So let's talk a little bit about, just introduce yourself to our listeners and tell me a little bit of your personal story.

I'd love to.

My name is Hannah Maruyama.

I am the founder of Degree Free and we help 16 to 20 year olds find the right career path based on the needs that they have and then figure out how they're going to launch it.

So this, the way that we do things is very much backwards from a lot of the career guidance we have now and that's because it's clearly not working.

It's not really serving us and it's undeniable that the outcomes we're getting from the status quo way that we do career guidance and post high school graduation planning is just not working for young adults.

Many of them don't feel like they have a good view, a bright view of the future.

I would love to hear your thoughts about what do you do with that uncertainty?

There's an opportunity cost, like a missed opportunity of what they-- else they could be doing that might be better serving them in the future.

Yeah.

The-- there's a lot.

The student loan, I, I oftentimes refer to academia, American academia as the college industrial complex because I think that a lot of times there are areas of a specific professions, spheres culturally that you're not allowed to criticize, and I definitely would say that education, K through twelve education, you cannot criticize.

Academia, you cannot criticize.

Much of medicine, you cannot criticize.

And because there's this social cost to criticizing them, it's difficult for people to even feel that they can have the freedom to think critically about what's going on and just be objective about the results that we're getting.

So I'd love to talk about what some of those alternate ones are and what the data actually shows around some of those.

You know, what's your relationship with traditional school?

Um, I have, uh, a pretty windy backstory.

I grew up in the military, and so a lot of kids my age, I think there's a lot of people my age, I'm, I'm in my 30s.

A lot of people my age, uh, their parents were called back into the military after 9/11, so that's what happened to my dad, and my family then got into the military and then moved around a lot.

So I moved around probably every two or three years my entire life.

And, um, I, because of that, and like a lot of military families, uh, my mom homeschooled us for periods of time when it was inconvenient to put us in and pull us out of school.

Uh, so during my K through 12 education, I had every school experience you can imagine.

... okay

But who am I telling? Tell me about the one-on-one sessions.

Sure.

So my, I'm very proud of the process that we've created, uh, both mostly because we've done it through just trial and error, put hundreds of kids through this process at this point.

And basically the way we teach young adults to pick careers now is kind of insane.

We've completely disregarded Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

We don't think about what they actually need to make, where they want to live, how much, uh, you know, what kind of schedule they want to have.

And so instead we do the opposite because right now in high schools, high schools are just college pipelines.

How's your kid going to be a Sigma Chi if they're not in college?

But who am I telling? Tell me about the one-on-one sessions.

Sure.

So my, I'm very proud of the process that we've created, uh, both mostly because we've done it through just trial and error, put hundreds of kids through this process at this point.

And basically the way we teach young adults to pick careers now is kind of insane.

We've completely disregarded Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

We don't think about what they actually need to make, where they want to live, how much, uh, you know, what kind of schedule they want to have.

And so instead we do the opposite because right now in high schools, high schools are just college pipelines.

How's your kid going to be a Sigma Chi if they're not in college?

Do you feel like parents just aren't thinking through what the ultimate goal is?

Well, I think they peel off.

So let's just say for sake of argument that charter schools...

Charged schools, private schools, and public schools, their goal is student loan debt.

They don't think it is.

They think it's college, but half of them aren't going to graduate.

Only 25% of them are going to work in their field of study.

Do you help parents at all navigate how they can help their kids figure these things out, teach them these things when maybe the pull to college is really strong, even though the parent can see, hey, you're not really leaning towards any of those degree or that actually require a degree, any type of job that's like legally requiring a degree.

Do you feel like parents just aren't thinking through what the ultimate

goal is? Well, I think they peel off.

So let's just say for sake of argument that charter schools... charter schools, private schools, and public schools, their goal is student loan debt.

They don't think it is.

They think it's college, but half of them aren't going to graduate.

Only 25% of them are going to work in their field of study.

54% of them are going to be under or unemployed.

Do you help parents at all navigate how they can help their kids figure these things out, teach them these things when maybe the pull to college is really strong, even though the parent can see, hey, you're not really leaning towards any of those degree or that actually require a degree, any type of job that's like legally requiring a degree.

But who am I telling? Tell me about the one-on-one sessions.

Sure.

So my, I'm very proud of the process that we've created, uh, both mostly because we've done it through just trial and error, put hundreds of kids through this process at this point.

And basically the way we teach young adults to pick careers now is kind of insane.

We've completely disregarded Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

We don't think about what they actually need to make, where they want to live, how much, uh, you know, what kind of schedule they want to have.

And so instead we do the opposite because right now in high schools, high schools are just college pipelines.

How's your kid going to be a Sigma Chi if they're not in college?