1102: College vs. Trades | Skeptical Sunday

Spring is here, and so are the deals at DeeDee's Discounts.

From trendy outfits to home makeovers, DeeDee's has all the deals you need.

I'm talking everything from sandals and sundresses to spring throw pillows and scented candles.

You love a good deal? Get in your bag and get to DeeDee's Discounts.

This episode is sponsored in part by Vital Proteins.

I want to tell you about Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides.

That's a mouthful. It's a daily supplement that supports your hair, skin, nails, bones, and joints all in one in one simple step each day.

Collagen makes up about a third of the protein in our bodies, but as we hit our 30s, it unfortunately starts to decline. That's when you might notice things aren't working quite like they used to.
Your joints, your skin, maybe even your hair. Vital Proteins steps in to help keep those areas supported so you can stay active and keep doing what you love.
Vital Proteins is the number one collagen peptide brand in the US, so they know what they're doing. It's super easy to take.

Just add a serving to your coffee, smoothie, even water.

It doesn't even taste like anything,

so it blends right in.

The key is consistency.

Making it a daily habit is how you see the benefits.

Get 20% off by going to vitalproteins.com

and enter promo code Jordan at checkout.

These statements have not been evaluated

by the Food and Drug Administration.

This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure,

or prevent any disease.

Support for this podcast comes from Progressive, America's number one boat insurer. Administration.
This product is not intended to diagnose, helping you float carefree all season long. Quote today, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates, number one rating based on boat market share data from ratefilings.com.
Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.
Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher, Nick Pell. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. And during the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers.
On Sundays, though, we do Skeptical Sunday. That's where a rotating guest co-host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic.
Topics like sovereign citizens, circumcision, e-commerce scams, diet supplements, the lottery, ear candling, self-help cults, and more. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs.
These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.
Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. So today, if your family was anything like mine, there was just no question about it.
You were going to college after high school. Now, however, many people, myself included, are skeptical that college is really a good deal at the end of the day.
You might have heard more and more people talking about the idea of skipping college and going straight to work or entering the trades. But is college really useless? Is it a bad investment? Or is this just another talking point without facts to back it up? Here to give us a little higher education on the topic is Anglo-Saxon poetry enthusiast Nick Pell.
Before we go any further, Nick, you went to college, correct? Not as much as you did. Well, your bank account certainly thanks you for that.
These law school student loans were absolutely ridiculous. I'm sure we'll talk about that.
I bet they were, but hey, at least you're a lawyer now.

Yes, but as you may have noticed, I don't practice or use my degree in any way whatsoever most of the time.

What did you study, like bro science, kinesiology, or something like that?

Sir, I have a bachelor's in English literature from the University of Massachusetts.

Oh, like I said.

I literally use my degree every time I research one of these episodes for you, because a lot of what English degrees are is reading, parsing on information, a sense of information. But if I'm being honest, I think I took two classes that were valuable for my job.
So what were the two classes? Introduction to Academic Writing, which was a 200 level class and Controlling the Discourse, which was a seminar on psycho and sociolinguistics that I took in the linguistics department. I have a linguistics minor as well.
Oh, okay. That's actually quite cool.
I'm not even sure I know what psycho sociolinguistics is, but like a lot of people, look, I almost never use my degree when I go to work. I studied law.
I didn't study podcasting. I didn't study digital media or anything like that.
Yes, I read my own contracts, but that's kind of it. I think one of the reasons you're so successful at podcasting is your law degree.
People have said that before. I'm not really seeing what you're saying.
I don't do a law podcast. I don't practice law.
How does the law degree help me be a successful podcaster in your opinion? First and foremost, you're an entrepreneur, which requires a lot of stick-to-itiveness, willing to go through, frankly, a lot of bullshit to get to your goal. Sure.
Okay. That definitely sounds like getting through law school, but I could have developed the same work ethic and stick-to-itiveness by learning, I don't know, to be an electrician, maybe, or something like that.
Okay, fair. But beyond your work ethic, a lot of the same stuff I said about getting an English degree applies to your legal education.
You have to read. You have to be able to parse information out.
You have to be able to present information in a rational and coherent way. So it sounds like you took school really seriously then.
I probably should have done that too. I did not.
I basically used it as an excuse to sit around and smoke a pot all day. Okay, well that tracks.
That is college in a nutshell. So how do you think that you ended up more or less working in your field writing and researching rather than asking for my order at a local coffee shop like many aspiring writers? In my case, I think it had a lot to do with just relentlessly pursuing the goal.
But with that said, I think that college educations

are demoralizing In my case, I think it had a lot to do with just relentlessly pursuing the goal. But with that said, I think that college educations are demonstrably and objectively good investments for basically anyone.

So I am dying to get into this with you today because I just don't know if I agree.

And I think a lot of people listening are like, is this guy crazy?

Why should someone spend $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 for a degree in French poetry or sociology or whatever? It just sounds like a gigantic waste of money when they could just go out and get a job or they could go to trade school and learn how to be a plumber or a carpenter and get a job that actually exists where there is a current demand for those services in every state. Probably sounds extra crazy if this airs after the homeschooling episode, but look, not everybody wants to go to college, and that's absolutely fine.
But I think that the facts are pretty clear that anyone who does go to college is making a sound financial investment. Okay, so why would somebody want to go into the trades if they can potentially make more money with a college degree? Because you have to spend like a third of your adult life at work.
So doing something that you hate or something you're not a good fit for is a great way to spend your life being miserable. Sure, but it sounds like you think everyone else who doesn't want to be in a trade should go to college.
Well, again, I'm making a very limited statement. This is all about the money.
College is a good investment, and I think I can prove that. Okay.
Yeah, go ahead. Prove it.
Let's do it. The median salary of people who went to trade school is a little over $67,000, and the median salary of people with a four-year degree is over $77,000.
That's compared to $47,000 for people who just have a high school education. Investment is specific.
It means you put money in and you get more money out. And I'd say that a $30,000 a year salary increase for a one-time $37,000 purchase, that's the per capita college debt in America, is pretty clearly and stunningly worth it.
So we're comparing a college degree against a high school education or college education against a high school education. Yeah.
Okay. Thanks for joining us on Skeptical Sunday.
We'll see you next week. Now, obviously, the elephant in the room here is the student loans, right? Unless they get forgiven by the president or whatever.
I mean, $37,000, that's not nothing. Plus, look, it takes four years to earn a degree.
I don't know if we should value that at $0. Yes, you're basically a kid with a high school education while you're going through college.
If you only have a high school education and you had a job, wouldn't you be making 47 grand a year or a little bit less? I don't know. That's not quite how it works.
I get it. But I hear all these horror stories about people just getting absolutely buried by student loan payments.
People aren't starting families. They're not buying houses and whatnot because they can't afford to.
$37,000, like that might be average and it makes sense to work with averages. But my loans, which by the way, almost 20 years ago now, just to make myself feel super old, they were almost $200,000 if you include undergrad and law school.
And they would have been way more if I didn't have scholarship funding from the state of Michigan. And that is insane.
I'm going to do a quick inflation calculator here. That $200,000 was actually worth $310,000 in today's money.
That's just by all metrics, absolutely an insane amount of money for somebody who was, I think I was like 25 or something. And by the time you guys hear this podcast, it'll be like $6 million.
That's right. That's right.
In Zimbabwe. But yeah, that's a hell of a lot of money, man.
The average student loan payment in America is $503 a month. I think the facts don't really bear out that this is this crippling debt for most people on average.
So let's go ahead and give the college kids a $6,000 a year haircut on their earnings. They're still coming out ahead.
And this also assumes that they're just never going to pay their student loans off. Did you pay your loans off? I paid mine off early because it was like a freaking sword hanging over my head.
Oh, you're going to hate me. I never made a single payment.
Really? Were you on some kind of forgiveness program or something? No, I just looked around the country I lived in and realized that eventually a bunch of liberals were going to say I didn't have to pay them back because it was unfair or something. And I just ran down the clock on that.
And I wasn't wrong. Mike, I'm in awe, but I'm also completely unsurprised that you did this.
So they just gave up on you paying and forgave your debt. You ran the clock.
That's like a 20 year clock, right? That's some long game. The secret ingredient is crime.
So did you take a hit to your credit? Don't they report like, hey, this guy doesn't pay his bills. Isn't that a thing? I guess so.
And I never really paid much attention to my credit because I paid cash for everything.

The only time it ever really mattered was when I was looking for an apartment.

Yeah, I bought my house in cash.

Like, I buy everything in cash.

When I would look for an apartment, sometimes people would be like, hey, your credit is on the line.

But I never didn't get an apartment because of it.

Got bad credit, but here's an envelope full of money and here's another one for next month.

Are we good? There's going to be another one on the first. Yeah.
Okay. Income statements and bank deposits and stuff.
So that was the only time it was ever an issue. And yeah, I just had to pay cash for it.
Legal disclaimer, please do not ignore your student loan payments. Ignore them.
They're fake. Don't do this.
And if you don't do it, because we told you to, because that's not what we are telling you to do. So the other flaw here is assuming that people in trades aren't taking out student loans.
And a lot of these people are going to very expensive for-profit technical schools. Those are not cheap.
And if you're doing that, you are almost certainly taking out student loans. Sure.
Yeah, I know there was a whole controversy about the cost of some for-profit trade schools using these predatory loans, right? They were just crazy. The rates were insane.
Yeah. That was ITT Tech, who anybody our age or maybe a little younger remembers when Maury Povich was wallpapered with ITT Tech ads.
That was over $13 billion in loans for one college. That was quite a racket.
I remember them advertising for basically my entire childhood. And I mean, the 80s and the 90s on TV.
I'm sure they were around before I was born. There's decades of roping in tens or even hundreds of thousands of students, maybe more.
They had a campus in my hometown back in Troy, Michigan, or Royal Oak or wherever it was, and they clearly targeted minorities and low-income students with just insanely high tuition programs.

And it's kind of depressing, but quite interesting to read about on Wikipedia.

It's like, you read about it and you're just like, how the hell did they get away with

this for so long?

It's absolutely crime.

The secret ingredient is crime.

Yeah, it's horrible.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that everyone who learns a trade does so without incurring any student loan debt. They're still not coming out on top in terms of income against the average bachelor's degree haver.
Ah, degree haver. There's that English degree at work.
So one avenue tradesmen have that more white-collar guys don't have are apprenticeships, which have basically doubled since 2013. There were almost a quarter million of these apprenticeships in 2021.
It's actually it's a really attractive path. My father did really well for himself.
He was an ironworker, which is definitely not a job that, quote unquote, anyone can do because most people just do not have the required mental toughness to be an ironworker. But that said, my father was a high school dropout.
He found out the ironworkers were open for apprentices, jumped through hoops, and got the job. It's really tough work.
You're outside in the freezing cold, the boiling heat. Some years you only work half the year.
And by the way, you're not getting paid for the half that you don't. And you need to get seniority in before you're employed regularly.
But he stuck with it because pension and benefits, they're just unbeatable. Yeah.
Yeah. You hear about it's like the stuff of legends in Michigan, the union benefits.
I'm guessing not anyone can roll up and get an apprenticeship. I've seen The Wire.
Don't you need to be somebody that's a nephew or cousin or something like that? You got to have connections to get one of those. Or is that not accurate? There's definitely an element of my daddy's union involved in getting these apprenticeships.
Like if I spoke to my father, it would be really easy for me to get one of these. And it would not be for one of you because your father is not some guy that everybody in the Boston Building Trade Union knows.
But the only people getting these apprenticeships are guys whose dads had them. Absolutely not.
Especially if not all apprenticeships are through unions. There's non-union apprenticeships, and they're not impossible to get.
They're difficult, so what? They require some legwork, getting some experience in another trade, maybe, whatever hoops they make you jump through. But it's not like you're trying to become a lawyer without going to law school.
That might be a bad example, because I honestly think you'd be better served by working at a law firm and practicing under the supervision of a couple of good lawyers. You would learn more about being a lawyer that way than you would ever learn going to, I'm going to say most, but not maybe not all law schools.
You'd actually learn how to be a lawyer doing that. So with respect to apprenticeships, it sounds like there are obstacles, but it's not impossible.
That's pretty good news because I know nothing about this, obviously. To be honest, if you can't hang with the hoops, you have to jump through to get an apprenticeship.
You're going to last about 17 seconds on a job site. Tradesmen are brutal.
Some of the stories the old man told me are not HR approved. Oh, you can't just leave that hanging there.
If they don't like you, they'll take a shit in your lunchbox. Okay, I was not expecting that.
I thought you were going to be like, oh, they draw a penis on your hard hat. I don't think this is true anymore, but like back in the 80s, if you showed up with a Toyota or a foreign imported car from anywhere on a job site, you were getting a brick through your windshield.
Or you were going to park it like a mile away. But that was at the height of Buy American blah, blah, blah.
I think they've accepted defeat on auto manufacturing and assembly at this point. They resolved differences with fistfights.
Two guys got an issue.

They get into fistfights.

My father got into a fistfight on the job when he was in his 60s.

So this is not like the boys do this.

It's like, you guys got a problem.

They go out in the parking lot.

They punch it out.

And usually it's resolved after that. That's the crazy thing about it is he never really talked about people having grudges about it.
It was just like, and we're buddies again because we beat the snot out of each other on lunch break.

My father, when I was a kid, had on his hard hat for the longest time, Dr. Bitch, which was his nickname because you get nicknames and it'll get to be like Iron Maverick or whatever.
You get to be Dr. Bitch.
One way he won people over and is local is he was from Michigan in this Boston Union. He might as well have been from Mars as far as these old school Boston townies were concerned.
But he won a lot of guys over by writing Dr. Bitch on his hard hat and owning it.
But whatever frat experiences you have and you're like, oh, I can deal with it. No, you can't.
These guys are hard. Wow.
All right. In my trade, we would call this a hostile work environment.
Isn't there also this huge shortage of tradesmen in America? I know one of the main arguments for immigration, legal and otherwise, is getting people who actually can slash will work that hard doing stuff like framing houses or out in the hot sun or roofing, whatever, into the country in as large a number as possible. I think huge shortage is actually pretty fair language.
We're short half a million plumbers. There's an anticipated shortage of 1.9 million manufacturing jobs.
Wow. First of all, I wouldn't have guessed that there were 500,000 plumbers in America at all in the first place, let alone having a shortfall of 500,000.
That's a lot of pipes, I guess. Manufacturing jobs is also quite surprising because I'm thinking like auto assembly.
I don't even know what we manufacture here. I guess I should go ahead and look that up because being from Detroit, those jobs are gone.
They're in Mexico or whatever now. Yeah, they're actually not as gone as you think.
There's a lot of scab. That's what you call non-union labor when you were raised in a union house.
A lot of scab auto assembly and right to work states in the South. Explain what right to work is.
I feel like I've read about this maybe in law school or in the news, but it's one of those euphemisms where basically like right-to-work means it's not a good thing. It is exactly not a right-to-work.
Basically in primarily Southern states, but Arizona is a right-to-work state. Like when they were doing COVID vaccine mandates with the electrical company around here, I ran into a bunch of them and was like, why don't you guys just go out on strike? And they laughed and they were like, you're from back east, huh? And I was like, yeah.
And they're like, we ain't striking here. We'll be out on rear ends.
But yeah, you can't really have a union. Guys can opt out and not pay dues, but enjoy the benefits of union representation.
You basically can't have a union. You can have a union in name and that's about it.
But anyway, there's a lot of higher tech manufacturing jobs that aren't quite anyone can show up and do this. Biotech, tech manufacturing jobs of any kind, these are not dummies doing these jobs.
And in many cases, they might be people with related degrees who just decided that desk work isn't for them. Working in a pharma plant, putting drugs together, honing lenses for cameras or medical equipment.
I had a gym buddy who worked in a plant putting microchips together, and he was not a knuckle dragger. We used to hang out and talk about Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Yeah, as one does at the squat rack. But putting microchips together, you're right.
That's not like a slouch job that you could learn YouTube or something. No, not at all.
And many people probably can't learn it, period. So the shortage of skilled and even quote unquote unskilled labor, whatever that means in the year of our Lord 2024, that's real.
Apprenticeships are available both in and out of unions. You don't have to go to ITT Tech to learn a trade at school.
My local community college doesn't have much, but it does have a lot for those seeking to get into the trade. And honestly, like wherever you are listening to this, I bet your community college has more to offer people wanting to get into trade than mine does because I live in a very poor area.
You know, it's a great use of those student loan payments you're ignoring. The fine products and services that support this show.
We'll be right back. By the way, if y'all aren't on the newsletter yet, it's called Wee Bit Wiser.
It comes out every Wednesday. It's a sub two-minute read that will help you change the way you think, just a little bit for the better, change your psychology, just something practical, useful that you can apply right away.
It is a great companion to the show, and you can find it over at jordanharbinger.com slash news. A lot of good engagement there.
I'm really stoked at how many of you love the newsletter. You can always hit reply and get me, by the way.
So it's just been a fun way to interact with you guys. jordanharbinger.com slash news.
Now back to Skeptical Sunday. Yeah, I remember a high school in our district, which I think was like an alternative school for kids who had trouble paying attention or who were like, maybe not going to go to college.
I can't exactly remember what it was, but they had an auto shop and a local community college near me in Detroit growing up. There were a lot of them all about automotive surprise, surprise in Detroit.
And the ads on TV were all like hands on experience. You're going to get hands on experience, hands on experience.
And I remember kids my age when I was like 15, 16 years old and they went to that other high school. They were like, yeah, we're building a car.
We're restoring an engine. And I was like, I think I learned something trigonometry.
Not sure where I'm going to use that. They actually graduated and had real skills.
It's quite impressive. I'm curious in general about the job outlook for people in trades, right? Because it's one thing to say, oh, there are all these unfilled apprenticeships.
But then if everyone starts going into the trades, don't those get filled up pretty fast? Is there a bottleneck anywhere with this stuff or what? So when we talk about the economic outlook of different occupations, we're talking about two things, the fastest growing occupations and the most new jobs. What's the difference for those of us who are listening and don't want to do math in our head or whatever you're about to do.
Okay, so if there's 10 dark web sheep sharers in 2024 and there are 100 the next year, we experience a thousand percent growth in that field, but only 90 more jobs. If there are a million widget mechanics and the next year there are 1.5 million widget mechanics.
That's only 50% growth, but it's 500,000 more jobs. Oh, got it.
So can we break down the fastest growing fields and the most new jobs? Because that's going to be different. Yes.
So there are stats from the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. They're pretty sound, probably.
Fastest growing jobs. Some are arguably trades.
Wind turbine service tax is number one at 45%. It's tied with nurse practitioners who are, in my opinion, they're basically doctors without a medical degree.
So I wouldn't call that a trade personally. Really? It's not a trade? I don't know.
I feel like that's a trade. Is doctor a trade? Yeah, so this is an interesting question because I think doctors and lawyers are tradesmen, but we just went to like really expensive trade schools.
I don't know. That's an interesting question.
I've kind of always thought, yes, I'm a tradesman because I'm a lawyer. These are actually like, as far as statistical record keeping is concerned, these are considered professional degree jobs.
Yeah, if that category exists, then that makes more sense to me too. Okay.
So the distinction is less about the work they do than about the preparation it takes to get there. What else is on the fastest growing jobs list? 12 of these are like not at all what people think about when they think about the trades.
Data analysts, infosec analysts, epidemiologists. If these are trades, we're back to really torturing a definition of a trade to qualify them.
Then there's other stuff like physician's assistants, actuaries, physical therapist assistants. So you don't think the medical-oriented ones are trades at all? I think they're definitely more trades than nurse practitioner in that they have a much more narrowly defined skill set and a much lower bar to entry in terms of education, which I don't mean as a diss, to be clear.
In fact,

you don't need as much school to be a certified nursing assistant as you do a nurse practitioner. But I think that if we're talking about trades and people entering the trades, I think that we should probably stick to a more common sense old school concept of them, which is manual type jobs that are pretty discreetly defined skill sets.

I'm not saying the... concept of them, which is manual type jobs that are pretty discreetly defined skill sets.

I'm not saying the medical ones are like completely not trades, but when people talk about, oh, America, kids need to skip college and get into the trades, like they don't mean

go be a nursing assistant.

They don't mean go be a dental hygienist.

They mean like go be a welder or a carpenter or a plumber or a pipe fitter or something like that. That's the sentiment that I feel is out there.
That's like the micro dirty jobs definition of trade, right? Yeah. Which for the record, I have enormous respect for trades.
I have enormous respect for anybody who goes out and does something that benefits society. I'm not here to look down my nose at anybody's job, especially given what I

do for a living. But I have most of the teeth in my head still as a result of the old man's lavish healthcare plan because he pursued a trade.
He had baller healthcare when I was growing up. And one of the reasons I don't really want to muddy the waters here too much is because I have a lot of respect for these old school manual trades.
And I don't think that these kind of like skilled, maybe some of them, but lower education bar needed medical jobs. I just don't think the same thing.
I get the point. I don't think anybody can credibly leave this episode and be like, they just shat on the trades., I'm advocating for the trades.
You're saying how tough they are and how good they are,

but a college education earns you more money over time, which I know we'll circle back to

in a minute here. But you said those things for the next 12 fastest growing jobs, which leads me

to believe that number 13 is actually more of a traditional trade. Is that right?

Yeah, solar installed. And that's, which is not very traditional, but like,

you're a glorified carpenter. And that's the only other trade by the definition that I'm using that was on the entire list.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. But wind turbine guys and solar guys are newer jobs, period.
So it would make sense that those are the ones that are growing the fastest. Yeah.
And I completely agree, which is why I also looked up where are most of the new jobs going? Like by number, like how many new jobs? Not like we had 10,000% growth in a job that didn't exist three years ago. So where are the new jobs? I'm curious about that because being self-employed, I'm completely insulated from a lot of this stuff.
Home healthcare, number one, almost double what the second entry on the list is. And you will never in a million years guess what the second biggest growing field is by number of jobs.
Lay it on me. Software developers.
In Silicon Valley, I should have known. Learn to code.
It's not just a snarky way to clap back at a recently unemployed journalist on X, formerly known as Twitter.com. After that, restaurant cooks, which i think it's wild that people overlook hospitality jobs because like i know chefs if you don't own the business it's a possession-proof job it's also like i've worked in kitchens it's the most absolutely most stressful work environment ever and hot hot and you got like almost certainly an alcoholic screaming at you because chefs like booze.
If you're a chef out there, don't get mad. You know what I'm talking about.
But people stop eating out at restaurants approximately around the same time that they stop buying scratch tickets and cigarettes, which is like never. So then we've got stockers and order fillers, registered nurses, freight movers, operations managers, healthcare managers, truck drivers, financial managers.
So basically what you're seeing on this whole list are a bunch of jobs that you absolutely cannot get without a college degree and a bunch of jobs absolutely do not need a college degree to get.

The only building trade on this list of most new jobs is laborer, which I'm from a building trades family. Laborer is definitely a skill set, but you'll notice what's not on there.
Electricians, welders, pipe fitters, operating engineers. Why do you think that is? I think part of it is definitely the Mike Rowe thing where people think they're too good to do this kind of work.
And so the labor market just dries up around it because nobody wants to do them. And it's silly because I feel like a lot of people who raids their whole life being like college, college, college, college, college.
And it's like, well, maybe you would like being an electrician. Maybe you would like being a welder.
But yeah. And I also think that there's just less need for these jobs and a higher bar to entry.
So yeah, there's going to be more laborers than electricians because A, you need more laborers and B, it's way harder to become an electrician than a laborer. To use electrician as an example, that's growing at 6%, which is faster than average.
And when you drill down to the raw numbers, there are 762,000 new electrician jobs in 2022 as compared to 168,000 data analyst jobs. Oh, that is really a massive amount.
That's a crazy amount of jobs. So the statistics about growth percentage can be misleading, right? The sheer numbers are just bananas.
Yeah, it's super misleading. I think a lot of us, you know, where do I go? The trades of college.
How do you want to spend a third of your waking life? What are your natural skills, aptitudes, tastes? How much do you value money over free time? My old man did not become an ironworker because he loved the trade of ironworking. He did it because he had two kids at Alamo.
Alimony, does that still exist? I guess it probably does. I know all about it.
It's another skeptical Sunday. Yeah.
So I live a pretty inexpensive and thrifty life because money just doesn't really motivate me that much. I like having free time.
I like having time to spend with my kid. I like having time to paint, play music, go to the gym.
And it's not that one's better than the other. I totally don't think that it is, but you just have to ask yourself, what do you value?

One thing you and I talked about when we first discussed doing this episode was the phenomenon of people getting advanced degrees, right?

A lot of people are going, okay, great, college, undergrad, but what if I get a master's,

what if I get a PhD?

All we've talked about so far is a basic bachelor's versus high school versus trade

schools.

Do we know much about people who are getting more advanced degrees, like yours truly, professional degrees or otherwise? Okay, so this is where it starts getting tricky. Okay, go on.
So people with PhDs on the whole earn more than people with master's degrees, but they earn less than people with professional degrees, which I'm guessing means doctors and lawyers. I mentioned those practitioners.
My mother was a speech and language pathologist and you need a pretty specialized master's of science to get into that. So maybe that too.
Yeah. PhDs and professional degrees.
I always thought that was kind of like trade school for nerds basically, but I guess as per our previous conversation here, not really the same thing. Also, I didn't know our moms had the same job.
What a coincidence that is. Seriously, we have to have talked about this at some point before.
Yeah, maybe in one of those awful Hollywood dive bars you used to drag me to, but those memories may be a little bit fuzzy. Yeah, probably.
If we did talk about it, it's been totally memory hole. So people with doctorates also have lower unemployment rates than master's degree holders, but higher unemployment rates than professional degrees.
And these are minor differences. Here's where it starts getting interesting, though.
Average person with a master's degree is getting about $65,000 in student loan debt just from grad school. So that's doubling your student loan debt just for the master's degree.
It's almost crippling it because you're adding that to what you had originally. Let me ask you this.
Do you think somebody with a master's degree is earning two or three times what they were earning when they had a bachelor's? I definitely do not think that at all. No.
And you would be completely right. They're getting about a 16% annual salary increase.

16.

One six.

Wow.

So they go 65 grand into debt to make, what does that end up being?

Like a couple hundred extra bucks a week, basically?

It's about 250 bucks a week, which is about 12 grand a year.

And I think it's safe to assume that this is where we're really going to start seeing

disparities in earning potential between, for example, use your master's degree in

and go to the next video. brand a year.
And I think it's safe to assume that this is where we're really going to start seeing disparities in earning potential between, for example, is your master's degree in English Lit or History or Chemical Engineering? People with more technical and practical advanced degrees are probably going to have better opportunities and outcomes than people with humanities or social science degrees. I look at journalism school, J school as the school kids call it, and the price was insane.
Yeah, it's funny. I looked at that after law school because I was like, I'm really interested.
It was just like, no. And journalism jobs, in case y'all haven't noticed, are absolutely getting clobbered out there and they are not going to recover.
Completely, and they're not coming back. So when you get your master's degree in the humanities or God forbid, a doctorate, there is not a lot you could do with that other than teach college.
And those academic jobs are just not going to happen for most people. It's a total jungle out there for the people in search of these academic jobs that aren't adjunct professors making 20 bucks an hour to work 100 hours a week.
Is that an exaggeration or is that accurate? Because 100 hours a week sounds like a lot, but it's not impossible. A lot of people work like that in finance in 20 bucks an hour.
Is that realistic? Every hour class time generally involves 10 hours of prep. And that doesn't include stuff like office hours, emails, grading, writing letters of recommendation.

Most adjunct professors do live in poverty.

They do work insane hours.

The specific numbers are completely pulled out of my butt.

But basically, yeah, they work super long hours for garbage pay and often no benefits.

Yeah, I remember that even when I was going to undergrad.

It was like, vote for this

because graduate student instructors need better healthcare and we need raises and we need like food. I was like, oh, this is a bunch of nonsense.
This isn't a career. And I remember one of our graduate student instructors being like, I want to explain how poor I am.
And I'm teaching you here in this university that you pay for. And it was kind of like sad.
You know, it was just like, holy smokes. These people are just like slaves almost at this institution.
I shudder to think what people getting doctorates are paying for grad school. Do you have those numbers handy? This is going to be...
Oh, are you ready? Yeah, as ready as I'm going to be. Over 127 grand just for grad school.
Oh my God. So they doubled their grad school debt, not their undergrad debt, not their total debt, just their grad school debt.
People are going to cry when they hear this, but how much more are they making? I think they're probably already crying. The jump in income is about 500 bucks a week, which is about 24 grand a year.
And you are going to see the uneven distribution again. Right.
Between like French poetry and chemical engineering. That seems like a lot of money for a significant raise in income, but it's hard to say if it's worth it once you figure in how long it takes to, first of all, get that PhD, then pay off the loans and the interest on those loans.
You could be talking about 10 years to get the PhD total, let's say five years after undergrad, and another decade before you break even with the income and the loans and all that stuff. So one way to contextualize this quickly and easily is salary versus time.
A bachelor's degree, the annual salary increase you're going to get over the next level of education is roughly equivalent to the cost. It's one year, more or less.
The extra income pays for it. For a master's degree, the debt is about five years of that salary increase.
And for the doctorate, it's about 10. And again, is your advanced degree in materials engineering or absurdist theater? I don't know, man.
I heard the absurdist theater job market do be popping off these days. I know a couple of guys who made a career in theater.
They started their careers in the 70s and the 90s, respectively, which was a lot easier to get in. But they were also willing to do basically anything to make money to work and back the house, teaching summer school to kids, set construction, whatever came up.
The jobs are out there for these quote-unquote useless majors, even if you don't want to be an academic.

But you do need to be a little creative about how you view your job search and is the degree worth it. I definitely don't think it is in the humanities for the most part.
I don't think a J school degree would have made me any more employable or God forbid, a creative writing MFA. Gross, which I also considered for a while, but this is just like my experience.
And my experience is I could have done what I do now. I'm a marketing copywriter when I'm not researching the difficult topics here.
I could have done this with no degree. And many people do.
The degree has helped me get my foot in the door because I had it. And it also got me comfortable with jumping through lots of stupid hoops, which I was much less comfortable with before I went to college.
And the two classes which directly apply, as well as the umpteen other ones that don't, also taught me to be creative outside the box. Thank you.
You definitely are that, man. And Nick wants to do a Skeptical Sunday.
What was it on how smoking is good for you? Nicotine. Yeah, yeah.
It's nicotine, not smoking. Nicotine's good for you.
You know what's better than a steaming turd in your lunch pail? The fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.
Thank you for listening to and supporting this show. Your support of our advertisers keeps the lights on around here.
All the advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support this podcast are all in one searchable and clickable place. JordanHarbinger.com slash deals.
That's where you can find it. I really appreciate you guys supporting the sponsors.
I don't get a commission from every sale, but when you support the sponsors, they're more likely to come back, which helps us create all this great stuff for y'all. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday.
I think this is a good way to start talking about the discrepancies between disciplines because aren't the people who are majoring in engineering and business, aren't they skewing this super high and making up for the fact that, again, the French poetry major is the shift supervisor at the local cafe? Why do you keep beating up on French poetry, man? Who are you? I don't know, but I can't pronounce his name. I don't mean to use shift manager as a pejorative because that's a real job.
It's real work. I'm thankful that those people are doing it, but it's not work that requires a degree in French poetry.
And that's really the point I'm trying to make here. Anyway, like I said, aren't the people with more practical, I'm going to say useful, even though it's going to be kind of offensive, useful majors just dragging the average up for the so-called useless ones.
Actually, that's the term that's going to offend people, but whatever. Yes, the stats are pretty clear.
STEM majors are going to earn the most, followed by business majors. But you know what? STEM and business, two of the most popular majors in America.
No one is going to believe this. I can barely believe that.
What's all this noise about how we don't encourage people to get into STEM enough in schools if they're the two most popular majors in America? It's a stone cold fact. Almost half of everyone in college is there for STEM or business.
It almost sounds unrealistic to me because I've never not heard people complaining about how we don't have enough STEM folks. 46%.
So all these Nick Pell's sitting around reading Moby Dick and smoking hash all day. They're the minority.
And I studied Anglo-Saxon poetry and Arthurian legend. Thank you very much.
I'm very proud of it. Wait, that's weird.
I made that joke at the beginning of the show, but that's what you studied? Yeah. I thought you were totally just acknowledging my pedigree as an Anglo-Saxon scholar.
Literally no idea. I almost had no clue what they studied in the English department.
That's a hilarious coincidence. I've known you for a while.
Maybe it was just in the back of my brain, but I can't believe that's a thing, actually. Do you remember the night that we went into the bar and I recited Anglo-Saxon poetry to you? I don't remember walking into or out of the bar at this point for various reasons.
Okay, so I got another shot for you. You ready? Yeah, hit me, man.
Some of the lowest paying majors you could possibly pick are quote unquote useful ones. How is that possible? You're not going to tell me that engineering students and pre-med students are the poorest people in America.
No, no, not at all. But the absolute lowest paying major in America is early childhood education.
And I do not deny that is a worthy pursuit with concrete, tangible skills that benefit society as a whole, but at the bottom of the income thing. Yeah.
No, as the son of a teacher, I concur slash totally understand and have seen that firsthand. So who is at the bottom of the pile? Social workers and teachers.
Oh, man. Teachers are really having a hard time out there.
I caught up with somebody recently that I went to college with. Her and her husband are teachers, and she was just like, I love it.
God's calling me to do it, but I'm broke. I'm like really poor.
And it was sad. I'm guessing a lot of the other people at the bottom of the pile are in useless majors as well.
Sure. You see a lot of what you might expect there, but a weird, for instance, calling back to what we talked about two minutes ago, theater students generally earning more than literally every kind of education major I could find statistics for.
So theater kids are making more money than teachers. My goodness.
So what is the average English major or to use my favorite whipping boy today, French poetry major, what do they earn these days? So humanities majors are actually not really doing that bad. They're averaging a little over 54 grand a year, which is less than average college grad or average trade school grad, but still more than people with high school degrees.

Is there a geographical component to this? It seems people who work on the coasts make more money. Is that a real thing? That's a real thing, yeah? It's good to hit on the geographical component, but it's complicated.

Salaries for tradesmen vary widely from one trade to another and one state to another.

And you obviously can't be a remote welder or plumber. You need to be on the ground to do the actual work.
That is kind of the thing with trades. You have to be chasing the jobs to some extent.
You may not be able to live in the cool area of Brooklyn when you're just starting out as a plumber. You might have to move to Topeka or Salt Lake or somewhere else uncool in giant screaming air quotes.
Back when I did my Sirius XM radio show, a lot of the guys that listened called in were working in northern Canada and they didn't have any other media other than satellite radio. And they were working in like the tar sands.
And I remember talking to these guys and be like, what's it like working up in northern Canada in the tar sands? And like, yeah, we got a little set of trailers and a little camp and it's cold. Cold is an understatement.
And we just like work for 14 straight days with almost no time off, really long days. And then we go back home and we get the heck out of here and go back down to the border where we live, like Vancouver, and we chill out or we work our other job.
And they were young, right? We weren't allowed to work in the office in Vancouver. They were working the steam shovel, digging out the tar sand in Yellowknife or whatever.
Back to the income conversation here, living remotely, we're having to chase jobs, living in different areas. That's correlation, right? But that's not causation.
Or am I phrasing this right? You're absolutely correct. There's no evidence that getting a degree causes you to earn more money.
In fact, I think it's probably pretty close to the truth to say college isn't making anybody smarter. It's just that smarter people go to college and then get jobs that smarter people get anyway.
And those pay better than jobs

for people who don't go to college.

Obvious follow-up question is,

but then why go to college if you're already smart?

Is it just about the piece of paper

that supposedly proves it?

That's what we're paying for.

Yeah, that's it.

And I'm not a fan of credentialism,

by which I mean the process

by which people receive official credentials

to prove they know stuff.

But you're telling people to go to college.

Yeah, I wish that gold fell out of the sky, but it doesn't.

Fact is that to get even an entry-level office job in a lot of places, you need a college degree.

So I think it's fair to say that college filters out less intelligent people and gives more

intelligent people credentials. You can be upset about that if you want.
I am. I think it's really unfair to a lot of people, not least of all people who don't thrive in college environments.
Not everybody has intelligence that works in a college setting that isn't going to work on an office or business or whatever, but go ahead and apply to a job where your cover letter talks about how the credentialing system in America sucks. I don't think you're going to get that job.
No, it's like I can see how this system is unfair. I can see how you might want to work to change the system, but the system exists and you just have to play by the rules if you want to get most types of jobs, period.
Yeah, I don't think you need a college degree to be an Excel drone in an office. But what I think doesn't matter, the reality is you need a college degree to be an Excel drone in an office.
It's just how it is. Yeah, you're not wrong.
A bunch of office drone jobs and apologies to office drones don't need you to get a degree in psychology or anthropology to do them properly, but you need the degree to get your foot in the door. Otherwise, your resume goes out the window.
Yeah. And I think this kind of hits at one of the biggest problems with colleges in America.
And that's the expectation that everyone is going to go and they're going to go right after high school. Did you know what you wanted to be when you graduated high school? Oh, yeah.
I wanted to be a lawyer. No, I didn't.
I had no idea. I didn't even know when I graduated college what I wanted to do.
I only went to law school. And I think I've said this on the show before.
I only went to law school because I didn't know what else to do with myself. The only job I could get was at Best Buy selling CDs next to a life size cutout of Britney Spears.
And I was like, I have debt and I have loans. And I got the same job as my friend's 17 year old brother who's a sophomore in high school.
This is horrible. So I was like, the solution is more education.
And hey, law school actually worked out really well for a very short period of time. Yeah.
The point I'm trying to make is that I just don't think the average 17 or 18 year old in America has any idea what they want to do when they get out of high school. I agree.
I think the gap year concept, people have this, you know, it's this bougie thing where you like bum around Europe for a year, but it doesn't have to be. It could just be, go get a job, go work, go wait tables for a year.
Yeah, a good way to learn what you want to do for a career. Man, you can figure that out by learning what you don't want to do.
It's a good, decent sort of process of elimination. You can learn that by entering the workforce at 16, 17 years old.
Like I knew I didn't want to work at a movie theater, but more specifically, I was like, I don't want to be on my feet all day. I want to think more.
I want to have more control over my environment or whatever. I mean, that was helpful.
That was helpful knowledge at 15, 16, 17, whatever years old. I earned the workforce at 14, which is how I became an AARP member at 40T.
You're an AARP member? Really? They offer 15% off your entire check at Denny's. This thing pays for itself.
So the Jordan Harbinger Show is not sponsored and does not endorse AARP nor Denny's, even though the Grand Slam breakfast is quite legit sometimes. Well, Nick Pell does endorse AARP.
Cheap insurance, tons of discounts at hotels and restaurants. Get that card as soon as you can, friends.
Yeah, we got to have him cut us a check. That's so funny because when I think AARP, I think of my 83-year-old parents who are like, I don't want to bust that thing out.
That's for old people. Surely people give you side eye when a 40-year-old baby face whips out his AARP retired dude card.
I'll take that $1.79 off my pancakes. Oh, I can't wait.
I love whipping that thing out. I'm just so handsome and charming though.
Nobody bats an eye. The gap year idea thing though, spend a year flipping burgers or folding shirts of the gap or sorting mail in an office or whatever.
You're probably going to go, hey, I don't want to do this. And then you can narrow down what you do want to do.
Like you were like, I don't want to be on my feet all day. I was looking at getting out of copywriting for a while and was like, I don't want to be outside and I don't want to be in an office and I don't want to go back to school.
And I came up with trucking, which was like, I'll go be a trucker tomorrow. It still sounds like a cool job.
And that was all through process of elimination, which you can then pick a major with better earning potential. You can take a breath and say, you know what, I can get all my gen eds done on the cheap community college and then transfer to the University of Michigan or the University of Massachusetts or people transfer to Notre Dame from community colleges.
That cuts the debt way down, man. Even a little bit of breathing room could make a huge difference there.
That changes all the course. Absolutely.
So there's this very cookie cutter path of graduate, go to college, get a job. I think it's less that college is a bad investment because the numbers very clearly say that it's not.
It's just that people follow this prearranged script with T without thinking about it in a more intelligent way. And I think the main thing to remember is that college is a path forward to greater employability, greater income.
I think, again, this is indisputable. This is what the facts are telling us.
But this is where people get it mixed up, is you're not buying a ticket to a good job. You still have to be thoughtful, purposeful about choosing your field.
80% of employers say liberal arts educations are valuable. Wow.
How is that valuable? So I'm kind of opposed to the idea that humanities have to be useful beyond just making you a cultured and well-routed person. The value of this is not, oh, it makes you a better advertising executive because you can reference Hamlet.
With that said, I think humanities These educations definitely make you a valuable asset for a broad range of industries. Can you explain, though, how, let's say, reading Hamlet makes you a better advertising executive or makes you a valuable asset for a broad range of industries? It's not as specific as reading Hamlet.
In fact, it's the nonspecificness of liberal arts education that makes it valuable. You learn how to engage with texts, how to read them, how to think about them.
It's really good at encouraging you to think about things outside the box, come up with your own ideas. And that's where I think the value lies from a business perspective.
And I talked about this at the top of the show. I'm not writing the great American novel.
I'm not teaching English. College helping to get a job because of the college experience, for lack of a better term.

And similarly, your experience in law school prepared you to be a podcaster and entrepreneur,

both what you've learned in the classroom and your experience outside of it.

Maybe at the end of the day, college is just this really expensive, glorified finishing

school for middle-class employment.

Huh. Yeah, I think you might be right.
But like you said, if that's what it takes, does it matter? Only in the most abstract sense possible. Interesting, man.
This definitely has been quite eye-opening. I think it's a good place to wrap it up.
For me, I'm still encouraging people to go into trades if they want to, maybe learn how to do a job that actually exists. It might be easier to find a career.
But also, yeah, look, if college is where you want to go and you're willing to also put in the legwork and realize you're not just buying a ticket to a better job, I think that's the right mindset to go in there with it. And hey, thanks to Nick for coming on and giving it the old college try.
And thanks to you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, Jordan at JordanHarbinger.com, show notes at JordanHarbinger.com, advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support this show, all at JordanHarbinger.com slash deals.
I'm at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.
This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.
Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer, and I'm not even sure if I'm a tradesman. That's still up in the air.
Basically, do your own research before implementing things you hear on the show. Also, we may get a few things wrong here and there, especially on Skeptical Sunday.
If you think we really dropped the ball or you think we're really onto something, let us know. Y'all know how to reach me, Jordan at jordanharbinger.com.
Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love, and if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today.
In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.
Join us as Adam Gamal, a Muslim Arab American and former Egyptian refugee, recounts his rise to become a key operative of one of the U.S.'s most secretive military units in this two-part podcast series. In part one, Adam delves into the high-stakes world of counterterrorism and covert operations, revealing the personal and ethical complexities of fighting terrorism from within the shadows.
I came to the U.S. to give me the right to dream.
In Egypt, you don't have that option. It's not cliche.
I'm not trying to recruit people to join the army. But I was like, here is a key, actually, to be as American as anybody can argue with you.
And it was joining the military. You end up there by pure determination, by having grit, and by being a bit lucky.
So we were basically getting our tasks from Secretary of Defense level. Join Special Operations Command in charge of three main missions.
Counter-narcotic, counter-terrorism, and hostage rescue. I believe myself, if my dad did not push me towards getting the right education, then maybe I would have went in the wrong direction.
So education is going to help people prosper. They're going to help people actually critically analyze the information they are receiving.
So when somebody is bullshitting them about, hey, if you go to the bathroom with your right foot, not your left foot, you're going to hell. If you have an educated person, you're going to look at him and say, you know what, man, this doesn't make any fucking sense.
And then I believe to educating women is crucial because they are raising us. A lot of people spend more time with their moms than with their dad because they nurture us and they do all of these things.
So if we have a population of educated women in the Middle Eastern and any of these countries, I think these countries will prosper. And it will be harder to convince these guys to become terrorists.
Business is war and business is good. When we give people the proper education, we all live a better life.

Tune in to uncover his unique journey and critical insights only he can provide on episode 978 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.