What Are We All Doing Here?
What if we're wrong about college?
Quick note before I begin: This is a longer one, but if you enjoy these please consider hitting the “like” button, it helps more than you know.
There is a question that Peter Thiel would ask during interviews that he highlighted within his book “Zero To One”:
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
I wrote the following piece, completed it, then realized I may have answered this question. The short answer is, the important truth very few people agree with me on, is that most all college degrees are not worth pursuing.
Here we go:
On a recent podcast, the initial discussion centered around the core value add of a Liberal Arts degree in today’s world. That question fanned out to are college degrees in general worth it today? What used to be only 1-2% of the population went to college while the rest of us started working, now is dilutively subsidized to the gills such that most everyone has a degree, as well as massive debt. If everyone has a degree, the answer seems to be a higher degree, and so on.
Mike Solana had a funny quip about all of the English majors that sit around in class reading God Knows What. The group argued that great programs actually read the classics, to which Mike replied..
“You don’t need a degree to read a book, you can literally just read!”
The podcast highlighted that for many people, the degrees they obtain generally don’t lead to a job that justifies the time, debt and problems associated with that 4-5 year effort. Secondarily, its encouraged that it “doesn’t matter what you major in, you’ve been accepted in, you’ve been “chosen” so you can do as you please”.
It really struck a deeper question that I’ve been considering for the past several years. Crucially, it may be an important exercise of seeing an absurdity that many may be privately questioning, but publicly never voice:
Why are we doing this?
I was reminded of a speech given my Tucker Carlson at the Nixon Library back in 2018. I virtually never watched his show, as I stopped watching all televised news that year, but I found his speeches really intriguing. The following clip, found at the Q&A section of the event, touched on a profound truth that is the crux of my position here:
What he touched on is a truism that I personally experienced as well. I attended to the No. 1 party school in the country in 2007, the University of Georgia, and left with a degree in real estate…and problem with alcohol. I spent the better past of my first three years spinning my wheels, rarely finding my place in an environment that didn’t resemble the real world. It was a place of abdication, myself included, of life’s demanded responsibilities that are artificially held at bay for those years, or seemingly so.
Patton Oswald was in Athens one night back in 2009 and made a joke that I retold for the next decade (cleanly paraphrasing):
“Athens is Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, its not the real world. You either need to get out right after you graduate or never leave, because this is not how the real world is.”
Its such a strange thing we all do, that seemingly doesn’t change. For instance, I’ve had the privilege to volunteer at my church for the past few years in a high school Bible study group, and now have had the chance to circle back with a couple that have wrapped up their first year in college, of which included UGA.
What I found so interesting is that nothing has changed, their experiences for good and bad were the same as mine. If anything, what was going on today in 2022-2023 is a carbon copy of 2007-2008. I’m afraid that each generation ups the ante on the last.
The arguments for college generally surround the value of the network, and to some degree that is true. In no small part my UGA degree opened the door to my career in commercial real estate, as anyone can attest that the commercial real estate market in Atlanta is dominated by that Alum network.
Yet, at what cost, and why?
The larger and much more important aspect here is developing the ability to point out absurdities in life, because the social pressure to leave well enough alone given the personal, financial and opportunity costs already incurred by most, results in a negative social cost to be the one to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
I found myself nodding along during and after my tenure at UGA with those who also graduated, with the same refrain of “man, I loved it” while privately knowing that wasn’t the full truth. There was an absurdity to the place, or at any college, of a perpetual party environment with some “classes” sprinkled in. There was a large part of me, on more than one occasion, that questioned why in the world we are all here, for what?
In a large state school like UGA, the classes in the first two years are dominated by 300+ person auditoriums of subject matter that I don’t recall, nor could I immediately after at the time. They seemed superfluous and many were. College in those years didn’t seem to center around the acquisition of knowledge but the façade of it in my mind. I do recall in my first Pre-Calculus class an older gentleman (likely my age today) who would studiously take notes and ask questions to me and my buddy’s annoyance sitting in the back of the class. What an immature reaction by me to what was in actuality the ideal college student, someone who was paying tuition and getting the value he paid for. Yet that gentleman was the exception, not the rule. My loser buddy and I were the rule, so it seemed.
And to be clear, I genuinely enjoyed the classes and focused attention I received in the business school my last 12-18 months at UGA. A large part of that was due to the fact that there were so few of us (this was 2009-2010 for a real estate degree after all) we were combined with the MBA program. The lack of real estate students meant that we were essentially getting an MBA at the same time, so we were surrounded by young adults who had been working for a few years. The perspective they brought was a badly needed maturity to this side of the classroom. Sitting with them before class gave a fresh perspective on what was important, specifically that the subject matter now was actually applicable. They told us 21-year old’s that the class material is practical and worth your focus, because it comes up in the real world.
They also shared how much of the other portions of college didn’t matter.
I was fortunate in this sense, that I had exposure to “adults” that when they focused, I focused. The primary benefit, post-graduation, was it highlighted the absurdity of the first 2-3 years of college. What in the world are we all doing? Why shouldn’t we work first, then come back to polish things up like the MBA students I sat with?
At what opportunity cost, and for what gain do we keep people idol, like Tucker said?
It never ceases to amaze me how relieved some are (much more than you would think) when I reveal my compunction of the typical college experience, which only then lets people completely uncork their underlying feelings that something was off too.
The general consensus is the first years are meant to provide a good foundation on which the Major would provide specific knowledge, such that the student leaves “well rounded”. Yet its more social than academic, so nightly trips to downtown Athens seemed encouraged, and I happily obliged. But what started grinding on me was this felt more like an endless vacation, a resort with unlimited food, booze and zero gravity.
The accepted absurdity is that the first few years for most, if not all of college for some, was a hedonistic exercise that included the base minimum effort to pass and continue on. Katherine mirrors this sentiment in the podcast, in which the fact you were in college meant you were “chosen” so now you can do whatever you please. Find the easiest classes, sort of attend, pass the tests and head back to the party.
Hey man, its football season.
The Seeds of Paper Street Capital
What started to crack the “well-rounded” argument for me was the experience that I had that shaped who I am today, in which I found something immensely interesting in my spare time, and followed it full heartily. This experience was the seeds to Paper Street Capital that sprouted about a decade later.
It was 2009 starting my junior year and for some reason that I can’t recall, I decided to open a brokerage account at Schwab. I purchased a few hundred dollars of AIG at the time, solely based on a Morningstar report on the company available on the site. The net result was a very quick $100 profit, all during the bailout phases of the time.
I remember standing in my living room thinking, wait… if I can learn how to discern what all of the financial metrics mean, and choose investments based on that work, I can potentially make a living? It felt like a cheat code where I could bet on the smartest and most capable people and (hopefully) benefit. Its so simple now, but as a barely passing pre-med student at the time, I was desperate to find a different path in life. I accidentally stumbled on an obsessive hobby where instead of suffering through yet another 300+ person lecture hall of General Chemistry 201, I dove head first into Benjamin Graham, Joel Greenblat, Peter Lynch and any book on Amazon that was available on value investing.
Around that time, I changed my major to real estate and entered the business school. My personal time focused on betting against Chinese ADRs (American Depositary Receipts) in the 2011 era. They were fabricating their numbers and the business models seemed suspect. It was also my first exposure to Carson Block of Muddy Waters fame, the short selling firm. I read his report on a different Chinese firm, but it sent me on my own path with several Chinese ADRs that resembled the same “muddy” characteristics. I learned more through that venture, buying puts and learning everything I could about each Chinese firm. It was an education that paid me, as although earnings “beat” handily, the market didn’t believe them, nor did I, so the trades worked.
So within that absurd world of the party college, I was teaching myself. In a strange juxtaposition, a short time later I found myself in the basement of the World Congress Center in Atlanta taking the CFA Level 1 in late 2011:
I was the only student in the hall taking the test that day, to the delight of all the other participants. It was a really nice time to be honest, they were all fun to be around and liked that I was there because I wanted to be, not because I had to. They were all there as part of their employment agreements, and I recall the word started spreading to the other tables as we awaited the test…who was this kid doing it on his own?
The wildest part was, that same day UGA was playing the SEC Championship against LSU above me in the Georgia Dome. So as I came up from the first half of the roughly eight hour test, I was greeted by a sea of drunken LSU and UGA fans stumbling around the World Congress Center. I’ll never forget that moment of pure juxtaposition, exhausted with another round of testing to go, I saw the contrast of my self-motivated education vs. the one that was being sold.
{As an aside: I fondly recall the encouragement of my late real estate investments professor, Dr. Carolyn Dehring. In office hours one day, I mentioned I was studying for the CFA and she was so impressed that I was doing that at the same time as finals. It was encouragement that I always cherished, especially as she battled stage 4 cancer and always had an consistent positive attitude the whole time. Truth was, I enjoyed “studying” for it because it wasn’t studying. Same as today, I consume company financials, conference calls, Twitter Spaces etc. because I really enjoy it. What is work for most is fun for me. It was then I understood why some people are so hard to compete with, they’ve found something they enjoyed and its not “work”… its fun. There’s no competing against that.}
So maybe we are perpetuating the idea of getting a college degree because if we didn’t, we may shine a light on how many degrees, potentially our own, were not fully worth the sacrifice. Maybe what we are sending everyone off to for four years comes at a massive opportunity cost that few are willing to acknowledge, and its slowly making things worse, whether personally or as a whole. Its hard to tell, but I suspect as more decline the collegiate path, we may come to find its a massive positive.
From my experience, and virtually everyone else’s, what I really learned was on the job. I had a real estate degree, but actually working in commercial real estate provided me with concrete knowledge of how the world really works. So the argument could simply be, why not just start there? The clear example, as I alluded to before, was my fortunate position to have classes with other students who had already worked, or were mostly currently working. It changes the culture of the classroom, while also highlighting the forced maturity of working and paying bills does to a person.
Now the counter argument here is an easy one. Hey man, just because you didn’t enjoy yourself doesn’t mean you’re right here.
Its a fair critique.
Many say they had a great time in college and got much out of it, I just wasn’t in that camp. There were clearly times in which I enjoyed my time, my key argument here is both the objective and duration of a degree. I also spent most of my early years around girls that majored in dance (go figure), and many friends in the Greek system, of which I decided not to join after a year of party-hopping. That seems to be a whole different subject, one that may be self evident but I don’t have any strong basis for critique. I just felt like there was the facade of an education happening for the first two-three years, then for everyone to finally pick a path and things get more interesting.
I also understand the argument that there is a large social aspect to all of college, as I mentioned before. Its that absurdity that strikes me, what are we accomplishing then to have young people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop those social connections? What if that effort and energy could be used to develop social structures in places outside of the university? How better could cities around the country be if that effort was invested there?
In no small part, I suspect the decline of local community social groups (Elks Club, churches, Dinner Clubs) were a result of a higher proportion of younger adults leaving town for those crucial years. Where once a community would develop and social structures would necessarily commune to foster the transitions from high school to the adult world, were replaced by the university. Yet, it left those who didn’t go with fewer options to congregate, or to those who returned to start a life. Point is, there’s invisible second order effects that result from larger societal agreements. As they say in the podcast above, there’s the tragic nature of secondary and trade schools shutting down.
The larger question is, what if we’re really wrong about all of this, and what would that look like? Maybe its a large percentage of the population with crushing debt from wasted efforts, useless degrees, lower family formation and higher general unhappiness?
Maybe its exactly what it looks like today?
Since so much of it is subsidized, the costs necessarily rise. The delay of financial pressures result in what all bad debt does, makes you willfully blind on the front end, and miserable on the back. My hope is that the focus comes more into making college a net positive, one that provides training for jobs that are needed.
Secondarily, its likely college is not for everyone, and that might have included me in some real sense.
A large percentage of what I do today was self-taught, and I never view it as “work”, its genuinely a pleasure. As for the real estate side, I believe that I could have gained the necessary knowledge the same way I did out of college, by just starting working (for very little) under someone who had been doing it for years. Moreover, the benefits I felt during my time in the business school with the MBA students gave me a perspective that maybe I could do what they did, start a job for a couple of years, then return to college to get the 12-24 months of specific business acumen from the business school while still working.
Instead of sitting in a holding cell at 20, I could have been two years into a career and attending a great business school for the first time. How many more examples are throughout society that resemble the same feeling of… maybe I could have taken a quicker route here? I don’t want to color UGA with a broad brush, as I exemplified how I enjoyed the business school aspect in my later collegiate career.
College is truly what you make of it, as I suspect many are like me at that age, too immature to make wiser decisions on the time spent there, and all too allured by the unending parties, downtown, football games etc.
To be clear, as both the podcast and Tucker said, there’s an important side to higher education for engineers, doctors etc. The same likely goes for the Ivy league; the open secret of college admissions is its a protracted IQ test to filter who is qualified to do what. Yet if the “well-roundedness” that was supposed to come in school, came about for me in a self-directed fashion, what else could be replicated outside of college?
I suspect a good bit.
One of my favorite questions comes from Peter Thiel that sums this all up very well:
“If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?”
-Peter Thiel
Offering Solutions
To wrap up, I spent a really enjoyable evening with my brother last night where we browsed Barnes & Noble as we talked about life and his venture of writing his own book. I primarily read on a Kindle, so I miss out on the scope of how much I read relative to the sizes of some of the books I’ve finished. For years, I didn’t consider myself a reader, in the very least a slow one. Yet I found myself pointing out book after book, in various sections, of ones I’ve read and enjoyed.
My brother laughed and said he didn’t know I read so much, which I replied, “Neither did I”. Pulling one off the shelf, I was completely amazed that this “slow reader” accidentally read a 3,000 to 4,000 page novel.
At the risk of sounding self aggrandizing, the main feeling I came away with was how available great knowledge is for very little cost. In the same way that Amazon became my collegiate library in 2009, the opportunities are available to anyone to explore and teach yourselves anything you find interesting. There are certainly more bad books than good, yet what could your world be if you had access to the most knowledgeable people on planet earth throughout history? What more can be learned from Youtube, podcasts, all for free?
Maybe that’s a way to offer a solution here. With Youtube, AI, libraries and Kindles, the access to life-changing information and learning materials is inexcusable. Maybe we can skip over the hangovers and go straight to what can make your life better? What opportunities are lost because we “have” to get a college degree that in the end, may not provide the benefits that it used to.
Maybe its good to develop the skills to make lasting friendships, build a local neighborhood community, teach yourself skills that make everyone’s lives better?
Moreover, what if you get a 4-5 year head start on everyone?
All in all, lets choose to live life.
Will
I really liked this writing. In some ways you are right about a college degree - in other ways maybe wrong. I'm very glad the money was spent and that you can boast about having graduated from the Terry School of Business at UGA. That in itself is a huge accomplishment.
Don't feel like the Lone Ranger either, most of us feel as though the first two years were useless - and they probably mostly were. However, when the junior year rolled around most all of us were much wiser and more mature (those who didn't quit). And the business school made so much more sense and my grades soared! I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't really enjoyed business law, business management courses - and of course marketing!
And back to the first couple of years...I think that you must have picked up a little something from your English classes, as you are an excellent writer (you didn't get that at Monroe).
All in all you are absolutely correct about what you did after college. You realized that you couldn't use alcohol (that was an excellent/mature decision) and you dove headfirst into the real world of real estate and business. I too didn't come out of college knowing all about business. It took me 7 years of working, honing my sales and management skills, etc. before going into business for myself. You are correct in knowing it was the real world that was the best teacher. And for those who had the internal fortitude (like yourself) learning from a variety of different mediums/sources offered you a wealth of information and how to best apply it. You have learned how monitize all the knowledge and self-taught instruction - and I am so proud of how this is being done. You are a very mature person and business man!!