth its $150,000 average price tag, while 43% say it’s worth it only for specific degrees like medicine or law, and 38% say it’s not worth it under any circumstance.

The Myth Had Some Truth to It

We’ve all heard it: “you need a college degree to get a good job.” For decades, it has been insinuated that going to college, investing 4+ years of commitment and hard work, magically guarantees the career and salary of your dreams. This may have been true many years ago, but the reality is that “a degree guarantees a job” was more correlation than causation.

Here is what was actually happening: In 1940, only 4.6% of adults had degrees. These were the most driven individuals of their time. For employers, that scarcity translated into a sort of signal or indicator: hiring a college graduate meant hiring a highly skilled employee. The degree worked as a filter because it was evidence of commitment and dedication.

When Everyone Is Special, No One Is

Fast forward to 2020, and the rate of bachelor’s degrees amongst the adult population has increased by 715.2%. Yes, the filter stopped filtering. The once-trusty signal, now translates to “I just did what everyone else did,” and it isn’t doing employers any favors. 

Increasingly, we are seeing employers drop degree requirements and replace them with skill-based requirements. Think of this as a next-level filter that actually makes sense. Would you rather hire someone who reads books and writes papers on the field you’re hiring for, or someone who possesses the skills and/ or experience needed to do the actual job? And wouldn’t you know it, skill gaps are categorically considered the biggest barrier to business transformation. 

Guaranteed Job > College Degree

With so many questioning the ROI of a college degree and employers clearly pivoting toward skill-based hiring, people are done pretending credentials matter more than capabilities. The same November 2025 Overton Insights poll found that 57% would choose an unaccredited program that guarantees a well-paying job over an accredited degree with no guarantee.

The Alternative Is Already Here

This is why Praxis makes more sense now than ever. Our Accelerate program is a six-month skill development program with a job offer guarantee of at least $45,000. Praxians are working and earning, while others are still fulfilling their general education requirements. 

You aren’t confused or misguided for doubting that a college degree equals automagic success. You see the writing on the wall. Employers want skills, not transcripts. You want to launch your career, without the prestigious debt. Only 14% still believe in the old promise. The rest of us? We’re building something better at Praxis.

The post Only 14% Think a Bachelor’s Degree is Worth the $150,000 Price Tag appeared first on Praxis.

We are thrilled to announce that Praxis has been acquired by Libertas Network, marking an exciting new chapter in our journey to empower ambitious young adults to take ownership of their lives and careers. This partnership represents a shared commitment to our ethos of “criticizing by creating.” Now, more than ever, young adults need a viable alternative to college that offers them personal, professional, and financial upside without student debt. We are excited about the promising opportunity this new partnership presents to help even more young adults break free from the college conveyor belt.

Why This Matters

Since its founding more than a decade ago, Praxis has pioneered a bold vision: that you don’t need a college degree to build an awesome life and career. As they say, the proof is in the pudding. Through Praxis, hundreds of students have launched successful careers by prioritizing practical skills, strong work ethic, and real-world experience––even without college.

By joining the Libertas Network, we are taking this mission to the masses. Libertas is deeply aligned with our values, working to create a future where education is flexible, opportunity-driven, and free from outdated constraints. Their shared vision for the mission of Praxis, coupled with their expansive network, make them the perfect partner to help Praxis scale its impact.

What This Means for Praxis

This acquisition isn’t just about preserving what Praxis already does well—it’s about expanding opportunities for even more young adults. In the coming years, Libertas will help us:

• Scale the Program – We’ll substantially increase the number of students we serve each year, opening doors for more young adults to break free from the conveyor belt. Expect bigger and more cohorts, more diverse career opportunities, and a wider geographic footprint.
• Deepen Industry Connections – We’ll leverage Libertas’s robust network of forward-thinking companies and entrepreneurs to create even more high-quality career outcomes.
• Enhance the Curriculum – While the program already offers a top-notch alternative to college, we’ll explore ways to integrate even more resources for students to make the program even more dynamic.
• Launch an Entrepreneurship Program – Traditionally, Praxis has focused primarily on helping young adults pursue traditional career opportunities without the time or money spent on a college degree. Many students want to build their own businesses, and we’re going to build a world class experience to help students become entrepreneurs, too––including providing resources, back-office support, and investment opportunities.

By joining the Libertas Network, Praxis will evolve into an even more powerful engine for social and economic change, ensuring that young adults are not limited by an outdated, one-size-fits-all education model.

Libertas Network’s president Connor Boyack said, “Bringing Praxis into the Libertas Network offers us the chance to supercharge a program that’s already changing lives and align it with our broader mission to rewrite the rules of opportunity. I can’t wait to see the incredible things our participants achieve as we build this future together. We’re going to 10x Praxis and create a large network of ambitious young people building better lives without barriers in the way.”

Looking Ahead

Our mission remains the same: to help ambitious young people build careers and live on their own terms. We are excited about the future and confident that this partnership will allow us to serve more participants, expand our reach, and amplify our impact like never before.

Praxis Founder Isaac Morehouse summed it up best: “I can’t think of a better home for Praxis than Libertas Network. The Libertas team has built a national network of families raising critically thinking children who seek alternatives to the K-12 and college conveyor belts—and that’s a perfect fit for Praxis. I couldn’t be happier.”

We’re just getting started, and we can’t wait to share more about what’s ahead. Stay tuned for updates, and if you’re an ambitious young person looking to break the mold, or an entrepreneur looking to hire bold, capable talent, we’d love to connect.

Together, we’re redefining education—and the best is yet to come.

– The Praxis Team

The post A New Chapter for Praxis: Joining Forces with Libertas Network appeared first on Praxis.

In order to do that you must break norms. Because normal does not lead to freedom.

Many people aren’t as free as they believe. Much of their time is governed by external factors – like a need to make money, work/social/familial obligations, student or consumer debt, a need or desire for social status, and so on.

To paint with broad strokes, people who fail to achieve escape velocity spend their careers puttering around. They hop from job to job or stay around at one company for longer than necessary but the story is the same. They’re passed over for promotions. Their income remains stagnant, usually limited to annual cost of living raises that don’t beat inflation. They trade away their agency to the company they work for.

People who reach escape velocity take a different course. It usually looks like they’re behind for the first couple years. Then all at once, their trajectory explodes. Figuratively speaking, they reach the necessary velocity to leave Earth’s orbit.

When you reach escape velocity, interesting things begin to happen.

Added responsibility finds you. Your income usually skyrockets. Career opportunities seek you out. Paths emerge in front of you. Escape velocity creates optionality.

TLDR; achieving escape velocity grants you the freedom and optionality to choose how you spend your time.

Escape Velocity Is Not Easy

The corollary is that escape velocity requires an incredible amount of energy, focus, effort, growth, and creativity – condensed into a short period of time.

You don’t just wake up one day, clock in at your job, and get promoted to CEO. That’s not how escape velocity happens.

If you want to achieve escape velocity, you need to cram a decade’s worth of effort into a few years. As venture capitalist Paul Graham once wrote, “if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars’ worth of pain. For example, one way to make a million dollars would be to work for the Post Office your whole life, and save every penny of your salary.”

The same is true in your career. If you want to skip 20 years on the ladder, you need to condense those 20 years into a short span instead.

Easier said than done.

But it’s more than possible. It’s highly probable. If you’re clever. Or – clever or not – if you’re deliberate.

There are paths that lend themselves to achieving escape velocity with a high degree of likelihood.

Escape Velocity Through Sales

The first and possibly simplest path is to start your career in sales. By learning to sell, you will learn how to translate your time, energy, and skills into income. This is a super skill. Whether you’re selling Cutco door-to-door doing selling software, the essentials of sales are the same. Find problems and offer solutions at prices others are willing to pay. 

Success in a sales career directly translates to higher income. Higher income is one way to buy back your freedom. You can save more. You can invest. You can build an escape plan. Or, you can continue to drive your income higher and higher, while learning how to become more efficient with your time.

Sales offers one way to achieve escape velocity. And it doesn’t require 10 years. Countless Praxis alumni have hit the 6-figure mark early in their 20s after going all-in on sales careers. If you can make that kind of money while your expenses are still laughably low, you can get years – even decades – ahead financially. 

Escape Velocity Through Apprenticeship

Apprenticeship offers another route to escape velocity. The curve looks different from sales. The earnings start and continue lower – eventually they’ll pop.

It’s no guarantee you’ll ever make as much money as you might in sales, but escape velocity is not just a matter of income. There are more kinds of freedom than financial freedom.

Apprenticeship offers a route to optimize for the kind of work you want to do. You achieve freedom by positioning yourself where you want to be, rather than building a career doing something you hate.

Through apprenticeship, you set out to study from someone who is already doing what you want to go – while getting paid to learn. As you pick up the craft, your responsibility grows, and so will your income. Eventually, you earn a position. Or you develop the credibility to go off on your own. Either way, you can increase ownership of your time and situation quickly, relatively speaking.

For example, I knew I wanted to run a business someday. I landed an apprenticeship under the Founder and CEO of an early-stage startup. I spent three years as his right hand as the company grew from 20 employees to over 200; and from around $1,000,000/yr in revenue to nearly $10,000,000/yr in revenue.

In the time it took some of my friends from college to graduate law or business school, I achieved escape velocity. I went from apprentice to executive. I learned how to build a business. I increased my income 5x. 

I learned what I wanted and needed to know to put myself in the position to go do what I originally set out to do – and I’d done it from a position of relative financial strength. Rather than going $100k in debt to get an MBA and learn about build a business theoretically, I increased my income year-over-year and saved a bunch of money, while learning hands-on how to do what I wanted to learn how to do.

Apprenticeship offers another predicable route to achieving escape velocity. But it’s not always as simple as applying to jobs. Often, you will need to create your own role, or convince someone else to hire you as a generalist – and then prove you’re someone worth investing in. It’s not easy. But it has good odds for achieving escape velocity.

Escape Velocity Through Entrepreneurship

Maybe the most effective – yet most difficult – path to achieving escape velocity is entrepreneurship.

The odds of business success are low. Very low. Your first business will probably fail.

But successfully achieving escape velocity is not about your first business. Or second business. 

It’s about building your launch infrastructure. Developing your skills. Your confidence. Your body of work. Your experience. Your network. Your intuition. 

In order to do that, you need reps. The best way to get reps? Get started. Literally start a business. Any business. Take it seriously. Go all-in on it until you fail or it succeeds or you change your mind. Then repeat. If you’re young and don’t have a ton of money, don’t worry. That can be a benefit. Because you’ll be forced to start a business that has lower costs to start – which also means less financial risk. 

It will be brutal. You’ll develop thick skin. You’ll learn and grow. But so long as you stay in the game, continue developing your skill set, continue perfecting your business, eventually success will flip from impossible to inevitable. 

Entrepreneurship offers a predictable path to escape velocity. You can design your life and your business simultaneously. In a way, building a business is a lot like terraforming your own personal universe. You get to decide how to do everything. You get to call the shots. Your decisions are to your own benefit or detriment. And if your business succeeds, eventually, the money will follow too.

But more important than business success or money success, the point of escape velocity is to break free from the gravitational force that holds you back from designing your life and career into what you want it to be. In that arena, entrepreneurship – though high stakes – offers the greatest measure of autonomy.

A Few Final Words on Escape Velocity

The three paths I laid out are by no means a comprehensive list of paths for achieving escape velocity early in your career.

But they all share in common one trait: they have high probability of success for building the “right stuff” you need to achieve escape velocity. Experience. Skills. Relationships. Confidence. Intuition. Reputation.

Whether you succeed financially or not while you’re young is beside the point. The best way to achieve escape velocity is by focusing on the traits that increase your probability over time.

Remember, you’re building your launch infrastructure. You may have a few failures – a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” or two, if you will.

But if your goal is ownership over your life and career, aiming to achieve escape velocity is one of the most effective goals you can set.

It will force you to prioritize the right stuff over the normal stuff. The stuff that actually leads to results you want. 

That’s all for today. More on this again soon.

The post How To Achieve Escape Velocity In Your Career appeared first on Praxis.

Photo by Rich Smith on Unsplash

You Don’t Need College To Discover What Makes You Come Alive. But You Do Need This.

How To Get A Head Start On Life Without College or Student Debt

You don’t need a college degree. I know. Blasphemous, right? It’s God’s honest truth. You don’t need a college degree. In fact, I’d argue you’ll be better off if you skip college altogether. If you read on, I’ll share with you exactly why I believe college is no longer a ticket to the good life – and what matters more than a college degree.

—

Quick confession. Yes, I *did* go to college. And yes, I *did* graduate. And so yes, I *do* have a college degree. But in the decade since I stumbled out of college bored, full of angst and terrible ideas, guess how many employers have asked about my degree. Zero. And (depending on who you ask) I’ve turned out just fine.

But this post is not about me. It’s about you. The proverbial college student. The high school or homeschool senior. Or the young adult who’s currently taking a gap year.

This post is for anyone who is on the cusp of making the decision to enroll in college AND is simultaneously questioning – do I really need college? Is this worth it?

That voice inside your head is onto something. Really. But if you’re not quite ready to listen to it yet, then sit back and buckle up, because I’m going to spend the next 2,000+ words sharing exactly why you don’t need college to succeed in today’s world – and it’s going to get rocky.

What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

You’ve probably heard that question half-a-hundred times by now. But you know what – it’s a silly question. Seriously. Even if well-intentioned. 

Go walk through the grocery store. Or visit your local bank. Ask any “adult” you meet if they’re doing what they thought they’d be doing when they were 18.

It’s a silly question precisely because you and I don’t have a crystal ball. And you don’t know what you don’t know. Namely, you probably don’t know all the possible career paths out there today. Let alone the jobs that don’t exist yet.

And that’s perfectly okay. You don’t have to choose what to do for the rest of your life. Not now or ever.

Whether you go to college or not, cut yourself some slack. Your major does not define you. Nor does it determine how the rest of your life will turn out. (Unless you major in Woke Studies, in which case, well, your path seems pretty predictable. And I bid you good luck.)

But if you choose not to go to college, that’s okay too. That does not automatically mean you’re destined for a life of Sandwich Artistry at the local Subway and living in your grandma’s basement.

The fact is you have more options today than ever before. Options like finding meaningful work with good earning potential – regardless of your education background. Options like turning your interests or passions into a legitimate income. And options like trying out different paths before making a sizable long-term financial commitment to one particular career path.

In short – you don’t have to choose one particular route just because that’s what everybody told you growing up. Today, you have options. Options that didn’t exist when your parents or grandparents or high school counselors were your age. 

So first, take a deep breath. Then give yourself the freedom to explore those options before you commit to something that doesn’t blow your socks off with excitement. 

What Are My Options? If I Don’t Go To College I Have To Learn A Trade, Right?

Learning a trade would not kill you. In fact, there are probably infinite useful ways a trade could come in handy. 

But no – that’s not your only option if you don’t choose college. Learning a trade is a great option. (Have you seen average incomes of trade jobs lately? Nothing to shake your fist at there.) 

Still, you have plenty of other options. I’ve written at length about a number of alternatives to college in a different post. To name a few:

• Take a gap year
• Do an apprenticeship
• Enroll in a bootcamp
• Take an online course
• Start a business
• Join an accelerator
• Get a job
• Monetize a hobby
• Apply to Praxis
• And the list goes on

Personally, I think all of these are viable alternatives to jumping directly into college. Plus, I think you’ll learn more and earn a better return on your investment than college (I’ll save that another post). Instead of going into detail on each of those again here, I want to focus on several specific things I would do if I were in your shoes today.

What I Would Do Instead of College Today

If I graduated high school today, knowing what I know now, here’s exactly what I would do.

Number 1: Get A Job 

Any job will do just fine. Really. Don’t sweat too much over it. But bonus points if there’s an entry-level hourly wage job that actually excites you. (Personally, I love grocery stores so that’s where I’d go.) 

Here’s why I’d get a job: Whether you’ve had a job before or not, work experience is like currency. Earn up enough of it and you can use it to buy other, different job opportunities. Because as you’re gaining experience, you’re also building a track record. And that’s a useful thing to point to when you’re exploring future opportunities. 

Getting real on-the-job experience will give you more context about the world. Plus, unless you’re a TikTok millionaire or Teenage Entrepreneur Prodigy, you’re probably not swimming in cash. And holding down a job will provide an income. 

Number 2: Get Smart About Money

You’ve probably heard plenty of advice about saving money, spending less than you make, and so on. While those are sound pieces of advice, they don’t include an explanation why.

Quick story to illustrate:

One summer when I was a teenager, I had a job doing manual labor for a contractor. Stuff like digging ditches, clearing stumps and what not. The summers were hot. The work was hard. But at that age, minimum wage still seemed like a lot. After my first couple paychecks, feeling newly rich, I went to the mall and I spent every single dollar on new clothes. Later that weekend, when a friend phoned about going to the movies I realized I had no money. When I asked my mom, she told me to use the money I earned. But it was gone. I’d already spent it. So I had to miss out on the movies.

What a bummer, right? I love going to the movies. Almost as much as I hate being able not to afford things. And that’s why getting smart about money now – while you’re still younger – is so important. 

Saving money isn’t about cheating yourself out of the good life now. It’s about proactively preparing for opportunities you don’t know about yet. About saving now so that later when somebody calls you up about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, you have the option to say yes.

Plus, getting good at managing your money when you don’t have a lot of it helps build the discipline that’ll really come in handy later when you have a lot more. 

Number 3: Find A Mentor

Who’s one adult you admire? Don’t pick your parents. Who is somebody that’s got a career that interests you? Or a skill that you’d like to learn. Or just somebody you really think highly of.

Seek that person out. With money from your job, offer to buy them lunch in exchange for their time and wisdom. This doesn’t have to be just one person. It could be any number of people. But try to arrange it so you can regularly meet with somebody. At least monthly. To ask for advice. Talk about your goals. To learn from. To use as a sounding board for your ideas.

Just because somebody is older than you does not mean they’ll have all the answers. But it does mean they’ve been around the block a time or two more than you. And that age and experience comes seasoned with the salt of wisdom that can be really useful for you (even if you just absorb it for later).

Number 4: Explore New Ideas & Beliefs

The world does not care what your parents believe. It will put you in all sorts of sticky situations that force you to make choices. Choices where you don’t have the time to call up Mom or Dad and ask them how they’d handle it. And in the real world, *you* will be held responsible for your choices.

So it’s imperative you get comfortable with your own ideas. Your own beliefs. And where you stand on different things. But more importantly, it’s crucial to your own personal development to give yourself the freedom to explore your own unique, individual point of view on the world. 

Your own personal point of view is what will enable you to become the best version of yourself. Whether you validate that you believe the same things your parents do, or discover an entirely new set of beliefs and ideas about the world – the important thing is that you do the work to build confidence in your own skin. 

Number 5: Move Away From Home

It’s very difficult to undergo a personal transformation while you’re surrounded by people who knew who you used to be. That’s not to say you have to leave everything you ever knew behind and become an entirely new person.

But if you want to discover the stuff that really makes you come alive, if you ever want to really do your best work, then it’s imperative you give yourself the freedom to explore the world on your own. Independent of the influences and social pressures of the town where you grew up and the people who raised you.

Plus, moving away from home will (hopefully) force you to become financially independent – in addition to intellectually and emotionally independent. This is important stuff. Really. Building confidence in your own ability to make choices and navigate the world is maybe the best thing you can do to set yourself up for future success.

If you do those five things, I’m confident you’ll come out ahead. Regardless of what you decide about college. But, given the spirit of this post, let’s bring everything back home with a few final words on college (and why you don’t need it).

You Don’t Need College. You Need Courage.

At some point, you have to grow up, right? I mean, you can’t work in the lumber yard at Lowe’s forever. (Or can you?)

It’s great and all to maybe take a year or two to “find yourself” after high school. But when it comes down to brass tacks, you really *need* that college degree to get to the next level of life. Right?

No. A thousand times no. You do not need college. What you need is courage.

Everywhere you turn in life, no matter what age or stage, there are going to be people offering up free opinions about how you should live your life. But the fact of the matter is, most of that advice will probably be piss poor applied to your life.

You want to know why?

Because *you* are a different person than everybody else. And you are on your own journey. With an entirely unique and different set of destinations and milestones that matter to you. Which means you’ll need your own set of directions.

And I don’t say that to be fluffy. This is hardcore stuff. Really. Finding the courage to trust your own guts, instincts, and that big ol’ brain on your shoulders will not only save you from a world of trouble – it is also the key to discovering the life, work, purpose, meaning, and happiness you’re after.

You will not find the secrets to your happiness in freshman orientation. You have to put in the hard work of discovering these things on your own. What makes you happy now will likely change as you get older, get more experience, and learn more about yourself and the world.

Unfortunately, many people make the mistake of assuming college will help them discover those answers. That it will take the place of doing the hard work of figuring things out. But in reality, it robs you of four years (if not more) that you could’ve been out running experiments in the real world. And worse yet, for the average college graduate, it means they’ll spend the next 20 years or so paying off that mistake because of the student debt they racked up.

But that does not have to be your fate. If you have the courage to try something different.

Your Life Is An Ongoing Experiment

I said this post was not about me. And it’s not. But there are so many lessons contained here that I learned the hard way. Lessons that, had I known years ago, would’ve drastically reduced the amount of time it took to discover the kind of life and work that makes me come alive. 

In the time I’ve lived on this big old rock circling the sun, my answer to the “What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?” question has changed dozens of times. 

(At age 2, I wanted to be a dinosaur. No joke. And sometimes I still wonder what my life might be like had I continued down that path…)

It will continue to change as I change. As the world around me changes. As I learn more about myself. As I continue to explore my interests. As I continue to test my ideas out in the real world.

Just like it will change for you, too. If only you have the courage to follow that voice inside your head. 

Your life is meant to be fun. And full of adventure. Not spent wasting away in a job you hate, paying down debt you regret, daydreaming about what could have been if only you’d done something different.

You don’t need college to discover the life you want. You need courage.

—

PS – If you think you’ve got the courage to do something different, but you’re not sure how to actually put it into practice, then don’t sweat. I’ve got you covered. 

Read the below posts next for concrete ideas how you can start building the life and career you want without college:

How Degree Inflation Destroyed the Value of A College Credential

What To Do if College Isn’t For You: The Ultimate Guide

A Degree Won’t Make You Rich(er).

Five Years Ago I Graduated College Without a Job or a Clue — Here’s How I Turned It Around

The Great Career Renaissance: Transformations to The Way We Live and Work in 2020

The post You Don’t Need College. But You Do Need This. appeared first on Praxis.

Photo by Hunters Race on Unsplash

—

Over the past decade, we’ve helped thousands of young adults with no college and limited work experience land awesome jobs (many jobs that listed degree requirements).

The real secret is that many employers don’t care about degrees. At least, not as much as job postings suggest.

Outside highly regulated industries (law, consulting, medicine, accounting, high finance), employers care more about your capability than your credentials.

During the hiring process, employers look for three things:

1) evidence of your ability to do the job or quickly learn how (capability)

2) a high degree of confidence said evidence is reliably (credibility)

3) the likelihood that you’ll contribute to the team in a positive way (culture)

None of those criteria require a college degree.

*(Unless the culture is more meritocratic/elitist, by nature. Which good chance, it’s not the kind of place you want to work anyway. Unless your goal is to play office politics rather than do actual work. In that case, you’re probably in the wrong corner of the blogosphere.)

The best thing you can do to stand out the job hunt without a degree is to manufacture the strongest signal possible. Here’s how you do that across each of the three core criteria:

How to Build Evidence of Your Capability

Don’t rely on a résumé. Build a portfolio, instead. Whatever skills you claim to have, build evidence around them — and do it publicly. Create your own website. Publish regularly. Get active on social media. Share original content related to your skills/areas of career interest. Engage others who are leaders in the space you want to work in.

Start building evidence long before you’re on the job hunt. How long? At least a few months. But the longer, the better.

A quick litmus test, Google yourself. What do the top results say? Does your name appear in the first few results? What’s the impression those results give? Is it positive? Is it relevant to the types of jobs/industries you’re trying to break into?

The best evidence you can build is a robust, verifiable digital identity that screams “This is the person we should hire.”

That requires consistency and longevity — i.e. you’ve been thinking about and working on this particular problem/skill for a long time, uninterrupted.

Which brings us to the next criteria, credibility.

How to Develop Credibility

Third-party endorsements will increase your credibility. How many people have referenced you work? Linked to it? Engaged with it? (How many social followers do you have? How many newsletter subscribers, etc.)

Are you seen as a contributor in the area of your interest/industry? Are you seen as a leader? Are you well-connected online to people in the industry?

Building an audience around your skills and area of interest is an infinitely more valuable signal than a degree.

Getting personal references or endorsements from people seen as leaders in the field/industry you want to work in are also useful.

Better yet, if you can get a warm referral from someone in the industry (or someone working at the company you’re trying to get hired by), then you’ll dramatically increase the likelihood your application gets moved to the top of the pile.

But it’s not enough for your application to get seen and demonstrate capability. The last part — culture — is also huge.

How to Demonstrate Cultural Alignment

Cultural alignment is an often overlooked aspect of the job hunt.

When you’re first starting out, it’s not as big of a deal. You need experience — by any means necessary. Even if it’s with a company you’re not very excited to work for. It’s okay if you treat your job as transactional — so long as you’re comfortable with that.

So at the very minimum, first, you want to avoid demonstrating glaring cultural misalignment.

For example, when I was in my early 20s (back when I still thought I wanted to go to law school), a friend of mine was friends with a state senator who urgently needed to hire a new staffer. So he made the introduction and I got the interview.

The senator was an outspoken democrat. I hand-picked a brand new democrat-blue tie for an extra touch. Except it didn’t matter. Because I all but had it in the bag until the very last interview question, when I lit the opportunity on fire.

“What’s your favorite book?” he asked. Without hesitation, “Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand,” I responded. “I’m a big fan of Rand.”

My response was a glaring indication of cultural misalignment. I had a strong referral. I had solid experience. I performed well in the interview. Except the last question. So I didn’t get the job.

I could’ve flown under the radar and probably had a better chance to win the job. (I would’ve hated it. But the experience could’ve been useful in the direction of my goals at that time.)

Still, it’s a good example. While demonstrating cultural alignment is a powerful way to increase the likelihood you get hired, when you’re first starting out it’s just as important that you avoid demonstrating cultural misalignment.

**Of course, you can ignore all of this if it’s critical to you to work at a company where you’re aligned. In that case, go all-in on sharing how you’re aligned.

But don’t forget, when you’re just starting out, you need experience first. Even if it’s with a company you with a mission you don’t align 100% with.

You need the experience. So get it. Even if it’s purely transactional. They hire you, they pay you, you do the job. It doesn’t have to be more than that. Once you gain experience, if it’s important to you to work at a company with an aligned mission, then pivot. You’ll be better positioned to win your second job hunt once you have experience anyway.

…

I know that’s a lot. But if you can demonstrate those three things: Capability, Credibility, and Cultural Alignment, then no one cares if you have a degree. You’ll be well-suited to win plenty of opportunities.

Don’t sweat not having a degree. Seriously. It’s not the passport to the good life it once was.

You can win the job hunt without one. (And if you ever want help figuring out how to navigate your career without college, then check out our program here at Praxis. That’s kind of our whole thing.)

The post How To Get Hired in 2025 [Even If You Don’t Have a College Degree] appeared first on Praxis.

Beanie Babies became a household name. People the world over raced to secure each new release, mesmerized by the prospect these tiny stuffed animals would one day be worth big bucks.

At the height of the Beanie Baby craze, many of these plush toys were reselling for as much as 5 to 1000 times their retail value — or in the rare case of Princess the Bear, selling for $500,000.

The major driver of the hysteria was that Ty Inc. began retiring early editions. Collectors rushed to buy each new issue before it was retired, or before stores sold out.

In other words, the manufactured scarcity — of limited supply — created an inflated perception of worth.

But the hysteria would not last.

In the late 90s, Ty Inc. began flooding the market with new Beanies. Where Beanie Babies were once scarce, suddenly, anyone could get them.

Almost overnight, the resale value of Beanie Babies tanked. Many Beanies went from selling for a multiples of their retail value to selling for less than their original $5 purchase price.

Once Beanies were no longer rare, the resale prices crashed. Once everybody had a Beanie Baby — or could easily get one for cheap — the perceived valued plunged.

Degree Inflation

There are two parts of degree inflation that are important to understand.

First, inflation happens anytime something that was once scarce becomes non-scarce. When that item becomes non-scarce, it loses relative value.

Maybe you’ve seen this with the value of US dollars. As the money supply increases, dollars are worth less than they once were. It may look as if prices are sharply increasing, but in reality, this “increase in price” is bolstered by a rapid decline in the value of a dollar.

For example, it would require $233.13 in today’s dollars to purchase something priced $100 in 1990.

In the same way, part of the reason the perceived value of a college degree has declined dramatically is because they are no longer scarce. In fact, in the 1990s, approximately 21.3% of the US population had a college degree. By 2022, this rate had increased to nearly 38%.

But how exactly are they less valuable?

The second part of degree inflation is the downstream effect of more people obtaining degrees. When bachelor’s degrees are no longer scarce — when most job applicants have them — employers no longer deem them as a unique differentiator for job applicants.

In other words, if everybody has a degree, then employers must look for other ways to differentiate candidates.

The immediate impact of this was that many employers began raising the bar. Jobs that once listed “Bachelor’s Degree Required” changed to “Master’s Degree Required”.

Moving Goal Posts

Students (post-2008 financial crisis) who’d been told their whole lives to go to college and they’d live happily ever after got sold a false bill of goods. Instead of graduating college, many students now felt they needed to continue school to get a Master’s degree (or more) if they stood a chance on the job market.

But what’s worse than the degree inflation: from 1990 to 2020s, while job requirements increased in many industries, wages remained relatively stagnate and the cost of college ballooned nearly 300%.

Since 2008, the aggregate student debt in the US has nearly quadrupled.

…but worse than all of that, is the big lie: That college degrees were valuable in the first place.

Perception of Value

A degree holds no objective value. People like to pretend degrees have an intrinsic value. But they don’t.

You can’t sell your degree. You can’t collateralize it. You can’t put your degree up for sale in the same way you might your house or a car. You can’t have it appraised.

All you can do is hope. Hope that other people think your degree is worth the same (or higher) esoteric amount of value you’ve bestowed upon it.

At worst, the underlying financial value of your degree is a fantasy. At best, it’s worth the resale value of the paper it’s printed on.

A Tough Pill to Swallow

I know it’s a tough pill to swallow, but your degree is probably worth less than the average Beanie Baby.

At least, your degree by itself.

That’s because your degree isn’t the thing you think it is. It’s not some magical talisman that unlocks untold riches and the perfect life.

Your degree is just a piece of decorated paper.

In reality, you are the product. You are what makes a degree valuable or worthless. What you do with your life. Whether as a byproduct of your college experience or lack thereof.

You never needed a fancy piece of paper to become valuable.

You can do most — if not all — of the same things without a degree that you can with a degree (except refer to yourself as a legitimate college graduate).

You can land the same jobs. Work at the same companies. Make the same money.

At least, if you’re willing to put in the necessary amount of time, energy, effort, and financial investment.

In a world where most people have one, a degree won’t help you stand out. You’ve got to find other ways to do that.

You’ve got to make yourself scarce — your skills, your perspective, your experience, your network, your ability to create value.

That’s how you make yourself in-demand. Not by doing the same things everyone else does.

It’s simple really. Not easy. But simple.

If you’re willing to put in the effort, you can build a higher value signal than a college degree. In that sense, you can become your own credential. (And a credential that’s impervious to degree inflation, at that.)

The post How Degree Inflation Destroyed the Value of A College Credential appeared first on Praxis.

If you want to build the most valuable network possible, then you should aim to build a robust network — filled with a variety of people from different stages and walks of life.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how to think about the “types” of networks.

Your Horizontal Network

Most of us over-index on a “Horizontal” network when we’re just starting out. That’s natural. Especially when you’re in school.

Think of your horizontal network as the group of people who are the same age / life stage as you. They’re at approximately the same point in their journeys as you are in yours. You’re closest friends, spouse, and closest professional connections will probably come from this network.

Unfortunately, when you’re a teen or 20-something, your horizontal network typically can’t do much in the way of helping you access job opportunities.

That’s where a vertical network comes in handy.

Your Vertical Network

If you’re a teen or 20-something, you should be building a vertical network. There are two parts to this.

First, there’s the group of people farther ahead of you in their lives and careers. Current and future bosses, mentors, coaches, professors, role models, potential investors, etc. People who have already accomplished what you’re setting out to.

In most cases, this group will be the most immediately useful to you when you’re just starting out. Which is important to keep in mind. Because eventually you’ll be part of this group for someone else.

That’s where the other part of the vertical network is useful. Think of this as the group of people you are ahead of in your career.

The best network couples peers, mentors, and mentees. It’s a beautiful, reciprocal arrangement. Everyone feeding value back into the network.

But there are also other dimensions to a network to keep in mind.

The post Types of Professional Networks And How To Build a Robust Network In Your Teens And 20s appeared first on Praxis.

We live in an increasingly complex world. If you want to learn how to navigate it effectively, then you need to develop (or learn) mental models.

A mental model is “an internal representation of external reality.” You might think of it as a rule of thumb on steroids.

I like think about mental models as frameworks for making decisions. Often, decisions can be hard because you must navigate a ton of complex information.

Maybe you’re trying to choose between two options. Maybe you’re evaluating a new opportunity. Maybe you’re trying to prioritize your time or money.

Mental models can help tame the chaos by providing a framework to map your unique decision onto — in this way, mental models can help you process you decision through a pre-existing template.

Learning to understand and leverage mental models is basically like having a cheat code.

There are countless mental models worth mastering. (If you really want to go deep on mental models, check out the late Charlie Munger’s work. I recommend the Poor Charlie’s Almanac or “Seeking Wisdom” by Peter Bevelin.)

For now, I’ll share five of my favorite mental models.

Five Mental Models Every Young Professional Should Master

• The Pareto Principle (Or, The 80/20 Rule)
• First Principles Thinking
• Compound Interest
• Occam’s Razor
• The Theory of Constraints

Below, I’ll outline each model and how you can apply it.

Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)

The Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80/20 Rule, posits that 80% of outcomes often come from 20% of causes. In a professional context, a majority of results are typically generated by a relatively small portion of actions or inputs.

Application: As a young professional, applying the Pareto Principle involves identifying and focusing on the most effective 20% of your tasks that contribute to the majority of your success. This focus can make you more efficient, better at managing your time, and overall, more effective.

First Principles Thinking

First Principles Thinking is a method of problem-solving that involves breaking down complex problems into their most basic, foundational elements, and then reassembling them from the ground up. This approach encourages deep understanding and innovative solutions, as it avoids assumptions based on existing beliefs or methods.

Application: In your career, you can apply First Principles Thinking to find unique solutions to tough problems — or situations where there’s no clear right answer. Stripping a problem down to its component parts can help you better diagnose issues, and as a result, better formulate solutions. If you’re ever stuck wondering why something isn’t working (or unsure how it works in the first place), boil it down to its basic parts.

Compound Interest Model

Compound interest is well-known in finance, but it also applies to personal and professional development. It suggests that small, consistent efforts accumulate over time, leading to significant results. Just like financial compound interest, skills, knowledge, and professional networks grow exponentially over time with regular investment.

Application: As a young professional, understanding compound interest means recognizing the value of gradual, incremental improvement over time. Regularly investing in skills, building relationships, and accumulating experiences can lead to substantial career growth over time.

Occam’s Razor

Occam’s Razor is a principle that suggests the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. In decision-making and problem-solving, it implies that “one should not make more assumptions than necessary.” It encourages simplicity and cutting through unnecessary complexity.

Application: You can apply Occam’s Razor to streamline decision-making and problem-solving processes. By focusing on simplicity and avoiding over-complication, you can make more effective decisions faster, a crucial skill in the fast-paced professional world.

Theory of Constraints

The Theory of Constraints is a mental model aimed at helping you identify the most significant limiting factor (constraint) in achieving a goal, and systematically improving that constraint until it is no longer the limiting factor. In business and personal productivity, this model helps in focusing efforts on the most impactful areas.

Application: By applying the Theory of Constraints, you can identify bottlenecks or barriers in their projects or career paths. By addressing these constraints, you can significantly improve your performance and productivity, leading to better outcomes and career progression. Often, elimination rather than addition is the way to improve (for example, sometimes eliminating one bad habit is more valuable than adding a new positive habit).

Anyway, those are a few of my favorite mental models. There are countless more that can help you navigate through the challenges of your life and career. But these offer a great starting point.

Take them for a test drive. Then share this article with a friend if you found it useful.

The post 5 Mental Models That Will Get You Promoted Early In Your Career appeared first on Praxis.

The best books are what I like to call “Gateway Books”. You read them and suddenly you feel as if you’ve pierced the veil — your eyes have been opened to an entirely new world and you can never unsee what you’ve seen. The kind of books that both kick you right in the teeth and also leave you wanting more.

As Holden Caulfield, the protagonist from The Catcher in the Rye, once put it:

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

Those are the best kind of books.

Pulling from my own shelf, here are some instant classics that jumped out. There are easily another hundred books that should be included on this list. Probably more. Because there are just so many great books out there — especially for your early 20s.

Treat this list as a starting point. Not a comprehensive list.

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
• How Will You Measure Your Life? By Clayton Christensen, Karen Dillon, and James Allworth
• Games People Play by Dr. Eric Berne
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
• 12 Rules for Life by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson
• Die with Zero by Bill Perkins
• The Art and Business of Online Writing by Nicolas Cole
• Relentless by Tim S. Grover
• How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win By by Scott Adams
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
• How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis
• How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler
• Metaphors We Live By written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
• Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
• The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley, Ph.D. and William D. Danko, Ph.D.
• What Color is Your Parachute? by Carol Christen (any version, the “for teens” or for career changers)
• The Last Safe Investment by Bryan Franklin and Michael Ellsberg
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Ran
• Seeking Wisdom — From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin
• How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne
• Knowledge and Power by George Gilder

…as I was making this list I realized several I should have added to the pile. The “Not Pictured” list:

• Don’t Do Stuff You Hate by Isaac Morehouse and Mitchell Earl (yours truly)
• Mastery by Robert Greene
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Jospeh Campbell
• Nudge by Richer Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
• The Happiness Hypothesis & The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
• The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden
• The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
• The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason

…there are countless others that are currently slipping my mind. Maybe I’ll have to return to this list later to update.

Happy reading!

The post 38 Books (And Counting) To Read In Your Teens & 20s appeared first on Praxis.

The post Two Critical Mindsets To Develop As a Teen If You Want To Realize Your Potential appeared first on Praxis.

A Decade of Proof You Don’t Need College

Many graduates have gone on to successful corporate, startup, and non-profit careers. Some have risen through the ranks of Directors, Vice Presidents, and even C-Suites. Some graduates have started businesses. Others have built careers around their creative passions – including countless photographers, videographers, authors, designers, artists, musicians, writers, podcasters, and more.

Most alumni achieve financial independence by graduation, if not sooner. In many cases, they go on to be among the top percentile of earners for their age cohorts. Not to mention, only a select few alumni have ever taken on student debt.

Beyond their careers, countless alumni have started families. Many have purchased their first homes and settled down. Many have capitalized on the arbitrage opportunity of remote work – relocating back to areas with lower cost of living while still capturing high wages. In this regard, many alumni have achieved a rare kind of freedom. Location independence and high earnings enable them to live and work wherever they want. 

Those feats alone would be impressive. Many modern working professionals never achieve many of those milestones. But countless Praxis graduates have achieved all of that – in most cases, well before age 30.

What You Need Instead of College

People often ask us – will I still need a college degree if I do Praxis? My answer is always the same: to do what? 

For people who ask, it’s rarely about the college degree in the first place. It’s about what they hope a degree can get them. But few ever question their motives enough to recognize the simpler path to get what they want.

You don’t need to wait four years to get started. You don’t need student debt to afford it. 

All you need is curiosity, character, courage, a little elbow grease, and a positive vision for your future.

Most ambitious young adults already have the right raw material in spades. They’re intellectually curious. Their word is their bond. They’re willing to go against the grain. And they’re hard workers. 

But even ambitious young adults can struggle with the positive vision part.

That’s where Praxis can help.

A Positive Vision For Your Life and Career

In under a year, our program helps young adults who already have the right raw material create a roadmap for their lives and careers.

Working alongside peers and mentors, students enact that roadmap. They set and meet goals. They build life and career skills. They gain work experience. They grow their professional network. They explore and hone their option set. 

In short, they build momentum. Then comes the fun part, they graduate and apply that momentum in the direction they want to take their lives and careers.

For most, that means starting a new career-oriented job. For some, that means launching (or growing) a freelance, service, or online business. For others, that means building a career around their creative passion – like writing, photography, videography, art, design, music, etc.

Rather than waiting four years to make a cold start, Praxis graduates get a running start into their adult and professional lives. Sometimes even before they graduate high school.

Not Just Peers, But Fellow Pioneers

Unlike college, Praxis graduates don’t make the leap into the real world alone. In fact, they’re plugged into a vibrant community of peers who are currently making – or have already made – the exact same leap. And that’s where the real magic happens.

Nearly a thousand young adults – all brought together by a shared spirit of acting out positive visions for their lives and careers – engaging with and encouraging one another as they pioneer their own adventures.

In that way, success is contagious in The Praxis Community. But success is measured differently, too. Not by traditional metrics like money or status, but by the degree to which alumni take ownership of their lives and careers.

Here’s To The Next Decade

While it’s still day one at Praxis, I can’t help but marvel at the ripple effect of nearly a thousand young adults deliberately opting out of college and student debt – to do something different. 

To enact a positive vision for their lives and their futures. Rather than the outdated, broken vision of higher education. 

It’s amazing what a decade can accomplish. Here’s to the next 10 years.

-Mitchell Earl, Chief Operating Officer

The post 10-Year Review: A Decade of Praxis Alumni Thriving Without College appeared first on Praxis.

But isn’t college the “safe” option that virtually guarantees a job? ‘Fraid not, friend.

Keep reading for 5 reasons why college is not for everyone and 12 tips on what to do if college is not for you.

And if you’re already in college and you’re considering dropping out, read our guide to dropping out of college.

5 Reasons College Isn’t For Everyone

College is definitely not for everyone, and that’s okay. Here are five reasons college might not be for you.

Reason 1: You Might Just Not Be College Material

And trust us – that’s not a bad thing. Nobody is really “college material.”

Humans are simply not designed to endure factory-style education to sit quietly in poorly lit rooms all day memorizing information that’s unlikely to be of use to us in real life.

It’s time to break the stigma attached to skipping or dropping out of college. Not enjoying college, struggling with the academic requirements, or struggling to stay motivated doesn’t make you a bad person.

It doesn’t mean you’re stupid or lazy or unambitious or whatever negative thing you might think, so stop believing whoever’s telling you that – especially if it’s yourself.

Truth is, everyone’s brains (and brain chemistry) work in different ways. We’re all motivated and fired up by different things, and something that energizes and fascinates your best friend might bore you to tears.

If academia’s not your thing, that’s okay. It’s much better to pursue your real interests and strengths than get into debt simply because the mainstream “wisdom” is that you need to go to education factory college to get a decent job.

With high interest rates, many low-income graduates end up making low monthly repayments that lead to student loans that grow with time instead of shrink. Don’t let it happen to you.

Reason 2: For Most People, College is a Really Bad Investment

A college education doesn’t come cheap, which means many students resort to student loans to afford it. While student loans can certainly make the cost of college seem more manageable, many students discover a harsh reality once payments come due.

In 2017, the average student debt balance owed was $26,900 for graduates of public colleges and $32,600 for private four-year school graduates, according to a recent report by College Board.

The average monthly repayment falls between $200 and $300, although three out of ten borrowers are not required to make payments on their loans due to deferment. This is often to their detriment, as interest is continuously added to the amount owed. According to a recent CNBC article, some 25 percent of student loan borrowers are behind on their debt in 2020.

While having a degree may seem like a guaranteed increase to your earning power, more often than not it doesn’t translate into higher earnings.

According to recent Statista data, 42.6 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed, working jobs they didn’t need a degree for in the first place, often because they’re the first jobs they find. When bills are due, any job seems better than no job. What’s worse: debt can make you feel trapped and afraid of taking risks – like changing jobs – so it can be easy to get stuck in an unfulfilling, low-paying job.

Reason 3: Experience Beats Textbook Knowledge

If you’re under the impression that a degree is necessary for a decent job, then pull up a chair and have a seat. Because we’ve got a little secret to let you in on. Degree requirements in job listings are often just a way to reduce the number of applicants. If you have the right skillset and attitude – and you know how to get your foot in the door and sell yourself – most hiring managers won’t even notice that you don’t list a degree on your resume. You just need to be willing to learn, work hard, and get a little creative.

Today, 37 percent of employers say experience is the most important qualification in a job applicant, according to a study by The Harvard Business Review. In large organizations (with more than 10,000 employees), experience wins out over a degree 44 percent of the time. According to 45 percent of recruiters and hiring managers, an applicant’s potential is the most important hiring consideration – not their educational attainment.

In today’s world, only two factors matter when it comes to winning opportunities:

1. Your ability to create value
2. Your ability to convince others you can create value.

If you can effectively do those things, you can write your check and create whatever life you want. This is why you need to a) build some valuable skills b) learn how to sell/market those skills.

The thing is, developing proficiency – and confidence in your proficiency – takes time and practice. It takes approximately 10,000 hours to master a skill (which will enable you to create value), and a college degree takes up around 8,000 hours that you could have spent getting really good at something and perfecting your ability to pitch yourself.

Reason 4: You Don’t Need College to Make Great Money

There are plenty of well-paying jobs out there that don’t require a bachelor’s degree. According to US Labor Department projections, 63 percent of all new jobs that will be created through 2020 won’t require a college degree.

More importantly, there are plenty of opportunities to make money by increasing the value you can create (and your ability to convince other people of the value you create).

Here are a few examples of jobs that typically don’t require a degree, keeping in mind that this is just a snapshot of the many opportunities available.

Also bear in mind that there’s an entire landscape of jobs that may list degree requirements, but these can easily be bypassed if you’re creative, hardworking, and daring enough to bet on yourself.

• Registered nurse – Median annual earnings: $73,550
• Administrative service manager – Median annual earnings: $90,966
• Construction supervisor – Median annual earnings: $62,192
• Wholesale or manufacturing sales rep – Median annual earnings: $58,383
• Electrician – Median annual earnings: $60,370
• Plumber – Median annual earnings: $53,910
• Insurance sales agent – Median annual earnings: $59,776
• Brickmason – Median annual earnings: $50,950

And that’s not even counting tech jobs that don’t require a degree:

• Data scientist – Starting salary: $96,000
• Front-end engineer – Starting salary: $63,500
• Java developer – Starting salary: $63,000
• Data engineer – Starting salary: $87,035
• Software engineer – Starting salary: $82,000
• Applications engineer – Starting salary: $59,230
• Business analyst – Starting salary: $58,340
• Systems engineer – Starting salary: $67,370
• Software developer – Starting salary: $66,800
• Cloud engineer – Starting salary: $82,780

You might be thinking “I don’t know anything about data science or coding, so none of that applies to me.” Sure, not yet. But four years is a long time. If you start teaching yourself the fundamentals today and work at it consistently for four years, you could be a more than proficient developer in four years. With coding bootcamps like CodingDojo, you can learn the basic skills needed to become a software engineer in as little as 14 weeks.

Entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, customer support, operations, and a huge number of opportunities in creative fields – these are just a few of the ways you can make good great money without going to college.

There’s absolutely nothing compelling you to follow the well-beaten W-2 path of working for someone else.

The gig economy is on the rise, as is the digital nomad lifestyle. Why limit yourself to jobs that follow the traditional 9-5 structure when you could read the four-hour workweek and live your best life working in the shade of a palm tree somewhere halfway around the world?

Reason 5: The Perceived Value of A College Degree Is Declining

There are more college graduates in America now than at any other point in history, with 33.4% Americans aged 25 and older holding a 4-year degree, per census data.

Problem is, the more people have bachelor’s degrees, the less valuable they become, causing degree inflation to become an issue. When everyone has a degree, it’s no longer a signal that differentiates the holder as exceptional, and before you know it, the jobs that require degrees from applicants start requiring Master’s degrees or PhDs.

According to Bryan Caplan, author of The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, “You need to get more education now to get the same job that your parents or grandparents could have gotten with a lot less.”
Recent surveys have found that the perceived value of college degrees is declining rapidly. In 2013, 70 percent of surveyed Americans viewed a college degree as “very important.” By 2019, that number had dropped to 51%.

It gets even more interesting when you look at changing views about the importance of college in terms of age demographics.

Only 41 percent of 18-29-year-olds saw college as “very important” in 2019 and only 51 percent of 30-49-year-olds feel the same way.

That means only 46 percent of Americans under the age of 49 feel that college is important.

For a long time, getting a college degree seemed like the map to living the American Dream. But that’s changing. As more and more examples of self-made billionaires emerge and a growing number of young people realize that you can teach yourself just about anything if you’re driven and resourceful enough, the new roadmap to the American Dream is self-directed learning.

What Are My Options If College Isn’t For Me?

We know skipping college can be a scary path to choose when you’ve been told since childhood that going to college is absolutely necessary if you don’t want to end up working at the proverbial McDonald’s Drivethru.

The good news is, most of the traditional advice you grew up hearing about college is dead wrong. College is far from the only road to a fulfilling, well-paying job. If you’ve decided college is wrong for you, there are plenty of other options.

We’ve written about some of the options available in detail in our recent post about alternatives to college. Below are 12 more college alternatives to set you on the road to success if college just isn’t for you.

1. Get Out of Your Own Back Yard

A change of scenery might be just what you need to gain a fresh perspective and figure out what you want to do with your life. Moving away from home is a great way to assert your independence and you don’t need to be going to college to leave your hometown.

If you really want to see what “the college experience” is all about, you could even move to a college town, sit in on some classes, and enjoy the perks of campus life without the expense.

You could also see a bit of the world by doing something like WorkAway or teaching English abroad. There are plenty of countries where you don’t need a degree to teach English as a foreign language. You could even go sailing using a platform like Crewseekers – either as a work exchange or a paid crew position. Seeing the world is a great way to broaden your horizons, see what’s possible, and discover what type of life appeals to you.

2. Work for Free

It may seem counterintuitive, but working for free can be a solid investment in your future career. If you think of it in relation to what you’d pay to attend college, it’s an easier pill to swallow.

Working for free is a great way to gain experience, establish a portfolio of work, gain customers, and build your network. For instance, if you’ve taught yourself how to edit videos or build WordPress websites, you might offer your services for free at first in order to build up a portfolio and gain confidence in your skills.

If you do a good job, you can use the experience to pitch paying customers, or your first “clients” might refer more people to you. At the very least, you’ll quickly discover whether or not this is the kind of work you can see yourself doing long-term or not, and you’ll probably learn a thing or two about business and working with other people.

3. Write a Book

Whether you’ve always wanted to be a writer, or you’re just unsure what to do next, the only barrier to entry to writing a book is you. You don’t need an MA in creative writing to do it, either. Everyone has stories to tell, and exploring the recesses of your brain on a blank page is one of the most effective ways to get to know yourself.

With the ease of self-publishing today, you don’t even need to worry about finding a publisher.

If you’re unsure where to start, you can spend some time reading about writing first. Stephen King’s On Writing is a classic and as good a starting point as any.

4. Become a Content Creator

For a growing number of people, creating content and publishing it online is a viable way to make a living, thanks to ad revenue, affiliate marketing, and sponsored posts.

Whether it’s blogging on Medium or WordPress, creating a subscription newsletter on Substack, starting your own YouTube channel, building a TikTok empire, hosting an original podcast, becoming a popular Twitch streamer, creating helpful webinars or online courses, writing e-comics, or whatever floats your boat – being a content creator can be a full-time and well-paying job.

5. Get Into Marketing

Marketing can be a lucrative career choice if you put in the work to get good at it. Today, you certainly don’t need a degree to be a marketer (if you ever did). In fact, for a lot of the options on this list, you’ll probably have to teach yourself a thing or two about marketing.

Whether your goal is to market your own products or services or sell your services as a marketer, there are plenty of resources available to teach you a general foundation. Once you’ve got a good baseline understanding of marketing best practices, you can figure out which approach will work best for you and focus your learning efforts to specialize in the channels that are most likely to give you results.

Getting into marketing is easier than you might think.

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6. Do an Internship

Interning at businesses in industries you’re interested in can give you a huge jump start on the average college student by giving you varied work experience, insight into how different businesses work, and the soft skills to succeed in the workplace.

The fastest way to learn is by doing, so the more varied your early work experience, the faster you’ll develop your skillset and prepare yourself for the business world – whether that’s working for someone else or building your own business.

Pro tip: If you want a lot of hands-on work experience, Intern at a younger, growing business like a startup. They’re more likely to put you to work than just put you on coffee duty, so you’ll learn more, faster.

7. Start Your Own Business

You don’t need a business degree to start your own business. All you need is a good idea, some planning, and the will to work hard and learn the skills you’ll need for your business to thrive.

Here are 55 business ideas and a step-by-step guide to starting your own business, and an excellent guide to help you start making money with your new business.

In the age of the internet, you can maximize your income through multiple income streams. Check out this video if you want to get super inspired to start earning money.

8. Learn a Trade

Learning a trade like nursing, carpentry, plumbing, welding or any number of other in-demand skills is a quick way to start earning money without a degree.

In as few as 3-6 months, you could be entering the workforce as a nursing assistant, medical assistant, or CDL driver. In 6-8 months, you could be a qualified welder. More technical jobs like plumber or electrician take a bit longer, but it’s worth the time investment, as these jobs are currently seeing a skills shortage, which means they pay well. In 2019, the average annual income for an electrician was $60,370.

Whether you choose to go to a trade school or do an apprenticeship, vocational training is a cheaper, more practical alternative to college.

9. Become an Artist

If you’re a creative person, you could put your talents to use to make money. Now, if you think being an artist is limited to painting, sculpting, drawing, and photography, think again.

While you can certainly make money in traditional visual arts if you have a good head for business and marketing, there are many other ways to use your talent to make a living.

Graphic designers earn an annual average of $38,827 and experienced graphic designers earn as much as $70,325, while corporate illustrators earn an average of $63,030. You could also think about exploring a field like web design ($65,240) or user experience (UX) design ($102,364), both high-paying jobs that are seeing a boom in demand as every company under the sun needs a website and/or and app these days. Of course, these are all average salaries – you could make even more as a freelancer or agency owner.

10. Get Fit

Did you know that being physically fit can be a job? Okay, it’s not quite that easy, but there are plenty of ways to make money in the fitness industry, which is currently valued at more than $100 billion globally.

You could become a personal trainer, fitness coach, or fitness-related content and use it to become a fitness influencer on social media. There are plenty of people who have built careers through their workouts.

For instance, college dropout Mari Llewellyn built a successful brand selling her own supplements, workout guides, and merch, all based on the foundation of her Instagram account. What started as a personal growth project and a way to document her transformation journey became the basis of a thriving business

11. Become a Realtor

Real estate is one of the easiest self-starter careers to get into. While the specific requirements to get a real estate license vary slightly from state to state, the core requirements are as follows:

1. Be older than 18 or 19 (depends on the state)
2. Be a legal US resident
3. Complete your required pre-license education (find your state’s requirements)
4. Pass your state real estate license examination

It’s that simple. The rest comes down to how much you’re willing to invest in your personal development to build your sales and marketing capabilities.

Join Praxis, the Ultimate College Alternative

We developed Praxis to get right what colleges get wrong. Praxis is about providing value rather than simply transmitting information, giving our graduates the tools they need to succeed in the workplace.

We wanted to give the brave individuals who have enough faith in themselves to skip college a way to kickstart their careers by helping them nurture the practical skills needed to succeed in today’s business world.

With our self-directed learning approach, graduates emerge from our program armed with real-world skills, self-confidence, and hands-on work experience. Don’t want to take our word for it? Read one of our graduates’ stories about how Praxis helped him to develop his skills and apply them to real-world problems, and lit a fiery passion for entrepreneurship.

Praxis tuition costs $12,000, and 93% of Praxis participants graduate with a full-time job offer – with an average first-year income of $50K. Within your first six months of working, you’ll earn more than the cost of tuition. Plus, we’re so sure of the value of our program that we’re willing to tie our success to yours. That’s to say that if you’re not hired within six months of completing our bootcamp, you don’t pay a cent.

The post What to Do if College Isn’t For You: The Ultimate Guide appeared first on Praxis.

Does this sound familiar?

If you’re stuck in this never-ending loop and worried your lack of experience or qualifications are the problem, this guide is here to help in four ways:

1. Explain what “relevant experience” actually means.
2. Identify the one thing many employers care about most (yes, more than experience).
3. Teach you how to land a job with a tailored pitch instead of worrying about interviews.
4. Give you actionable tips to nail your pitch delivery.

Let’s start at the top.

What Does “Relevant Work Experience” Actually Mean?

Relevant experience is your past work experience that in some way relates to the job you’re applying for.

If you’re applying for a sales position, prior jobs you’ve had with a sales component would be considered relevant experience. Jobs without a sales component, especially jobs that weren’t customer-facing, would be considered less relevant. In this example, prior experience as a line cook at a restaurant wouldn’t be considered as relevant.

That doesn’t mean your work experience as a line cook is irrelevant to the sales position you’re applying for. “Relevant experience” is a flexible term, and what’s considered relevant depends on two factors:

1. What your prospective employer is looking for in a candidate.
2. How you frame and present your prior experience.

You can’t do much about the first factor, but you can do a lot about the second. That’s what the remainder of this guide covers in detail.

Even better, when you frame and present your experience the right way, you can steer the conversation toward what the interviewer is looking for, giving you the best chance of landing the breakthrough job you need to start your career.

Forget About Interviews and Embrace the Tailored Pitch

Most people take a passive approach to hunting for jobs: they look for job listings and apply by sending their resume and a cover letter, and then sit around waiting for an email or call inviting them for an interview.

This approach might work if you have a resume full of relevant experience, but it won’t cut it if you don’t have the X number of years of experience (or degree) the listing stipulates.

The problem with this passive approach is that it places the emphasis on what’s missing instead of what you can offer. In fact, most companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to filter applicants based on specific keywords in their resume and cover letter.

This means if your resume doesn’t mention the qualifications, skills, and experience contained in the listing, there’s a good chance your resume and carefully crafted cover letter will never even reach human eyes.

This is why the tailored pitch strategy is so critical. Creating a pitch that is specifically tailored to the company you’re applying for allows you to control the narrative and shift the focus from what you don’t have to what value you can create for the company if they hire you.

How to Create a Tailored Pitch

If you really want to go above and beyond—which is exactly what employers want to see—create a tailored pitch for each role you apply for.

Your pitch gives you the chance to sell yourself far more effectively than an interview.

A tailored pitch leads with the value you’ll add to the company and tackles any objections an interviewer might raise before they can bring them up. This eliminates the guesswork for the company and puts what you’re bringing to the table front and center.

It follows this format:

“Here’s what I can do for you and your company. I realize that I don’t have the most experience/formal credentials, BUT what I do have is more valuable. Here’s why…”

Here are step-by-step recommendations that our participants use on a weekly basis to land interview (and job offers):

1. Get very specific about the companies you want to work for and the roles you want.

2. Tailor everything to these companies. Research what they’re currently doing and identify ways you can help them improve.

3. Create a clear value proposition that demonstrates what you can do for them. For instance, if you’re applying for a sales job, compile a list of leads, or for a marketing job, write an analysis of their current efforts and gaps you would address.

4. Create a visual pitch deck that highlights your strengths and how your experience  and unique perspective makes you the right person for the job. Showcase any similar projects you’ve completed successfully in the past, as this will serve as evidence that you can do the job you’re proposing.

5. Use cold outreach. Find the hiring manager or a senior manager in the department you’re targeting and reach out to them personally. Tell them you have an idea you’d like to pitch them and suggest meeting times for a first call or interview. Be adamant about following up until you get a response back.

6. Deliver your pitch, using the tips below to make a favorable impression.

Creating a killer pitch takes extra effort, but it probably takes less effort than continuing to apply to job after job hoping to get a call-back.

Confidence—Not Experience—Holds Most Job Applicants Back

A common issue with many qualified applicants isn’t their lack of work experience, work ethic, or ambition, but their lack of confidence when selling themselves. They often don’t think their past work experience is either relevant or respectable enough to be considered professional experience.

Here’s a great reason to throw those concerns out the window.

According to a 2016 survey by Jobvite—a software company for professional job recruiters—there’s one factor hiring managers care about nearly as much as work experience: culture fit.

“Culture fit” is a catch-all term for the intangibles a candidate brings to the table:

• Confidence
• Professionalism
• Social skills
• Communication skills
• Comfort working as a member of a team
• Fascinating interests or hobbies
• Obvious excitement about the job they’re applying for
• Demonstrated knowledge of what the job entails

As one interviewer wrote, “Fit is the person I would be most excited to have walk into the office the next day.”

Can those things really make that much of a difference?

They do to people like Richard Branson, the high school dropout who founded Virgin Group and now is worth $4 billion. Branson wrote a whole article about the importance of hiring for fit:

“The first thing to look for when searching for a great employee is somebody with a personality that fits with your company culture. Most skills can be learned, but it is difficult to train people on their personality. If you can find people who are fun, friendly, caring and love helping others, you are on to a winner.”

How about another example?

In 1994, Brian Scudamore, the founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, launched his first junk removal company—The Rubbish Boys. Frustrated by stalled growth and people he didn’t enjoy working with, Scudamore decided to shake things up. He fired all 11 employees and started from scratch, assembling a new team of people he actually liked based on one simple question: “Would I enjoy grabbing a beer with this person?”

(If you aren’t 21 yet, don’t worry. Scudamore also uses the BBQ test.)

Both examples show successful CEOs of major companies who value personality and fit over skills and experience. That’s a trend we’re seeing among hiring professionals in all sorts of industries, so don’t let a lack of confidence in your on-paper accomplishments hold you back.

Tips to Nail Your Pitch Delivery

A great application gets you in the door. Once you’ve got the hiring manager’s interest, you have your chance to wow them during the interview. Here’s how it’s done.

1. Be Prepared

Benjamin Franklin said, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

You’ve managed to get your foot in the door and have an opportunity to give your pitch, and now it’s time to make the most of the opportunity by showing up prepared:

• Know both the job description and desired skills inside-out.
• Research the company, the position you’re applying for, and the interviewer (if you know who they are). Learn about relevant history, products and services the company offers, what other employees have said about the company on sites like Glassdoor, and anything else that shows you’ve put in the effort and want the job.
• Identify problems that you can solve for the company.
• Dress professionally, look presentable, and be well-groomed.
• Be ready to address any obvious gaps between the desired qualifications and your work experience. For each, show what you’ll do to close that gap, such as enroll in a training course to learn a skill.

When you come prepared, you’re showing your work ethic. For many employers, that says more about you than anything else.

2. Be Confident and Proud

If you don’t take yourself seriously, no one else will either—including your audience.

No matter your prior job experience, speak confidently and proudly of the work you did, regardless of your job title or responsibilities. You had a job to do, and you showed up every shift to do that job to the best of your ability. You gained experience, learned new skills, and were an asset to your employer.

3. Show Off Your Soft Skills

Let’s revisit Richard Branson’s quote from earlier—specifically, this sentence: “Most skills can be learned, but it is difficult to train people on their personality.”

The “skills” Branson is talking about are technical abilities or hard skills—things like report writing, data analysis, and how to use specific computer programs or tools. You can take online courses or get on-the-job-training to master each.

And just as there are hard skills, there also exist soft skills. These are lumped in with personality in Branson’s quote and include things like problem solving, communication, and leadership.

Soft skills are becoming increasingly valuable to employers with three specific soft skills topping the list.

Fortunately, the pitching process gives you ample opportunity to demonstrate your abilities to listen, pay attention to detail, and communicate effectively.

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4. Answer Questions with Concrete Examples

There’s a time and place for non-commital corporate speak and business jargon, but keep it to a reasonable level when answering questions. Focus on giving direct answers with concrete examples that show your abilities or prove your understanding of key concepts.

Here’s a great list of 46 common interview questions. Practice answering a few with supporting examples based on your experience.

For example, let’s say the interviewer asks, “What are your greatest strengths?” Avoid regurgitating the same generic answer about your strong work ethic, resourcefulness, and ability to multitask. That doesn’t mean you can’t use those strengths in your response, but the key is to include evidence or an example of a time you used your resourcefulness to get the job done.

5. Be Memorable

Think about a person in your life who everyone seems drawn to. Everyone knows them, everyone likes them, and they make everything look easy.

Seriously, take a second and think of someone you actually know.

Got a person in mind? What about their personality or behavior makes them so magnetic? Why do people remember them after a casual, two-minute introduction?

If we both listed qualities of the individuals we’re thinking about, chances are good that our lists would look very similar. That’s because most of these well-liked, memorable, and charismatic people share several common characteristics:

• Exude quiet confidence
• Open and inviting body language
• Speak passionately
• Appear determined
• Full of optimism
• Encourage others
• Offer respect
• Show sincerity and honesty
• Make everyone feel important
• Communicate clearly
• Think differently

Your goal during the pitching process is to be memorable to the person on the other side of the table.

If you aren’t a naturally smooth and charismatic person, that’s okay. Here are some ways you can make yourself memorable during your pitch.

• Stand or sit up straight. Lean forward slightly, don’t cross your arms, and be relaxed.
• Control the pace of the conversation. Don’t rush through your points. Go slow and methodically, vary your tone, use hand gestures when appropriate, and think of yourself as a storyteller captivating your audience with vivid answers to your audience’s questions.
• Speak with passion and conviction.
• Show interest in both your listener(s) and the company. Before and after your pitch, make conversation about items in the building or in their office, ask about the company culture, and give them a chance to speak.
• Don’t be afraid to share personal information or experiences that paint a more well-rounded picture of who you are. If you have any unusual or quirky passions or hobbies, find opportunities to work them in naturally.

For more actionable tips, check out the How to Pitch Yourself episode of the Self-Directed podcast.

The Easiest Way to Overcome Your Lack of Professional Experience?

Your lack of relevant experience doesn’t have to sentence you to working minimum wage jobs for the rest of your life. With the strategies in this guide, plus some effort, you side-step the traditional interview process, emphasize your relevant most skills, kick ass during the pitching process, and take your first steps toward your professional career.

But there’s an even easier way to overcome your lack of relevant experience: Get some!

If you’re stuck in the “can’t get a job without experience, but can’t get experience without a job” cycle, project-based learning programs like Praxis give you a chance to kill two birds with one stone:

• First, build required skills with a six-month professional development bootcamp.
• Then, gain real-world, relevant experience with a six-month paid apprenticeship program.

After completion of the program, you’ll have both the skills and experience needed to start your career. Praxis graduates have a 93% job placement rate after the intensive, 12-month experience with an average first year income of $50,000 and no college loan debt.

Ready to see if Praxis is right for you? Learn more about self-directed learning to discover how Praxis can help kickstart your career, today.

The post How to Nail An Interview When You Lack Relevant Experience appeared first on Praxis.

I won’t sit here and say, “No, college is a scam and people who go to college are fools.”

Truthfully, there are a lot of good reasons people choose to go to college. For some, going to college is the right option.

But going to college isn’t the only option.

If it were the only option, then everyone who didn’t go to college would be a failure, right?

We know that isn’t true, because we’ve all heard the dropout-to-billionaire stories of tech geniuses like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg.

But are those guys one-in-a-million exceptions to the rule?

How realistic is it for someone to be successful without going to college?

We’ve done the research for you and compiled a list of 125 people who found success without a college degree.

Sure, some are Zuckerberg-level geniuses, but those aren’t the only names you’ll see.

You’ll also see a lot of people who found the right college alternative and worked hard to achieve success in a wide range of jobs:

• Real estate entrepreneurs
• Corporate managers and executives
• Journalists
• High-paid freelance writers
• Motivational speakers
• Marketing and video production consultants
• TV personalities

And a whole lot more.

125 Successful People Who Didn’t Go to College

As you’re exploring the best option for your future, keep these 125 success stories in mind.

1. Ross Alex

Alex dropped out of college to become a real estate entrepreneur who’s now created two six-figure real estate businesses.

2. Yashar Ali

Ali is a journalist responsible for breaking some of the biggest news stories in recent years from the Fox News sexual harassment scandal to Harvey Weinstein, to the Russia investigation, but he never went to college.

3. Paul Allen

When you think of Microsoft, you probably don’t think of Paul Allen. But like Gates, Allen dropped out of college after two years to pursue computer programming. In fact, it was Allen who convinced Gates to leave Harvard.

4. Mary Kay Ash

Ash was the founder of Mary Kay, the multi-level cosmetics marketing company, which today has over $3.6 billion in revenue per year. Ash didn’t go to college because her family couldn’t afford to send her. Instead, she got married at 17 before getting divorced nearly 20 years later in 1953. After her divorce, she attended the University of Houston for a year before dropping out. In 1963, she formed Mary Kay Cosmetics.

5. Julian Assange

Assange is the founder of controversial media organization WikiLeaks. He attended Central Queensland University and the University of Melbourne in Australia but dropped out for moral reasons.

Assange was obsessed with computer programming as a kid and used his self-developed expertise to become one of the world’s best hackers and most controversial figures.

6. Zachary Babcock

Babcock is the author of Prison To Promised Land, which talks about his five years in prison and how anyone can find happiness and fulfillment after addiction, loss, and other struggles. Today, he’s a motivational speaker, has a podcast, and runs a Facebook ad agency.

7. Cathal Berragan

Berragan is a college dropout who left school to start the social media marketing agency, Social Chain.

8. Patrick Bet-David

Bet-David‘s family immigrated to the United States at 10 as Iranian refugees. He joined the military after high school and then took a few traditional jobs at finance companies before being inspired to launch PHP Agency, an insurance sales, marketing, and distribution company, before the age of 30.

Bet-David is an Iranian immigrant and US Army veteran who worked a few traditional jobs after his military service ended before starting his own financial services company.

9. Gautam Bhargava

Bhargava is a high school dropout and the founder of peeyr.com, a peer education marketplace connecting students with peers for tutoring.

10. Chandler Bolt

Bolt dropped out of college in 2013 and is now the author of five best-selling books. He’s also the founder and CEO of Self-Publishing School.

11. Matt Boney

Boney attended Brown University and then had an idea for a new take on vacation rental packages. He dropped out, moved to Miami, and founded Daycation.

12. Richard Branson

Branson is a high school dropout and founder of Virgin Group, a multi-national venture capital company. Though extremely smart and hard-working, Branson struggled with dyslexia that made attending traditional educational institutions nearly impossible.

13 Travis Brodeen

Brodeen is the CTO of Newchip and was making $150,000 per year by age 19. He’s been involved in startups for 20 years and recently founded MVP Institute, a company that helps startups raise early-stage capital.

14. Mitchell Broderick (Praxis)

Broderick attended a local community college before deciding he wanted to take his life in a different direction. He dropped out and discovered Praxis, which helped him land a sales job for Advantage Media Group. Broderick thrived in the role, and after graduating from Praxis, he was promoted to VP of Business Development. Today, Broderick is the VP of Client Development at Platform, a real estate marketing agency.

Here’s what Mitchell had to say about his Praxis experience:

“Praxis isn’t something that contrarians do to be different for a year. They do it because it works. They get awesome jobs making great money.”

15. James Cameron

Cameron is one of the biggest names in film, directing movies like The Terminator, Aliens, Titanic, and Avatar. He enrolled in Fullerton College in 1973 to study physics before switching to English and ultimately dropping out in 1974.

Cameron got into film because he was blown away by Star Wars in 1977 and worked his way up from production assistant to model maker to art director before becoming the household name he is today.

16. Holly Cardew

Cardew is a college dropout who founded Pixc.com, which helps e-commerce stores optimize their products and images to increase online sales. She also founded Vop, which makes your TikTok feed shoppable.

17. AJ Cartas

Cartas dropped out of college in 2015 to focus on social media marketing and has been running his own agency, Syzygy Social, since January 2020.

18. Pete Cashmore

Cashmore founded Mashable at age 19 without ever having gone to college. In 2017, Mashable was sold for nearly $50 million.

19. Tim Chermak

Chermak is a college dropout and a co-founder of Platform, a digital marketing agency for real estate professionals.

20. Mike Clum

Clum dropped out of college in 2011, bought a camera for $600, and started Clum Creative. At first, he cold-called companies asking if he could shoot videos for them. Nearly 10 years later, Clum Creative has grown to become a full-fledged video production company with over $3 million in annual sales.

Clum started his successful video production company with a $600 camera and a lot of hustle.

21. Gabriel Conte

Conte is a YouTuber with 1.85 million subscribers. He dropped out of college to grow his channel and is now a full-time Youtuber.

22. Simon Cowell

Cowell dropped out of school at age 16 and took a job working in a mailroom. At 23, he started his own record label, Fanfare, and now he’s known as the tough-to-please American Idol critic.

23. Philip DeFranco

DeFranco is a YouTuber with 6.39 million subscribers. He dropped out of college to dedicate more time to his daily news channel, which covers political and controversial topics.

24. Ellen DeGeneres

DeGeneres dropped out of the University of New Orleans after just one semester, instead deciding to pursue stand-up comedy while working odd jobs to make ends meet. It took nearly 10 years, but DeGeneres finally caught her break on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

25. Michael Dell

Dell founded Dell Technologies after dropping out of the University of Texas after his freshman year at age 19. Today, he’s worth $38.4 billion.

26. John Paul DeJoria

DeJoria overcame a tough childhood to co-found John Paul Mitchell Systems in 1980 and Patron Tequila despite only having a high school diploma.

DeJoria is the co-founder of the Paul Mitchell hair products line and founder of Patron Spirits who was twice homeless and sold encyclopedias door-to-door while searching for success.

27. Barry Diller

Diller dropped out of UCLA to become the president of Paramount Pictures and CEO of Fox Studios before becoming the CEO of IAC, which owns Match.com and the Home Shopping Network, among other properties.

28. Jack Dorsey

Dorsey founded Twitter after dropping out of NYU.

29. Jake Ducey

Ducey is a three-time published author who’s given TED talks, toured with Vans Warped Tour, and has a YouTube channel with more than 600,000 subscribers.

Enjoying this content? Drop your email below and we’ll send you our best free resources on succeeding without college:

30. Addison Rae Easterling

Easterling is a college dropout who left to pursue her TikTok influencer career (@addisonre) and later launched her own beauty label, ITEM Beauty.

31. Daniel Ek

Ek co-founded Spotify after dropping out of the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden just eight weeks into his engineering program. He became a millionaire at 23 and a billionaire at 35.

32. Jesse Elder

Elder didn’t finish high school, and today he’s a former MMA fighter-turned-entrepreneur who works as a mentor and life coach focusing on personal happiness.

33. Larry Ellison

Ellison dropped out of two colleges only to later become the founder of Oracle.

34. Rand Fishkin

Fishkin is the co-founder of Moz, one of the largest and most influential SEO companies in the world. Fishkin dropped out of the University of Washington in 2000 to work full-time at his mother’s marketing firm before launching the SEOmoz blog in 2004, which later became the company he co-founded.

35. Michael Fisk

Fisk skipped college and founded Photoboxx, an event-based photo activation company that released one of the first hashtag printers in the world.

36. Sam Forline

Forline dropped out of school and established Blue Collar Scholars in 2013 to hire college students to work in their communities. He’s largely responsible for the success of the Ice Bucket Challenge in his role as the Director of Organizations Against ALS.

Forline is largely responsible for the success of the Ice bucket Challenge, which raised $115 million for the ALS Association.

37. Damien Foord

Foord is a college dropout and Air Force veteran who’s now a branding expert and Principal Strategist at Prismonde.

38. Brett Fox

Fox is a college dropout and a co-founder of Photzy.com, an online photography school.

39. Romacio Fulcher

Fulcher was a college dropout at 19 and became a self-made real estate millionaire by 25.

40. Joe Gagliese

Joe put his college degree on hold to co-found Viral Nation, an influencer marketing agency that’s helped clients like Ray Ligaya land sponsorships with brands like Sony and Tic Tac.

41. Sachet Gagwani

Gagwani enrolled in Radford University to study computer science but dropped out because he “didn’t learn anything new.” He founded an anonymous, social media geolocation app called Covertly and now runs a company called G Venture Group that performs various business services for its clients.

42. Bill Gates

Gates dropped out of Harvard after two years to co-found Microsoft with fellow dropout Paul Allen. Gates became a millionaire by age 26 and is worth $102 billion today.

43. David Geffen

Geffen co-founded DreamWorks after dropping out of three different colleges: Santa Monica City College, Brooklyn College, and the University of Texas.

44. Loren Gray

Gray gained fame on musical.ly (now TikTok) in 2015 while in 6th grade. Today, she has 20.1 million Instagram followers (@loren) and 48.4 million TikTok followers (@lorengray).

45. David Green

Green is the founder of Hobby Lobby who skipped college to start his own arts and crafts company with a $600 loan and an idea to make miniature picture frames. Today, he’s worth $7.6 billion.

Green started Hobby Lobby with a $600 loan and grew his business to over 900 stores and 43,000 employees in 47 states.

46. Micah Green

Green is a Cornell dropout who founded Maidbot, a housekeeping robot for hotels.

47. Nash Grier

Grier initially gained fame in high school through Vine, becoming the second most-followed user on the platform.

48. Maayan Gordon

Gordon is a college dropout, glass artist, TikTok sensation, and now owns Maayan Gordon Media where she’s a TikTok and LinkedIn coach.

49. Lucy Guo

Guo is a successful computer programmer who left Carnegie Mellon in 2014 after two years to pursue an internship with Facebook. Since dropping out, she’s held a variety of impressive positions, including Product Designer roles at Quora and Snapchat. In 2019, she founded her own investment firm, Backend Capital.

50. Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag

Haag is an eSports star and YouTuber with 3.26 million subscribers. He dropped out of college to dedicate more time to professional Call of Duty tournaments, which is how he gained much of his YouTube fame.

Haag was one of the best Call of Duty players of all-time and won $103,000 in 2011 alone, well before eSports reached its current levels of popularity.

51. A.J. Hakimi

Hakimi dropped out of college and hustled his way to a full-time income by buying and selling items on Craigslist. Today, he’s The Flipping Ninja.

52. Jake Heilbrunn

Heilbrunn dropped out of college to backpack Central America and then wrote Off The Beaten Trail. He’s now a social media strategist at Launchbox 365, which bridges the gap between managers and millennials in the workplace.

53. Randalyn Hill (Praxis)

Hill graduated high school at age 16 and wasn’t interested in the traditional college experience. Instead, she took a gap year, during which she discovered Praxis. Through Praxis, Hill landed a job at a coaching startup, Ama La Vida, where she honed her skills for 18 months before starting a career as a full-time marketing consultant at cre8tives.co. She’s also a podcast host on WanderBarn, an Indie podcast network.

Hill used her Praxis experience to start her own thriving marketing agency, Cre8tives.co.

54. Lydia Hodgson (Praxis)

Hodgson was accepted to several colleges but was burned out from high school and unready to commit to more traditional schooling. Instead, she applied to Praxis and got a job in marketing and communications for a real estate company. Today, she’s a Project Manager and Customer Success Specialist for a tech company.

55. Mandi Holmes

Holmes is a college dropout who built She Can Coterie, a full-service business and marketing management agency for online, service-based women business owners.

56. Seth Hymes

Hymes is a college dropout who worked in various digital marketing roles before creating his own digital marketing course in 2016.

57. Steve Jobs

Jobs dropped out of Reed College after just 6 months because he couldn’t understand how the college experience would benefit him. He traveled for a few years before co-founding Apple Computers in 1976 with partners Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne.

58.

The post 125 Successful People Who Didn’t Graduate College appeared first on Praxis.

That’s why we’ve compiled a list of 101 reasons not to go to college.

1. Most people don’t go to college to learn. If that were true, more people would sit in on lectures for free or educate themselves online.

2. You don’t need to go to college to have “the college experience.” You could live in a college town, attend football games and go to parties and get the whole experience without paying for college.

3. There are plenty of other ways to meet people your own age. You could get a job, take a class, volunteer, join a bootcamp, join a sports team, attend Meetups, or work out of a coworking space – to name a few.

4. College takes a “one-size-fits-all” approach that doesn’t take individual interests into account.

5. Everyone has different learning capabilities and what works for some learners won’t work for others. College doesn’t take this into account, using arbitrary standardized tests to measure capability.

6. Learning out of genuine interest is far more valuable than learning out of a sense of obligation.

7. Nearly a third of college freshmen drop out before the end of their first year.

8. Many colleges are adopting virtual/online teaching in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Paying full tuition for “Zoom University” if you’re not getting the full college experience seems like a bad deal.

9. Most colleges haven’t quite figured out the whole “online education” thing yet, which means you won’t learn as effectively.

10. Many companies, including Apple, Tesla, Google, and many others, are no longer listing degree requirements in their job descriptions.

11. Most job degree requirements aren’t set in stone and there are ways around degree requirements if you have the skills and experience the company is looking for.

12. Unless you’re dead-set on becoming a doctor or following another career path that legally requires a college education, you can learn everything you need to know through self-directed education.

13. There are so many great learning materials available online that are free (or at least far cheaper than college). Think online courses, YouTube, podcasts, blogs, ebooks, etc.

14. 90 percent of human resource leaders surveyed by Learning House said they’re open to hiring candidates without a four-year degree.

15. There are better, cheaper, faster ways to “find yourself” and explore what your interests are than going to college.

16. You don’t need to go to college to move away from home.

17. School doesn’t teach you how to think.

18. College keeps you in a prolonged state of childhood that inhibits your growth.

19. College makes you risk-averse, which can make you slow to take initiative because you’re always waiting to be assigned a project.

20. Like K-12, college teaches you to seek external validation instead of cultivating intrinsic motivation.

21. There are plenty of alternatives to college.

22. You might not have an accurate idea of how student loan debt and interest work.

23. The national average cost to attend a four-year institution is $26,120 per year, bringing the current total cost of attendance to an average of $104,480 over four years. And that’s not including interest.

24. The average private college tuition clocks in at $36,801 per year, with at least 120 ranked private colleges charging more than $50,000 per year.

25. According to the Washington Examiner, some 68% of Americans don’t have a bachelor’s degree.

26. 49 percent of college educators say post-secondary education isn’t necessary to a person’s success in life.

27. Across all types of colleges and universities, about 40% of students who enroll will fail to complete their degree program within eight years, and few ever come back to finish what they started.

28. Approximately 23% of students drop out during their fourth year.

29. College students drop out for a number of reasons, including financial pressure, academic pressure, and struggling to find their feet socially.

30. Nearly a third of billionaires in 2016 didn’t graduate from college.

31. You don’t have to be a billionaire to be a college opt-out success story. Plenty of successful people haven’t gone to college. Read their stories.

32. 53 percent of college grads are unemployed or working in a field that doesn’t require their degree.

33. Once you get your foot in the door at a company you want to work for, it’s entirely possible to move laterally into an entirely different role if you’re proactive and show them that you’re an effective employee who can create value.

34. According to a report by the Institute for the Future (IFFT) – a nonprofit panel of 20 tech, business, and academic experts – 85 percent of the jobs of 2030 haven’t been invented yet.

35. The world of work is changing rapidly. According to the World Economic Forum, skills – not degrees – will shape the future of work.

36. According to US Labor Department projections, 63 percent of all new jobs that will be created through 2020 won’t require a college degree.

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37. Most of us are likely to change careers 5-7 times in our lifetimes, and about 30 percent of the workforce is expected to change jobs or careers every 12 months. The idea that you’ll do what you studied for the rest of your life is outdated.

38. College is not the best route to building a successful business, according to successful entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Gary Vaynerchuck, Steve Jobs, and many others.

39. If you want to learn about business, you’ll learn more working in a sales or customer service role than going to business school.

40. Only around 44 percent of entrepreneurs have a college degree of any kind.

41. Great ideas can’t always wait four years, and putting your ideas and projects on hold while you go to college can have a huge opportunity cost. Someone else might develop your idea first, or market conditions (or you) might change so that your idea no longer seems like such a moneymaker by the time you graduate. Or worse, you might leave college loaded with debt and end up taking the first job offer you get just to make ends meet and forget all about your great idea.

42. In 2018, the majority of graduates from half of America’s colleges earned less than $28,000 per year, according to a Third Way report.

43. A recent survey found that on average, college graduates make about $11,600 (or 19 percent) less per year than they expected.

44. 32 percent of college-educated individuals say they never found jobs related to their field of study.

45. 93 percent of near-graduates believe they’ll get a job related to their studies within 6 months of graduating; but, only around 60 percent do.

46. You won’t necessarily make more money if you go to college. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that the top 25 percent of high school graduates outperform the bottom 25 percent of college graduates.

47. According to data from the CPA+ standardized test, which measures how students’ capabilities improved between freshman and senior years, college doesn’t teach students crucial skills like critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and writing and communication.

48. At over half of U.S. colleges that participate in the CLA+ exam, more than one-third of seniors “were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document, or interpret data in a table.”

49. 50 percent of employers surveyed by PayScale believe that graduates aren’t adequately prepared for the workplace.

50. The top three skills employers name as lacking are critical thinking and problem solving, written communication, and public speaking.

51. College predominantly focuses on theory and not enough on practical application.

52. The best way to learn is through practice in real-world situations, and college doesn’t provide enough opportunities for this.

53. 54 percent of employers provide additional training to new hires to make up for the lack of qualified candidates.

54. College doesn’t teach you the crucial soft skills and hard skills valued by employers. In fact, according to research by Pearson Business School, HR professionals say that only 13% of graduates are “ready to hit the ground running” when they enter the workforce.

55. College is not the real world and unless you’re aiming to go into academia, the college experience doesn’t prepare you for the realities of the career you’re pursuing. College campuses are isolated communities that are not representative of how the real world works.

56. With the pace at which the world (and technology) is changing, many college curricula are wildly outdated and the lecturers are often out of touch with what’s currently happening in their industry.

57. If you’re considering college as a way to build a professional network, keep in mind that a network of peers your own age (and at the same professional level) will likely take many years to yield returns. You’d be better served building a diverse network through varied work experience.

58. 37 percent of employers say experience is the most important qualification in a job applicant, according to a study by The Harvard Business Review.

59. The downside-to-payoff-ratio for going to college is too high. It’s better to make choices with low downsides and high potential payoffs.

60. Underemployment among college graduates is high (43 percent!). That means many college grads are working jobs that don’t require a college degree.

61. Going to college because your family, friends, teachers, guidance counselors, or anyone else in your life says you should is not a good enough reason to go.

62. eLearning programs are on the rise, with a forecasted 10.9 percent annual growth rate through 2025.

63. You’ll learn more about your career of choice (or your career options) through job shadowing, interning, and talking to people in that line of work about the ups and downs of the job.

64. Internships increase your chance of getting hired, and 56.1 percent of 2019 internships converted into full-time roles.

65. Colleges subsidize tuition in order to qualify for charity status and tax breaks, which really makes you wonder whether they’re artificially inflating tuition fees for nefarious reasons.

66. Between 1989 and 2016, the cost of attending university grew eight times as much as the average wage increase. In 1989, the average cost for four-year college education came to $26,120 ($52,892 adjusted for inflation). In 2016, that same four-year education averaged at $104,480. That’s an annual growth rate of 2.6 percent, compared to a median wage growth rate of just 0.3 percent.

67. The costs of attending both public and private colleges have increased by more than 25% in the last ten years.

68. More than 40 U.S. schools charge more than $250,000 for a four-year degree, according to US News and World Report data. And costs are rising not only for tuition and fees but also for textbooks and housing.

69. More than 44 million Americans are saddled with student loan debt.

70. The average student with college loan debt owes a whopping $32,731 at 5.8% interest. That means a $360 monthly payment for 10 years with over $43,212 repaid when it’s all said and done.

71. A recent survey found that on average, near-graduates estimate that it will take six years to pay off their student loan debt, while data shows that 20 years is a more realistic estimation.

72. Americans owe some $1.56 trillion in student loans.

73. As of 2019, an estimated 22% of all Americans with federal student loan debt are in default on their loans, and some think the total number of borrowers in default will rise to 40% by 2023.

74. Defaulting on your student loans affects your credit score and can set you back financially for many years.

75. On average, near-graduates estimate that it will take six years to pay off their student loan debt. Meanwhile, research shows it takes the average graduate with a Bachelor’s degree 21 years to pay off their loans. That means the actual cost of that $32,731 loan at 5.8% interest is $55,376.

76. With the $1.56 trillion owed in U.S. student debt, you could buy:

• • 1,56 billion iPhone 12 Pros.
  • 44,57 million Tesla Model 3s.

77. According to a recent report by Strada Institute for the Future of Work and Burning Glass Technologies, more than three-quarters of the 40 percent of college graduates that take jobs that don’t require a college degree straight out of college are still in the same job ten years later.

78. 70 percent of polled college students and recent graduates say that they have difficulty finding affordable insurance.

79. College not only postpones the start of your career by four years, but the debt incurred also leads to graduates delaying a number of key milestones including homeownership, marriage, and having children.

80. A recent study by the Federal Reserve found that around 20 percent of the decline in homeownership rates among millennials can be directly attributed to student debt  – representing some 400,000 graduates.

81. A recent study by LendKey Technologies found that one-third of respondents under the age of 34 would postpone marriage until their student debts are paid off.

82. In a recent survey, 61 percent of surveyed college students said they’d take a job they’re not passionate about to pay off their student loans. The pressure to pay towards student loans each month can really limit your career growth by making you afraid to leave a job where you’re underemployed or unhappy because you need income security.

83. Going to college and accruing debt delays the onset of investing by several years, and the earlier you start investing, the more you earn in the long run thanks to compound interest.

84. Apprenticeships are gaining traction in America – in the 2019 financial year, 252,000 individuals started apprenticeships. There are around 25,000 registered apprenticeship programs in the U.S. today, and In FY 2019, 3,133 new apprenticeship programs were launched – representing 128% growth since 2009.

85. In Germany, around 60 percent of young people train as apprentices in fields ranging from banking to manufacturing, to I.T. – compared to just 5 percent in the US.

86. With 35 percent of U.S. adults over the age of 25 holding a college degree, a bachelor’s degree simply isn’t worth much as a signal anymore, unless you went to a top-tier school and you were at the top of your class.

87. Only 5 percent of two-year college students graduate on time. In 2015, 59 percent of Bachelor’s students took 6 years to complete 4-year degree programs.

88. Only some 45 percent of students get their qualification from the first college they attended.

89. Four years of college amounts to 8,000 hours. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized research by Anders Ericsson, a Swedish performance researcher who studied the history of elite performers across many disciplines. He found that many elite performers broke through around the point they reached 10,000 hours of dedicated practice.

90. College is tough. Many students experience anxiety and struggle with the academic and social demands of college.

91. According to data from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 30 percent of college students say that stress has affected their academic performance. 85 percent of students say they have felt overwhelmed within the past year. 24.5 percent of college students reported using psychotropic medication.

92. Between 2007 and 2017, the use of campus mental health services at 196 schools increased from 19 percent to 34 percent, according to a recent study.

The post 101 Reasons Not to Go to College: The Big List appeared first on Praxis.