[Music] hey hey I'm back it's me Tiffany the budget aliche your favorite Financial educator and this is money glob from Yahoo finance where I help you debunk your money miss and miss understandings you like the literation I know you do well this episode we're going to talk about H the true cost of success when it comes to going to school or getting an education should you go to trade school should you go go to college what are the cost of both picture this you're 18 years old and you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed because someone
told you what do you want to be when you grow up and you have to make this huge financial decision what direction do you go to do you decide there's a trade that I want to learn and how much will that cost you do you decide you know what I'm going to go the traditional route I'm going to go the way to college but what if you don't use that degree so many big choices and they do cost money there's a study done by Ed ation data.org and they found that the average person holding student
loan debt owes $37,000 that's a lot of money and over 43 million adults hold federal student loan debt so this is not a choice to be taken lightly no it's a choice that cost and you might be a parent watching you might be a student you might be a favorite auntie I don't know and you're trying to help someone in your life make this choice but you don't have to make it alone not while I'm here no because today in this episode we're going to have a guest in the studio who is a career coach
she is a three-time best-selling author she is just a bad mama Jam invite into the studio Laura gastner aing yes you might have seen Laura on Good Morning America on The Today Show you might have seen her in Oprah daily Harvard Business Review oh oh maybe not there okay maybe Bill Clinton's White House where she helped to shape americore I told you she was a bad Manama Jama well in today's episode Laura is going to help us to navigate what choices we have available when it comes to seeking financial success through education trade school school
regular school let's decide Laura welcome into the stew and come on in I told you we're gonna have a guest in the stew today we have Laura who we're going to talk about Laura like should we be going to college or trade school or both or neither I just feel like this is a great conversation we're going to have today absolutely I'm excited to get into it so let's keep it easy for people who don't know they're like trade trade school like what exactly is a trade okay so a trade is a skilled occupation you
get very particular training for a very particular skill and then you do that particular job as opposed to the sort of expansive career where you may be doing all sorts of different things every single day okay so for example plumber right Plumbing construction HVAC anything that involves very specific Technical Training that you get in a sort of a licensing and and and certification type of way so there seems to be because I'm on like Instagram a lot and there seems to be this big shift about young people's attitudes toward going to college yeah like what
do you attribute that to well I think it's a couple things so I think the first thing is that it's higher education the cost of it is absolutely exorbitant so people are taking on all the student loans it turns out that the average graduate graduates with $37,000 of debt and 40% of graduates say that either they're unemployed or not employed in the thing for which they got the degree so suddenly that $37,000 doeses not seem really attractive at the same time uh there's so much growth in the trades because you have the traditional trades you
know plumbers electricians HVAC and a lot of those people are retiring so there are a lot of opportunities and openings right now and then you have all this new technology so you have like electric cars you have solar panels Etc and there's a lot of growth that's in that area so it turns out that there's about 200,000 of these new trade jobs that are going to appear in the next 10 years so the time is right to be able to do that so what is it that you think young people are looking for right so
they're like because ultimately I feel like disease are not opposed to working but to your point opposed to working kind of like in this corporate space yes so a lot of us nones came out of the pandemic going well when life returns to normal is the normal I'm really returning to the life I actually want and it was a big resounding no for a lot of people and so a lot of people started thinking about what's this definition of success that I've always had which was always like get the right grades go to the right
school go to college right that was the definition and it turns out a lot of people who the zc you know ahead of them aren't that happy and they're like well I don't want to do that because that didn't work and so instead they're thinking well what do I want to do that gives me this great work life balance we did this assessment where we have nearly 10,000 responses from 74 different countries across every demographic in every industry and what we found is that the one thing that people wanted more of after the pandemic was
actually control they want to control about when they work where they work how they work what they get paid to work and we're so we're seeing a lot more of these gig jobs we're seeing a lot more contingent jobs and a ton more trade jobs because the people in those jobs actually get to have uh some control over where they work when they work how they work they get entrepreneurship get that get to be their own boss so it's just a whole new definition of what employment can look like I think that answers kind of
like some of the question about like what are the the benefits or the the advantages of school but I saw like and I don't know if it's true or not but I saw this meme that like like trade entrepreneurs are like some of the fastest growing um demographic of of millionaires absolutely and and also because they start earlier so when you graduate from college you start making like entry level income and you're going to grow and you're going to grow and eventually you may end up out earning people that are in the trades but people
coming out of trade schools immediately start earning usually Union protected wages right they're usually getting paid a lot of money if you've ever had your a vac break in the middle of July you know cost a lot of money to have some guy show up or some woman show up on a Saturday right they can they can charge a lot of money and so immediately they're starting to make more so that they can start putting money away sooner they're graduating without debt it's a shorter uh program it doesn't cost as much money so they're already
coming in without that financial burden and then they graduate and they can start putting money away earlier and earlier so the compound interest of their earnings grows incredible because you're right I remember I had a friend of mine who was like in he worked for like Amtrak on the trains and he was in his 20s at the time and he was making really good money relative to his age yes now the problem is that they don't continue to grow in the same way that people who go to college so if you're thinking about the sort
of longterm picture you might also the benefits of college are you've got the four-year degree you have a vast and Broad uh uh liberal arts education you create h a relationship with a cohort of people who are all doing lots of different things so there's other opportunities to grow and pivot and change as well so there benefits to both and it studies do show that people will earn more with a college degree than without one but if you're thinking about maybe College isn't For Me Maybe I don't really know what I want to study you
can go to trade school and college is always there to go later there's plenty of people who return back and use that as a pivot point so if someone is watching and they're like a parent or maybe even just a someone who's in high school right now and they're just thinking to themselves like I'm trying to decide like what the next steps are How would how would somebody financially start to prepare for like for trade school are there like scholarships are there is there money available and then opposing that to how do you prepare for
like to set aside for college like yeah I mean I think thinking through your your the economics of the reality of your economics like everybody has different numbers and everybody has options of different uh student loan forgiveness um afterwards or or scholarships before so really figuring out what you want to do with the degree I often tell people that they should spend a little bit of time thinking about what they actually want to do what success looks like for them and I tell them that there's two numbers there's like the need to make number and
the want to make number right so if you're going to graduate with a job that's very clear and you know that it's a fast growing like if you're if you are uh going into an engineering field and you want to go to college for engineering there's tons of jobs in that so you know that you're going to be highly employable if you're say one of my kids and you're getting an art history degree not a lot of jobs in that so you know your next job is going to be graduate school so you're looking at
a very different Financial picture when you're coming so I think thinking through why you want to get that degree before you start investing the money and what that need to make number is for you to be able to actually put food on the table pay your rent Etc and not overextending yourself in terms of the the the loans that you're going to take out without a really clear picture of how the career that you want to follow is going to actually pay back that loan I think so many I mean I just remember thinking like
I don't know I just want to go to college and get a degree I don't know what I want to do after I think so many kids don't don't attribute what they actually do in school to what they can actually make right but did anybody ever say to you like well maybe College isn't an option they were just like the definition of success is college absolutely right so like it was we never stopped and thought maybe I want to go maybe I don't want to go nobody ever said to you what is your definition of
success what is interesting to you it may be that your definition of success is having a job that you have very specific hours you know exactly what you're going to make you know the training that you need to get and you want to be home to like have dinner with your kids every single night great awesome it may be that your definition of success is that you want you know go to college go to law school grind away on the partner track never see your kids but actually make so much money that your kids get
to make different decisions than you got to make because they have more Financial Freedom and flexibility and the truth is that every one of these definitions no matter where you are is right we just don't ask people and we tell our students they're 15 16 17 years old pick a major pick a college pick a trade go and we go okay but we don't have a frontal lobe when we're 15 16 17 so we make these decisions that are going to affect the very rest of our lives and we literally don't have the capacity to
make a good one and then we're like oh oh and also by the way here sign here for all these student loans right so we don't actually give ourselves a chance to stop and so my advice to young people who are thinking about what they should do is to stop for a minute and think about your definition not just the one that a teacher handed you or a parent handed you or some celebrity handed you but what actually excites you what's interesting to you how do you not just what do you want to make but
how do you want to live your life who do you want to be in your life and then what does that life cost both in terms of your time in terms of your energy in terms of money so is that this is the shift that you're seeing like when you're speaking to young people even parents because I feel like we see the shift obviously in young people they're just like I want to be happy I want peace but are do you see shift in like the the parents of these young people being open to having
their children not choose what has been the traditional path of success yes especially because these are the very parents that are still struggling with their own student loans and who are realizing that throughout the pandemic they were not fulfilled in what they were doing and they left thinking well maybe I should do something different maybe I should change and they can't because they are so just traed by the loans that they took out and so they don't want to do that for their kids oh my gosh Laura this conversation is so enriching but hold that
thought because we're going to take a quick break and you stay there because after we pay some quick bills we're going to be right back with more Laura more trade school more College [Music] and we are back so Laura what were you saying again about um I think we also live in a society now where um we are seeing people manifest their values through their work much more like before 2016 you would see like Paris Hilton like laying out on the top of a of a convertible eating like a sloppy hamburger during the Super Bowl
and then after 2016 suddenly all these companies were falling all over themselves trying to show their values right we saw all the sort of every possible political uh uh ideology you can have on display during the next year Super Bowl ad so suddenly we have been shown that there's this opportunity to reflect your values through not just where you spend your money but where you spend your productive hours of your day where you work and the Gen Z is not going back right gen Alpha certainly is not going back they expect that this work should
contribute to their lives in some way not just how much they make but like the values that they manifesting every single day who they are what their career trajectory is going to look like and whether that's working in the trades and feeling like they're sort of Hands-On and in touch and maybe an entrepreneur themselves or working you know within a union setting they that's that's one definition that they like and so if that's one of the ones that is interesting to them then that's so much more of a viable option now and at the same
time we also see Venture Capital funds that are you know they investing left and right in trade schools because they know how much they're going to grow I mean the 200,000 jobs I mentioned earlier that's just in the construction industry so imagine how it's going to grow when we think about the you know the solar panels and the clean tech and and uh U electric cars and all the rest of the new technology that we haven't even imagined yet well if somebody's watching now and they're just like uh I want a traditional R I hate
it here um I want a pivot you know how can they pivot do they have to go back to school if you're like a little bit older you know can they consider a trade at 40 45 it's it too late like where where're if somebody who's like I don't want to to navigate how I've been navigating what are the choices that are available for someone older so I'd say if somebody's listening to Yahoo finance are obviously thinking about money so the first thing they should think about is what's the need to make number right like
what do they need to make to put money on the table and can they make that number During the period of time that they're in this pivot and then there's the what's the want to make number right so everything in between the need to make and the want to make number is where you're going to sacrifice how you're going to spend your time are you willing to take on a second shift of a job so that you can go back to school during the day Etc and then maybe start doing some networking have some informational
interviews with people who are in that trade or in that career to have a conversation about well it looks this way on the bright shiny outside in our social media world where everything looks bigger than it actually is in real life and have a conversation like what does it really look like what does it really look like what does it feel like to work here um what are the opportunities for for career advancement what do you look for and the people that you're trying to hire so I know what I need to do during my
Pivot right so start to have those kinds of conversations and those informational interviews allow you to be smarter about the networks the knowledge the trends and whatever trade or career you want to go into so those are the first two things I would I would advise is there like a specific trade in in particular that you see I mean so you said Con construction but there is there any other trade that seems to be exploding with opportunity that maybe people are not thinking about certainly all the clean tech okay so clean tech are people that
install solar panels people that are fixing electric cars there are people wind turbines right anything that has to do with green energy and clean tech will be huge huge moving into the future because we're just seeing more and more I mean there's the electric car is just in and of itself uh most car companies are saying that they want to have all electric fleets by certain dates and so who are going to fix those right it's not the mechanics that are fixing our gasoline engines it's we've got to teach people how to do this and
so there's so many new technologies that certainly people that grew up with technology every single day are going to be much more comfortable thinking about and figuring out and you know working with the the the interfaces for well if you had to do it all over again so like did you go to did you do the traditional route I went to college and then I went to law school cuz I thought I'm going to be a lawyer I had a fourth grade teacher who was like Laura you're really argumentative you should be a lawyer and
I was like well I think you're wrong cuz like I'm argumentative right so but then I proceeded to put myself on a path to law school because my parents were like great law school that you'll be a lawyer that's a career we know right that's like an actual job and then I saw you know all the lawyers on TV and it seemed like exciting and sexy and I was like I'll be one of them and then I got to law school and I was that student you know the ones that are called upon on the
first day and ask question after question after question that was me right so I immediately of course hated Law School uh and I uh so I dropped out I I I it was horrible it was I was like this is not the place I should be I just hadn't thought about it and I dropped out and joined uh Bill Clinton's presidential campaign and ended up doing Advance like I went around the country I put on political rallies uh and he ended up in the White House I ended up in the White House I helped create
a maror yeah which is you know the program where people can take a year and pay College tuition by doing community service and so yeah I had thought that I had this idea of what success would look like and who I was going to be and who my parents approved of and all of that and then I got there and realized I had like Oregan rejection failure of being there if you had to pick a trade you know you're imagine yourself 16 17 years old and it's like there's no such thing as College what would
you have maybe like been interested in exploring if I had to pick a trade I probably would have gone into I think painting for sure painting because it's creative you can do it inside you can spend some time outside I think it's incredibly scalable there's you can continue to get better and better and better at different techniques so yeah I think i' would probably go into painting what about you what would you do I don't know honestly like my sister's an engineer and so you know I just always was curious how things worked but yeah
I don't I mean I just went to school cuz I was told to obvious you know right and even when I chose my major I was like een me my Mo I'll choose business because I'm 18 and I don't know what else to choose you're like I'll choose business seems like it involves money I like money I'll pick business right like that that's how we chose imagine so like I mean even if you're like in the middle of your career like so we make this decision when we're super young and then we never we don't
have the capacity to make a good one and then we don't change our mind and then we never give ourselves the grace to like go back and be like maybe that person I thought I was 20 years ago or I was told I was 20 years ago is actually not who I am or maybe ever was right so we have to we have to give ourselves this opportunity yes so that I did not know that you were in the white house because I've heard of mirac think we all have and so like you know what
was that pivot like for you and for because somebody might be watching and say well I want a pivot you know like or I am currently in school and I want to drop out and I'm kind of nervous so what was that pivot like for you like going to the White House and Beyond yeah well I mean I spent the first six weeks there um being paid all the idealism in ramen soup I could eat so I would say the first thing that I would do is is um make sure that you're comfortable living with
rats and roaches because that's what I could afford in terms of my apartment but to be more serious really thinking about like what will it cost right do I have six months of savings like lucky for me this was 1992 so six months of savings was like $12 in a bag of Doritos right so it was okay um but uh I if you are a young person and you're not happy and you want to make a shift you will never be as unencumbered as willing to live in squalor as willing to do the hard work
have as much energy has a as much of a plastic brain right to like be able to learn and grow like this is the moment so don't wait is what I would tell people because the pivot is super difficult but when you you know you're young and you're naive and you're like I think it could be successful I don't really know you don't know what you don't know and so you know there's a there's a great study that I that I uh quote in my most recent book Wonder hell that uh it's the coin flip
uh the coin flip study and the coin flip study says if you're suffering with a big decision you're struggling you don't know should I take the job should I get married should I buy the house and you don't know whether you should do it or not you flip a coin and if you flip a coin the coin says heads go for it versus Tails stay still people who get heads and go for it they say two months later they're not any worse off okay and six months later say they're substantially better off even if they
say it was the wrong decision okay right so they say they're substantially better off six months later even if it was the wrong decision because the process of making that decision and learning from it and meeting people along the way and discovering what you actually care about and what you're actually willing to work for actually teaches you what you want to do and so puts you on the right track so if you're stuck in analysis paralysis go do something action beat stagnation oh I love that action beat stagnation so if someone is listening what is
the best piece of advice you've ever been given when it comes to like a life impacting Choice um like especially when it comes to choosing the path to higher education or not did anyone when you younger kind of just like give you the kind of bullet in your back that made you say okay this is the this is the direction or give you the courage to leave Law School yeah yeah yeah um the best piece of advice I got around that was um not to follow my passion was that follow your passion is terrible advice
because we're told Follow Your Passion which means I just have to find my passion and then follow it and everything will be great which means the minute things get hard the minute it's difficult the minute we get a bad grade the minute we get a rejection we're like oh must not be my passion I should do something else and then we'd like search around for like what's the next thing that people on Instagram tell me is my passion or what's the Tik Tok telling me is my passion and instead of saying like what would you
do if you knew you couldn't fail I would say what would you do if you knew for sure you would fail and yet you would do it over and over and over until you got it right because that's your passion so for young people who are thinking like do I go to trade school do I go to college I would say what would you like what do you want to beat your head against the wall to figure out like what is that interesting to you that it's worth sucking for a little while at it right
like is it is it worth that because if it's not like shouldn't your passion be wor wor a little struggle like a little difficulty I love that Laura thank you so much for coming oh my gosh thanks for having me well I always like to the teacher in me it likes to kind of do a wrap up so you're gonna tell me if I get a A or not what I learned today from Laura are you guys ready okay this is what student Tiffany learned today that one that the the path to success does not
always happen via traditional um uh education meaning like going to school right and that trade school is a very viable option that actually might in the end make you more money because you get to start earlier making money um and that in the end what you choose to do you know really there is a certainly there are benefits to going to college but some of the cons of going to college might be the expense and especially if you're not going to use that degree in the long run you know and trade school takes a little
it's a little bit shorter and um with trade school maybe you can find the thing that you're truly passionate in and you're able to do it and make additional money outside of whatever job that you might have that trade school really might be the Avenue toward growing wealth especially these days um if you're a parent um consider really creating a safe space where your child can make the decision about trade school or going traditional College because you know these days that college is not the only way it's just one of the ways um and last
but not least that if you're not sure what to do flip that coin and then make the final decision and stick with it because you're not going to be better off or worse off from have making from had making that choice on your own did I get it right you got it awesome that's perfect that's perfect okay okay okay well again we wanted to ask the question what is the true cost of education is trade school worth it I think we answered that question today um I'm Tiffany the budget needa aliche with money Globe from
Yahoo finance I'm here every single Thursday 12:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time if you want to find me you can find me at yahoofinance.com you can also find me wherever you listen to podcast and if you want any sort of financial help a little handholding head on over to getg goodwithmyhands [Music] [Music] for professional Financial Services
