Lessons - Is College Worth It? | Jim W. Keyes - CEO of 7/11 & Blockbuster

Today's success story podcast is brought to you by Van to now listen up this matters for your business and today's digital landscape security isn't optional it's essential without it deal stall sales cycle stretch out and scaling becomes really difficult why because investors customers partners they all expect businesses to demonstrate strong security practices before they commit to anything and if you can't prove trust you lose opportunity so whether you're a startup founder trying to lend that first big client or an established company scaling your security program vanta helps businesses of all sizes prove they're trustworthy by automating compliance across 35 frameworks like sock 2 ISO 2701 and hippa the exact certifications your prospects your customers are demanding and here's why you need to pay attention vanta gives you back precious time you're currently wasting on compliance their platform automates up to 90% of the tedious compliance work and it helps you respond to those endless security questionnaires up to five times faster and they also connect you with experts to get your security program running immediately in the results they speak for themselves a recent IDC report found that vanta customers achieve over 535 thousand dollars per year in benefits and the platform pays for itself in just three months so join over 10,000 global companies like Atlassian, Kora and factory who use vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time and don't miss this for a limited time only my listeners can get a thousand dollars off vanta that's real money back in your pocket visit vanta.com slash scott now before this offer expires that's vant.com slash scott for a thousand dollars off in this lessons episode we challenge the modern skepticism surrounding formal education and it's true value learn why attending the best school you can is an investment that pays lifelong dividends discover how fear driven narratives distort perceptions of college costs and debt understand how critical thinking not just credentials is the real power of education in an increasingly polarized world you know what i think we're doing i think that we have like we we put these people that this one entrepreneur that dropped out of school or university or college we put that person on a pedestal and then we're like you know what that's going that's going to be us and chances are like no offense chances are that's not going to be most people um now i think that there is so because there's i also believe that some schools overpriced i believe that some school school creates massive amounts of debt having formalized education is good for the right reasons but i don't think that hundred thousand dollar per year is required so i like you see what i mean like it's like it's good if it could be a little bit uncannadian so i never paid a hundred thousand dollars per year for college that to me is that is like post graduate stuff if you wanted to go to law school or med school fine but for undergraduate like sort of like getting like the basics down um it shouldn't be that expensive so it's it's it's a tough it's a tough balance you have to strike because some people i don't think it's smart to go into massive amounts of debt but then what do you do because are they going to respect a degree from like a second to your second rate college that isn't a hundred that i have no idea i i'm not american so i've never played this game or the system before but i'm curious like if you were going to give advice to say your your son or your daughter what what career path and assuming that they don't have scholarships where would you say they should go what's like the best outcome for debt versus network versus actual education um and all the other in silvery benefits you do get when you're in like a formalized educational setting simple answer achieve all you can achieve attend the finest school you can get into work your butt off to get into the best school that you can get and then go i don't care what it costs go to the finest education institution you can or as long as you can because what that will do for you is generate and then it will be an investment we're to talk about that investment i'm going to talk to you about it from a businessman's perspective which very few people are looking at but it is an investment that will pay dividends for the rest of your life now let's talk about the cost there's a lot of misinformation and it's dangerous misinformation because a kid like me would have listened to this and said well yet i can't afford it and besides Peter feel as tell me i don't need to anyway i can just go be an entrepreneur and here's the analogy it's like Michael Jordan saying you don't need to go to college just i didn't go go be a basketball player look how much money you'll make and some people will look at that and they'll strive for that but only one percent will succeed and somebody on and Silicon Valley can say the same thing you don't need to just drop on the school just go be an entrepreneur but do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur and if you don't have that base knowledge and you fail as an entrepreneur just as if you may try to be a basketball player or you fail what do you have to fall back on then what and that's then what that people are taking into consideration that i worry about so much so my advice is work as hard as you can and get into the best school you possibly can okay let's talk about the price let me get you some math i just read an article in Forbes and they talked about the exorbitant price of college education today it's just grown crazy with inflation yeah well in nineteen eighty dollars and they use this example in nineteen eighty it only costs ten thousand dollars in the room board and tuition just to the map get on your on your iPhone and run everything what is ten thousand dollars in twenty twenty three it's just straight value of the dollar it's fifty five sixty thousand dollars okay wait that's what college costs today so you're telling me it's not any more expense than it was in nineteen eighty yeah what do we remember I talked about fear and people are scaring people to death they're throwing all this a hundred percent because i i'm not even american and i hear i hear enough of this about college debt and tuition for me to have an opinion about it even though i never went through the system which actually when you say it a lot it kind of sounds a little bit nuts but you you get the second hand information it's going exactly and it and it is somebody is afraid of something and they're stirring up all this stuff you know maybe somebody had a lot of debt and they're mad about there and they're and they don't have a good job in that i'm gonna say that that doesn't happen it's not everybody shouldn't isn't cut out for school and not everybody who takes on that debt will be able to pay for it but here's the way i look at it as an investor i mean you don't buy a business as an entrepreneur you would never ever buy a business based on today's dollars what we do as business people as we have an opportunity here's a company i'm going to buy instead of ten thousand dollars i'm going to spend ten million dollars you buy this business right what is the first thing we do we run a net present value of future income streams that will come from that business when we discount it back to today's dollars so why don't we do that when we look at a college education no no we either is it just fear i don't know why we don't do that i don't know i've never heard that analogy before but it's very correct so it's a business decision maybe it's a personal investment that you're making in yourself you're turning yourself into a corporation if you will that will have earning streams into the future at future dollar value not at today so somebody looks at me say i can't pay a thousand dollars a year i'm going to get out of that i'm only going to make fifty thousand dollars a year well yeah but that fifty thousand in today's dollars twenty years from now will be two hundred and fifty dollars two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year because you have that college education so it's the it's it's like buying a business it's no different we would never buy a business any business if we measured the value the way we measure a value the value of a college education i just want to take a second and thank cornbread ham for supporting today's episode now cornbread ham CBD gummies have been this really nice addition to my wellness toolkit i don't use them every day just when i want to win wine after those extra busy weeks but they're perfect for those moments when you want to take the edge off and just find your balance really just shut off from work now what makes them special is how cornbread ham crafts them they only use a flower of USDA organic ham plants that's the best part for the purest most potent experience no fillers no artificial fluff just clean full spectrum goodness in delicious watermelon berry and peach flavor i keep them in my night stand for those moments when i just need a little extra help relaxing and i love how transparent they are too every batch is third party lab tests it's you know exactly what you're getting and they put together a special offer for all success story podcast listeners all listeners can save 30% off their first order just head to cornbread ham dot com slash success and use code success at checkout that's cornbread ham dot com slash success code success for 30% off your first order of these amazing dummies that's so interesting but it's very it's it's very correct it's very like that that that it's very correct um it's simple but you have to simplify you have to get correct yeah no i'm just i now you you you got me thinking now but i never thought about it that way yeah uh because all you hear are these conversations about like student loan forgiveness and when you hear so many conversations about student loan forgiveness then you start to think well i wow that must be like a serious issue like that must seriously be impacting people because that's all i keep hearing about so if there's such coverage fear news coverage equals fear in most circumstances um if there's such coverage about this and that must be something that's really weighing heavily on the recently graduated you know us student american student but um i guess yeah that's a very smart way to think about it you like that we had heavily on me i thought i'm never it is step back man but i i had confidence that if i keep learning and i keep excelling in my job i'm gonna keep getting raises over time and that that went away it was shocking at ultimately what an investment that was what a good investment now i was arguably probably an outlier in that i leveraged my degree into much greater opportunity leading to or just by showing 500 companies so i'm in some ways i'm as much an outlier as an outlier into that and that yeah yeah but i mean okay so let's be candid you didn't need the salary of ceo fourton five hundred to pay off the bet it's not like that's when you paid it off when you are making that much money like you can pay it off at a much earlier stage two right like so i don't want somebody to think like well i'm not gonna be see yelling that's not the point we're having it's not that um what are some other things that you think we have to unlearn about education oh so there's so much to unlearn in today's narrative because there's so much bashing of the education um i know there's there's a lot of noise now about what what teachers are teaching um what schools are doing again it i encourage everyone to separate the fear factor because some of this is motivated by fear i may not like the teachers union so i'm gonna bash the teachers union um i'm i may not like uh what's being taught so i'm gonna bash the teachers for teaching the wrong things at the end of the day i i do a lot of work with public school systems i do a lot of work with post-secondary schools i set a board of two colleges these are some of the most conservative people i know that sit on these boards and the idea that they would foster an environment not just not just condoned but fostered to um try to change the minds of young people is mind boggley i i look at it and i say what are we afraid of i think we're teaching people how to think and that's the idea that it i did in teaching them how to think we're gonna cause them to question certain things yet when they question them then we recoil from that and are afraid of what they're being taught but that is the way that you should that is the most useful thing in my opinion that i actually got from from my formal education it was critical thinking exactly that's what i got from it yeah thank you it's a whole chapter in my book but if you think of where we are as a polarized society we're encouraging critical thinking right in school that's the idea so they'll think oh this is a bell curve and you've got the extremes on both ends of the bell curve and both of those extremes when you have true critical thinking are gonna recoil at what the response might be it could be from the left or the right they'll recoil from it and say oh my gosh what in the world are we teaching them well we're teaching them to think and and that's what's often missing in this equation so again it just you know comes back to this idea of what in the world we're afraid of you know it's very interesting because i've noticed a trend with even young families because i'm i'm at that stage of my life where we have friends with kids and and growing up homeschooling was like never even a thought that wasn't a thing but now i hear that more and more and more the people on a homeschool because they're so scared of the education system and when i was a kid i mean my mom would look at me like i had three heads if i said i want to be homeschooled like she'd be like what are you talking about like shut up and get on the bus and go act like irregularly so it's definitely it's definitely um i understand where you're coming from i understand i understand why you want to sort of fight back and why you focus on education now because you see a world fit like filled with fear it's filled with fear i mean i got you your examples are great when i had an uh an assistant i was interviewing and we were talking about the book and i said a big part of your job is gonna be uh this book called education is freedom and uh and she said well i hope it's okay i i i didn't go to school i said yeah it's everyone has a choice as long as you're learning and able to do the job um i'm happy but i hope you'll continue learning and she said oh no i believe in education i believe in it so much that i pulled my son out of high school and i said what she said yeah i didn't like what they were teaching him it was scaring me they were teaching him crazy things um and i would felt that he was being indoctrinated and uh et cetera et cetera and so i said well what's going to happen and she said well i'm homeschooling her i said okay but is he going to be able to get into college and she said now he didn't really care about college okay is he getting to play sports um homeschooling he's gonna miss out on football and baseball and things like that she's well you know yeah but there's a trade-off and it was for me really hard to hear because i think about that young person and what they'll miss what the opportunity they'll miss because they lack that uh the collaboration i don't yet the community that they'll they'll get in that school environment and it was triggered purely out of fear sadly thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one