Latest / The ReForge Podcast / Is College Still Worth It? (with Matt and Colin) | ReForge 006

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Is College Still Worth It? (with Matt and Colin) | ReForge 006 · The ReForge Podcast

• 0:00
  Matthew Chang: Do not go to a university unless you're very confident that university can get you internships and ships.
• 0:08
  Matthew Chang: You know, whatever your field of study is.
• 0:09
  Matthew Chang: If it's art history, great.
• 0:11
  Matthew Chang: If it's engineering, they should cer certainly be able to set that up.
• 0:14
  Matthew Chang: Computer science, what have you.
• 0:16
  Matthew Chang: You want to be able to connect your education with real time industry feedback because it's changing so fast.
• 0:23
  Matthew Chang: And to do that, you need to take a break from school.
• 0:26
  Matthew Chang: Every few semesters go to a workplace and you need to do internships, right?
• 0:36
  Welcome to the Reforge Podcast.
• 0:38
  I'm Matthew Chang, and we're here to explore all things AI automation and the American worker proving that the American reindustrialization is possible.
• 0:48
  Pivotal pressing.
• 0:50
  Thanks for joining us today.
• 0:51
  Let's get into the episode.
• 0:54
  Colin Russ: Welcome back everyone.
• 0:55
  Colin Russ: This is episode six of the Reforge Podcast.
• 1:00
  Colin Russ: Today you are fortunately going to just be hearing from Matt and I as we get into things a little bit.
• 1:06
  Colin Russ: Um, one of the topics.
• 1:09
  Colin Russ: We, we've been seeing a lot of conversation around is what the workforce of the future looks like.
• 1:14
  Colin Russ: What should kids be doing after they get out of high school?
• 1:18
  Colin Russ: Is it college?
• 1:18
  Colin Russ: Is it trades?
• 1:19
  Colin Russ: What the heck is that gonna look like?
• 1:22
  Colin Russ: And recently, uh, there was a.
• 1:27
  Colin Russ: A bit of a, I guess I will say some attention given to the folks on X from a post that, uh, Molly O'Shea made from an interview with Chris Powers of Hadian, um, where he basically said everyone should tell their kids to quick college, get welding degrees.
• 1:49
  Colin Russ: You know, that whole thing, you know.
• 1:53
  Colin Russ: Let's, I mean, let, let's just kind of jump right into it.
• 1:56
  Colin Russ: Matt.
• 1:57
  Colin Russ: I'm curious, as an engineer, as somebody who, you know, we don't want necessarily engineers to just blow off college'cause there's a lot of valuable knowledge to be gained there.
• 2:08
  Colin Russ: Um, what, what is your take kind of initially on just the, what, what the workforce looks like, rather what they need?
• 2:18
  Matthew Chang: Dude finally.
• 2:20
  Matthew Chang: Finally, people are talking about this, right?
• 2:22
  Matthew Chang: I think so.
• 2:24
  Matthew Chang: Colin, you and I are, we're, we're in the choir, right?
• 2:26
  Matthew Chang: There's no point in preaching to us.
• 2:28
  Matthew Chang: We're like, this is literally what we've devoted our careers to is, is building things.
• 2:33
  Matthew Chang: And um, so we don't need to get the message.
• 2:36
  Matthew Chang: But what I'd say is finally, other people are getting the message.
• 2:39
  Matthew Chang: Um, I've been very vocal and I've been in the cross hairs on X and in my local newspaper for my opinions on university.
• 2:49
  Matthew Chang: To be informed.
• 2:51
  Matthew Chang: You know, I went to university twice, you know, so gave me, um, I, uh,
• 2:57
  Colin Russ: The first time.
• 2:58
  Matthew Chang: I'm on, I'm, yeah, the first time was rough.
• 3:01
  Matthew Chang: Uh, I'm on, um, two university advisory boards, you know, both for Jacksonville University and, um, the, uh.
• 3:13
  Matthew Chang: I'm, hi.
• 3:14
  Matthew Chang: You know, I consider myself highly informed about the state of higher education.
• 3:17
  Matthew Chang: Last week I was presenting at the Georgia Tech Automation Fair.
• 3:22
  Matthew Chang: You know, in two weeks I'm going to MIT for one of their premier conferences for executives.
• 3:28
  Matthew Chang: And, uh, so I'm, I love academia.
• 3:30
  Matthew Chang: Chang Robotics has an office at Northwestern University and another one at Jacksonville University where we have our robotic lab.
• 3:37
  Matthew Chang: So I'm all in on college and university.
• 3:41
  Matthew Chang: But a lot of the graduates are not entering productive fields, and so I'm gonna just start with the distortion.
• 3:49
  Matthew Chang: The distortion is, is student loans, right?
• 3:53
  Matthew Chang: That's the distortion.
• 3:54
  Matthew Chang: So any, almost, almost any high school graduate can get a student loan and go to university while not being fully aware and mature enough to calculate the cost yet.
• 4:08
  Matthew Chang: That has been front and center.
• 4:09
  Matthew Chang: You know, Biden was promising to forgive student loans.
• 4:12
  Matthew Chang: I think a little bit of it happened, but most of it didn't happen.
• 4:15
  Matthew Chang: Um, you've got articles recently about students moving to Europe and defaulting on their student loan debt just so they never have to pay it back.
• 4:24
  Matthew Chang: Uh, we have dug ourselves into a hole by propping up universities and professors and research that do nothing constructive for the future.
• 4:34
  Matthew Chang: And if you want to study something.
• 4:37
  Matthew Chang: And it does not make money, then that's a hobby, right?
• 4:42
  Matthew Chang: If you can't get paid enough to pay back your student loan,
• 4:45
  Colin Russ: A hundred percent.
• 4:47
  Matthew Chang: that's a hobby.
• 4:49
  Matthew Chang: So, you know, we just went through this, um, at, at, uh, Jacksonville University and our, our university took a very bold stance at scaling back the programs.
• 4:59
  Matthew Chang: They went from order of magnitude.
• 5:01
  Matthew Chang: They went from a hundred degree programs in a small, mostly liberal arts school.
• 5:06
  Matthew Chang: To 43.
• 5:08
  Matthew Chang: So they shaved off about 60% of the degree programs.
• 5:13
  Matthew Chang: The piano teachers were really mad.
• 5:15
  Matthew Chang: The glass blowing teachers were really mad.
• 5:19
  Matthew Chang: Um, but those are kind of hobbies, right?
• 5:21
  Matthew Chang: Those are not career paths.
• 5:22
  Matthew Chang: The 43 that remained were business, finance, engineering, cybersecurity, autonomous systems, was a new degree program we just got through, uh, to be implemented.
• 5:32
  Matthew Chang: So it's the stuff that.
• 5:34
  Matthew Chang: Companies want and what does any university want or what should they want?
• 5:38
  Matthew Chang: It's not to take pride in what they taught.
• 5:40
  Matthew Chang: It's they, they should have employers asking them for the skill sets that the employers need.
• 5:46
  Matthew Chang: Right.
• 5:46
  Matthew Chang: And so if you have a bunch of universities that are not aligned with the economy, they're not aligned with the needs of the workforce and the companies out there that do the hiring, then that university is a, is a hobby location.
• 5:58
  Matthew Chang: And we have thousands of them in this country.
• 6:03
  Matthew Chang: So.
• 6:03
  Colin Russ: mean, it, it's, it has become a incredibly lucrative industry in and of itself.
• 6:08
  Colin Russ: And, and I, you know, I think that that's a whole problem that we could get into.
• 6:13
  Colin Russ: But one of the things you said was, you know, we've got 18 year olds kids fresh outta college or high school who.
• 6:20
  Colin Russ: Are able to take out massive student loans, you know, at, at 18.
• 6:25
  Colin Russ: I mean, I, I am one of those people, you know, and I ended up with a, you know, liberal arts degree, political science, you know, fortunately I had other experiences and, and kind of.
• 6:36
  Colin Russ: Background that was able to help me shift.
• 6:39
  Colin Russ: But the reality is, is I went in and, and, you know, I, I originally was gonna do engineering.
• 6:44
  Colin Russ: The school I ended up going to, didn't have the engineering programs, and so I was lost.
• 6:51
  Colin Russ: Part of that though is I was an 18-year-old kid.
• 6:54
  Colin Russ: You know, we have, we're, we're sending kids who they, they are still kids.
• 6:58
  Colin Russ: They may legally be an adult, but they don't know what.
• 7:01
  Colin Russ: They really want to do at 18, but we're saddling them with a bunch of, you know, student loans, telling'em to figure it out when they have, you know, a couple days, weeks even, to make that decision.
• 7:13
  Colin Russ: And then by the time they may actually know that what they do or don't wanna do, they're so far down the path and so much debt that they don't really have a perceived option but to finish through and get that degree'cause of sunk costs for all that.
• 7:27
  Colin Russ: You know, you look at Europe where.
• 7:29
  Colin Russ: It is much harder.
• 7:31
  Colin Russ: You know, you, you don't have the same numbers in school.
• 7:34
  Colin Russ: Some of the, these programs you like, you look at, uh, Erasmus Netherlands, phenomenal, phenomenal school.
• 7:41
  Colin Russ: The average age of student is much higher than that of the US and part of that is, is you don't have kids going right to school.
• 7:48
  Colin Russ: So it may be a little bit easier for'em to get in, but it's harder to stay in.
• 7:53
  Colin Russ: The people who stay in are the ones who are committed to actually going through and getting these, you know, degrees that they can actually get a job in.
• 8:01
  Colin Russ: So it's, I think partly we're sending kids to school too early, but then there's the whole piece of, you mentioned we've got hobby degrees because it's become incredibly lucrative of
• 8:12
  Matthew Chang: Yeah.
• 8:13
  Matthew Chang: Yeah, I think it, you know, whenever you're, it is always the follow the money or look for the incentives, right?
• 8:19
  Matthew Chang: That's with anything.
• 8:19
  Matthew Chang: So, you know, just to put a, a pin on this one, um, So this is, this is one of the op-eds I wrote for the local paper in Jacksonville.
• 8:30
  Matthew Chang: You got me in a little bit of hot water.
• 8:32
  Matthew Chang: It says our Jacksonville business journal, um, they title it, which is hilarious.
• 8:38
  Matthew Chang: I would say, thanks for putting my name in the title.
• 8:40
  Matthew Chang: You wanna make sure I get angry emails and texts from every person who had a canceled degree.
• 8:45
  Matthew Chang: Those 60 canceled degrees.
• 8:48
  Matthew Chang: So, you know, we frame it right.
• 8:50
  Matthew Chang: Student loan debt, 1.75 trillion.
• 8:54
  Matthew Chang: You know, that's, that's a huge part of the economy.
• 8:56
  Matthew Chang: And if that goes bust, you know, there's a lot of ripple effects.
• 9:00
  Matthew Chang: On top of that, we all know technology's changing faster for graduating seniors right now.
• 9:05
  Matthew Chang: So it's, you know, it's April of 26, that means graduation's at the end of this month, or it's at, uh, the beginning of next month for most universities.
• 9:13
  Matthew Chang: For graduating seniors, their freshman year chat, GPT didn't even exist.
• 9:18
  Matthew Chang: So do we think the university system is agile enough to account for large language models and the proliferation of ai?
• 9:26
  Matthew Chang: No, they just spent the whole
• 9:27
  Colin Russ: had that, you had massive dev boom during, you know, COVID.
• 9:31
  Colin Russ: Everyone was hiring devs and now they're laying'em off'cause you've got Claude code.
• 9:35
  Matthew Chang: right.
• 9:36
  Matthew Chang: They were, yeah, learn to code, right?
• 9:37
  Matthew Chang: That was the, uh, the slogan.
• 9:39
  Matthew Chang: So no, look, I went to Georgia Tech.
• 9:42
  Matthew Chang: I graduated with a traditional route, civil engineering, which by the way is a trade, so I would consider myself a trades person.
• 9:48
  Matthew Chang: Um, and, you know, I followed the, the apprenticeship to become a, uh.
• 9:56
  Matthew Chang: A, uh, professional engineer, and then I went other after other licenses, like being a licensed general contractor and getting certificates like my lead AP design certificate so I can design a, a green and sustainable building, right?
• 10:11
  Matthew Chang: All those sort of things.
• 10:13
  Matthew Chang: Um, from my cohort, there was gigantic conveyor belts that went into big consulting.
• 10:20
  Matthew Chang: So like Deloitte, KPMG, just like right out the door, right?
• 10:25
  Matthew Chang: Then, um, on the other side, you had it going out to big tech.
• 10:31
  Matthew Chang: So a lot of my cohort was going directly out to, um, you know, to, uh, Google and, and meta and uh, apple companies like that.
• 10:42
  Matthew Chang: So, very few people, they were following the money, right?
• 10:46
  Matthew Chang: They were getting good jobs with good salaries, but very few people were actually pursuing a trade.
• 10:54
  Matthew Chang: And so I like to joke.
• 10:56
  Matthew Chang: I'll say I was at the Georgia Tech Automation Fair last week as a presenter, and I, I said, back when Georgia Tech did engineering, of course I got some funny looks.
• 11:06
  Matthew Chang: But the old professors know it's true.
• 11:08
  Matthew Chang: They're not graduating engineers anymore.
• 11:10
  Matthew Chang: They're graduating people that are recognized to be very good at Quant, have a great school on their resume, and they're gonna go into big finance, private equity, hedge funds, uh, big tech, whatever.
• 11:22
  Matthew Chang: So one of the things that we're, you know, really looking for, I think Colin and what you and I both espouse is we want people to actually learn trades, right?
• 11:31
  Matthew Chang: The pinnacle of trades would be, um, would be like engineering, right?
• 11:38
  Matthew Chang: If you're smart enough to get into engineering school and you have the grades and you can get out, and then it's, to me, it's extra special if you can get licensed as an engineer, you know?
• 11:46
  Matthew Chang: So that's the pinnacle of trades.
• 11:49
  Matthew Chang: Then there's all the layers underneath that, depending on the readiness of the student, including working with your hands and going directly into trade school or apprenticeship programs, welding, electrical work, plumbing.
• 12:02
  Matthew Chang: You know, think about controls, technicians, your modern equipment in a factory.
• 12:07
  Matthew Chang: Even something as common as say a chiller a computer with a bunch of pumps on it, right?
• 12:15
  Matthew Chang: So everything that's getting deployed out there is high tech.
• 12:18
  Matthew Chang: As a baseline and the technical skills required by the young workforce that's getting in, they're gonna automatically learn controls and signal processing, um, how to program an HMI screen.
• 12:30
  Matthew Chang: You know, those are kind of table stakes these days.
• 12:32
  Matthew Chang: My, my house has an HMI screen in it and the guy that programmed it was about 24 years.
• 12:39
  Matthew Chang: Right.
• 12:39
  Matthew Chang: So what I'd like to tell people is, look, if you go into trades instead of university, so I think what we're bashing is these degrees that are hobbies and they don't lead to any career.
• 12:49
  Matthew Chang: If you go into trades and you don't incur that debt, and yes, you start making good money as a 18, 19, 20-year-old, um, your path to entrepreneurship is super compressed relative to your white collar peers who had a four to five year opportunity cost.
• 13:07
  Matthew Chang: Of going on before they could even start to learn something.
• 13:10
  Matthew Chang: Right?
• 13:11
  Matthew Chang: And so it would be interesting in both Erie and Jacksonville to do a survey.
• 13:17
  Matthew Chang: What, how many new plumbing companies, how many new HVAC companies, how many electrical companies are being founded by people that are 30 years old or younger?
• 13:26
  Matthew Chang: And I'll bet you.
• 13:28
  Colin Russ: Yeah.
• 13:29
  Colin Russ: I mean, it, it's, so one of the things that Erie did.
• 13:33
  Colin Russ: Maybe four or five years ago, um, that they'd been working on for ages was getting community college here.
• 13:39
  Colin Russ: You had regional, you had the, you know, Pennsylvania state system colleges around here.
• 13:43
  Colin Russ: But they, um, finally brought an actual, uh, you know, Erie County Community College in, and their biggest programs are their.
• 13:51
  Colin Russ: Welding.
• 13:52
  Colin Russ: They're CNC machinists, they're programmers, they're industrial, um, machinery, maintenance elect, those sorts of things.
• 14:00
  Colin Russ: And it speaks to the fact that, hey, there's the demand form.
• 14:03
  Colin Russ: Like these are people who otherwise, by and large we're not going to go the university route.
• 14:08
  Colin Russ: But there's also been this shift where a lot of people are trying to get those skills now, was they retrain for it.
• 14:14
  Colin Russ: It's, I mean, I, I think the path is clear and I certainly hope that a lot of that leads to entrepreneurship.
• 14:21
  Colin Russ: You know, a as some of these, you know, kids come outta the program and have the skills to then go get real jobs and see these opportunities.
• 14:29
  Colin Russ: But I mean, it's the, the reality is a lot of these degrees that, you know, the, the 60 that, you know, Jacksonville was able to, you know, trim out.
• 14:42
  Colin Russ: Those are.
• 14:43
  Colin Russ: I'm not saying they don't provide value to society, but there's clearly not a economic market for it.
• 14:51
  Colin Russ: You know, people are not going out and paying the piano player to come over to their house, you know, twice, twice a week to play live music for'em.
• 15:00
  Colin Russ: Hey, there's some phenomenal pianists out there.
• 15:04
  Colin Russ: Maybe julliard's the right school for you, not Georgia Tech or Jacksonville State type of thing.
• 15:09
  Matthew Chang: Yeah.
• 15:09
  Matthew Chang: And those are,
• 15:10
  Colin Russ: of, it just, it doesn't make the math, doesn't math.
• 15:13
  Matthew Chang: yeah, the math doesn't math and you know, I think it's really like, um, think it's like a lot of those kind of liberal arts studies would make an excellent minor or.
• 15:25
  Matthew Chang: Here's the caveat, or if you can afford the tuition, right?
• 15:29
  Matthew Chang: So if, if you are coming into university and you can afford the tuition to have a art history major, more power to you.
• 15:37
  Matthew Chang: It's not that I don't want us to have art history in society, it's that I don't want young people at 18 years old making life changing decisions to be indebted on something that sounded cool.
• 15:47
  Matthew Chang: Probably persuaded by a guidance counselor, right?
• 15:50
  Matthew Chang: And then.
• 15:51
  Matthew Chang: It doesn't work out for them.
• 15:53
  Matthew Chang: And then they feel like they had a social contract that was broken when they're, you know, 24 years old and they're struggling to make their payments.
• 15:59
  Matthew Chang: And what happens to those students too is they kind of stay on the cycle of debt.
• 16:03
  Matthew Chang: 'cause you're looking to graduate, it's really hard.
• 16:05
  Matthew Chang: Or you're, you're gonna get a very low wage job if you're, if you're gonna get offered full-time employment.
• 16:10
  Matthew Chang: So you're like, well just stick around for a master's.
• 16:13
  Matthew Chang: Right.
• 16:14
  Colin Russ: Double down on
• 16:15
  Matthew Chang: the problem worse.
• 16:17
  Matthew Chang: So the um.
• 16:19
  Matthew Chang: I'm gonna finish what I was taking you through'cause because I did, uh, maybe I feel like I was ahead of the curve now, um, in, uh, in writing about this last year.
• 16:29
  Matthew Chang: This is the short version.
• 16:30
  Matthew Chang: I did a long form on Twitter, but um, this is how it was shrank down for the editorial of the newspaper.
• 16:36
  Matthew Chang: So we talk about the shift in in technology, right?
• 16:39
  Matthew Chang: And we reference that in addition to addition to Hadrian, Google and Palantir are already encouraging kids not to go to college.
• 16:49
  Matthew Chang: Google's offering a certificate that if you take the Google training class, they say it's equivalent to a four year degree and you can get that certificate in six months.
• 16:58
  Matthew Chang: So these are for, for high tech students that have a desire to say, work at a place like Google.
• 17:04
  Matthew Chang: You, they're not even looking for a four year degree anymore to go to Google.
• 17:07
  Matthew Chang: They wanna see you do their class for six months.
• 17:10
  Matthew Chang: Um, as we kinda, as we kind of go down, the other thing we have to look at is Gen Z class sizes.
• 17:16
  Matthew Chang: So this is a, you already have a tremendous amount of pressure on small universities, and unfortunately for universities, unless you're agile like Jacksonville University, then it's the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poor.
• 17:30
  Matthew Chang: So the small private institutions are getting crushed right now.
• 17:33
  Matthew Chang: They're, they're addicted to this federally backed student loan, and that's why they keep selling more loan products to the, the, um, the, uh, students.
• 17:45
  Matthew Chang: So what.
• 17:46
  Matthew Chang: But then as you have shrinking class sizes, our class sizes as millennials was much larger than what you have today.
• 17:53
  Matthew Chang: Um, the, the big schools, like I, I live in Florida, so University of Florida only getting bigger.
• 17:59
  Matthew Chang: Right.
• 18:00
  Matthew Chang: Only getting bigger at the expense of all the smaller schools.
• 18:04
  Matthew Chang: Then you got this structural student loan debt.
• 18:06
  Matthew Chang: Right.
• 18:06
  Matthew Chang: Which we already talked about how that's a problem.
• 18:09
  Matthew Chang: So when you, when you kind of aggregate all this, what, where does it come to?
• 18:15
  Matthew Chang: This is what we're doing about it.
• 18:16
  Matthew Chang: You know, so we, we do partner with academia.
• 18:19
  Matthew Chang: This is us, uh, opening our robotics lab on a university campus to be in partnership.
• 18:24
  Matthew Chang: Here's the simple metric I'd give to a student.
• 18:27
  Matthew Chang: Do not go to a university unless you're very confident that university can get you internships and ships.
• 18:35
  Matthew Chang: You know, whatever your field of study is.
• 18:36
  Matthew Chang: If it's art history, great.
• 18:38
  Matthew Chang: If it's engineering, they should cer certainly be able to set that up.
• 18:41
  Matthew Chang: Computer science, what have you.
• 18:43
  Matthew Chang: You want to be able to connect your education with real time industry feedback because it's changing so fast.
• 18:50
  Matthew Chang: And to do that, you need to take a break from school.
• 18:53
  Matthew Chang: Every few semesters go to a workplace and you need to do internships, right?
• 18:58
  Matthew Chang: So if you, if you have that, then I think you can select that university, if that university, if you feel good that they're gonna get you internships.
• 19:06
  Matthew Chang: Then you're not, you're not really having that true opportunity cost of being four years, five years out of the workforce relative to your peers that go straight into trades.
• 19:16
  Matthew Chang: Um, and then for people that want to go straight into trades, I mean, it's just, in my opinion, gen Z wants to work with their hands.
• 19:26
  Matthew Chang: That's what I'm saying is that the young people want to build things with their hands.
• 19:30
  Matthew Chang: Grew up.
• 19:31
  Matthew Chang: Think about this.
• 19:32
  Matthew Chang: We were, we marveled at it when we got new apps.
• 19:34
  Matthew Chang: You and I, this show's our age, right?
• 19:36
  Matthew Chang: So I, the whole, our whole adult lives, we got a new app until finally we had so many apps, we're like, I just want no more apps.
• 19:42
  Matthew Chang: Right?
• 19:43
  Matthew Chang: But the whole time it was interesting.
• 19:44
  Matthew Chang: Social media, you know, e-commerce, all this stuff happened, streaming music.
• 19:49
  Matthew Chang: All this stuff happened in our adult lives for kids these days.
• 19:54
  Matthew Chang: And I'm talking to your, your high schoolers and your kind of early twenties folks right now.
• 20:00
  Matthew Chang: They grew up with all of this, they were inundated.
• 20:03
  Matthew Chang: And reality is outside the phone, it's outside the, uh, the tablet.
• 20:08
  Matthew Chang: And so I think there's a big craving of young people to work with their hands.
• 20:13
  Matthew Chang: And I just see that putting further pressure on universities.
• 20:16
  Matthew Chang: So to tie off universities, the question we have to answer in this country, are we willing to let, let's call it 50% of our small universities just die, are we.
• 20:27
  Colin Russ: And it, it, it's one of those uncomfortable conversations that nobody wants to have, but it is one that needs to be had.
• 20:35
  Matthew Chang: I've, I've owned some stocks on the stock market that stopped existing, right?
• 20:40
  Matthew Chang: And then I go sign into my little trading account, and then there's like this placeholder serial number where there used to be a stock.
• 20:46
  Matthew Chang: And I'm like, well, that was a company I did invest in them.
• 20:48
  Matthew Chang: They're not a
• 20:49
  Colin Russ: Not anymore.
• 20:50
  Matthew Chang: That's gonna be a lot of people's degrees, right?
• 20:53
  Matthew Chang: Is like you went to a university, you of fond memories, you formed a lot of great memories there.
• 20:58
  Matthew Chang: Uh, you learned a lot of things you grew up, but a lot of people are gonna have these small universities they went to that just stop existing.
• 21:06
  Matthew Chang: And what I would propose is the solution, because I hate to ask questions and not have an answer.
• 21:11
  Matthew Chang: Here's a simple thing that we can debate, and I've been, trust me, I've been dragged on Twitter for saying this.
• 21:17
  Matthew Chang: Should universities be responsible to guarantee at least a portion of the student loan debt?
• 21:23
  Colin Russ: I mean, I, I fall into the camp of, yes.
• 21:26
  Colin Russ: I mean, if you're putting a product out there, you don't get to just say, oh, sorry, we sold it.
• 21:31
  Colin Russ: Your, you know, yours now.
• 21:33
  Colin Russ: I mean that there has to be, you know, it comes back to the incentives.
• 21:37
  Colin Russ: Where, where's the incentive to
• 21:38
  Matthew Chang: whole thing with student loan debt and the university doesn't have to cover it, so they, they, they.
• 21:43
  Matthew Chang: They take in, say, 200,000 for a, a young student to get an undergraduate degree.
• 21:49
  Matthew Chang: The university takes that in.
• 21:50
  Matthew Chang: It's guaranteed by the federal government, and then if the student product, that student is the product, right?
• 21:56
  Matthew Chang: If it doesn't work out, they can't get a job or they can't make meaningful employment to pay that back.
• 22:01
  Matthew Chang: The university's like, well, well, we taught'em how to play piano.
• 22:03
  Matthew Chang: I don't know what happened.
• 22:05
  Colin Russ: Not our fault.
• 22:06
  Matthew Chang: They're not responsible.
• 22:07
  Matthew Chang: So the other place you have that kind of misallocation of incentives is, uh, things like the vaccine debate that's going on, right?
• 22:16
  Matthew Chang: So we to promote vaccine innovation or whatever the, the logic was way back when it happened.
• 22:22
  Matthew Chang: We said, okay, if you make vaccines, you don't have any liability.
• 22:26
  Matthew Chang: Then the pun pendulum swung too far.
• 22:28
  Matthew Chang: We started taking five times as many vaccines.
• 22:31
  Matthew Chang: You're vaccinating.
• 22:32
  Matthew Chang: 1-year-old babies against STDs, you know, basically in the delivery room.
• 22:36
  Matthew Chang: And so you're like, okay, maybe we went too far.
• 22:38
  Matthew Chang: Maybe we, maybe we do have some impacts from doing all that, but we've dis we've, um, decoupled the incentives and the penalties for behaviors.
• 22:48
  Matthew Chang: Right,
• 22:49
  Colin Russ: We, we have to find that right shade of gray somewhere in the middle where it incentivizes the right people, but disincentivizes bad actors who are trying to exploit it.
• 22:59
  Matthew Chang: So my proposal is simple.
• 23:01
  Matthew Chang: Make the universities cover 20% of the guarantee on student loan debt, just 20%.
• 23:07
  Matthew Chang: Right.
• 23:09
  Matthew Chang: Do you think they would stop offering expensive, worthless degrees to young people that had no shot at paying it back if they had to be?
• 23:17
  Matthew Chang: You got a hundred percent of the money if you get to university, but you only have to guarantee 20% of the debt.
• 23:22
  Colin Russ: I mean, how are you going?
• 23:23
  Colin Russ: Like any.
• 23:26
  Colin Russ: Underwriter is gonna look at that and say, all right, these ones, you keep, these ones, you don't, these ones are kind of iffy, and we're gonna revisit those in two to three years and see what the numbers look like.
• 23:37
  Colin Russ: I mean, it's, it, it, it makes, I, I like the idea, I think that, you know, skin in the game keeps everybody honest, keeps everybody aligned.
• 23:46
  Colin Russ: But I think there's also another whole kind of angle to this, and it, it comes back to kinda that messaging topic of.
• 23:54
  Colin Russ: We're, we're treating a lot of this as if it is binary.
• 23:57
  Colin Russ: You go, you know, trade school, voc, vo-tech, or you go get, you know, a bachelor's, master's.
• 24:04
  Colin Russ: And I've always believed, or since becoming an adult with a degree that's useless, I've believed.
• 24:11
  Matthew Chang: Can you tell us what is the degree that's useless?
• 24:13
  Colin Russ: It's political science.
• 24:14
  Colin Russ: It is a degree that I, I tell people, I say I literally could have learned the content by going to a public library.
• 24:21
  Colin Russ: I love the classes, phenomenal discussions.
• 24:24
  Colin Russ: Super, you know, great teachers, loved it, but not worth the$200,000, you know, or just shy of that, that I took out in loans.
• 24:32
  Colin Russ: I mean, completely irresponsible, completely ridiculous.
• 24:35
  Colin Russ: Loved it.
• 24:36
  Colin Russ: But again, literally could have learned it at a public library.
• 24:39
  Matthew Chang: So then, so lemme get this straight.
• 24:41
  Matthew Chang: So you got a political science degree.
• 24:43
  Matthew Chang: It was fun.
• 24:43
  Matthew Chang: You had a great time.
• 24:44
  Matthew Chang: Right?
• 24:45
  Matthew Chang: Uh, grew up a little bit, but then to pay off the loan, you went into big tech ERP Consulting.
• 24:54
  Matthew Chang: That's it,
• 24:54
  Colin Russ: I, I, I had to cha I had to chase the money to pay the loan off.
• 24:57
  Colin Russ: I mean, not what I, I have no idea what I would've ultimately done if the money wasn't a factor.
• 25:03
  Colin Russ: But, you know, when I was looking at colleges, you know, I was going to Purdue because engineering like that was.
• 25:09
  Colin Russ: Clear path, you know, made sense.
• 25:10
  Colin Russ: All that 18-year-old hormones changed, uh, my, my decision making.
• 25:15
  Colin Russ: And I, you know, went where the cuter girls were at the time.
• 25:18
  Colin Russ: And cool, like I would agree that what, what heck was I supposed to do with it, you know?
• 25:24
  Colin Russ: And I managed to phag on my way around.
• 25:25
  Colin Russ: But like, that's the rational thinking of, you know, 18-year-old male.
• 25:31
  Colin Russ: You know, it's irrational.
• 25:33
  Matthew Chang: Yeah.
• 25:33
  Matthew Chang: And then the crazy thing is HR people will look at you 15 years later and be like, oh, well, he's got a political science degree, and they'll discount the fact that you were at Capgemini implementing for the biggest companies on earth.
• 25:46
  Colin Russ: Yeah.
• 25:46
  Colin Russ: Well, and that, that's the other thing is it's like we've, we've credentialized, it's like we don't value degrees.
• 25:51
  Colin Russ: Anyone who says we do is, is lying.
• 25:53
  Colin Russ: If we value degrees, every single class would be a hundred percent attended.
• 25:57
  Colin Russ: You won't have kids skipping.
• 25:58
  Colin Russ: We value the credential, a piece of paper you get at the end of it.
• 26:01
  Colin Russ: So that's, that's an issue in and of itself.
• 26:03
  Colin Russ: But if you know a lot of jobs, you know, like Google, you mentioned earlier, they've got a certificate or training program, boom, you're ready for it.
• 26:13
  Colin Russ: Any job you take, they're gonna train you up those first, you know, six months on how to do what they do.
• 26:20
  Colin Russ: Cool.
• 26:20
  Colin Russ: You've got the fundamentals, but at the end of the day.
• 26:23
  Colin Russ: You know, I'm, I'm a big believer that for most of these jobs you can either learn from on the job training, you know, in a well structured, organized type scenario.
• 26:33
  Colin Russ: But a lot of jobs, you know, going the vo-tech route, boom, great for first couple years of your career.
• 26:41
  Colin Russ: Once you hit a point where, hey, there's a ceiling, because I can't do the next level of work'cause I'm not a professional engineer or because I don't have whatever, that's when it makes sense.
• 26:53
  Colin Russ: For somebody who's looking to keep growing, to go get those credentials, not the person who is, oh, well I eventually wanna do this.
• 27:02
  Colin Russ: It's we are ramming down this notion of, okay, get a piece of paper and then you can go do this as the entry gate, rather than how does this actually contribute to what you are trying to solve and achieve.
• 27:15
  Matthew Chang: Another, another solution.
• 27:17
  Matthew Chang: Um, so we talked about universities being partially on the hook for the student loan debt.
• 27:22
  Matthew Chang: Um, another solution I think that's, that's really important is some of these advanced degrees like engineering, which is your civil, structural, mechanical, electrical, you know, computer engineering, aerospace engineering.
• 27:36
  Matthew Chang: We need to offer those on flexible terms as well.
• 27:38
  Matthew Chang: I would love to see more working professionals.
• 27:42
  Matthew Chang: Earning their engineering degree on a part-time basis.
• 27:45
  Matthew Chang: And
• 27:45
  Colin Russ: Oh, I, I'm, I am an example of that.
• 27:47
  Colin Russ: Like, I would love nothing more than to, you know, go get an engineering degree.
• 27:52
  Colin Russ: But I'm at a point in my career where I can't justify spending that money for a piece of paper to reinforce, you know, a lot of things that I've learned organically.
• 28:03
  Colin Russ: Yes, there's plenty, I don't know, but, you know, you don't have the flexible options.
• 28:07
  Colin Russ: You don't have the night night programs or the part-time, that sort of thing.
• 28:11
  Colin Russ: So I, I, I'm, I'm with you a hundred percent.
• 28:13
  Colin Russ: There.
• 28:14
  Matthew Chang: Well, cool.
• 28:15
  Matthew Chang: Yeah, so I think, uh, I love, I love where your head's at.
• 28:19
  Matthew Chang: I think my, if I was gonna give advice to the 16-year-old and right before this call, I was on with a business woman whose 16-year-old son walked to the room.
• 28:28
  Matthew Chang: So we did this, I, I warmed up for it.
• 28:31
  Matthew Chang: If I was gonna give advice to the 16-year-old, it would be number one.
• 28:35
  Matthew Chang: Prepare yourself for high agency.
• 28:38
  Matthew Chang: Right.
• 28:39
  Matthew Chang: You don't have to follow the steps your parents took'cause you're not the same economy and the same technology landscape that your parents were.
• 28:45
  Matthew Chang: If it, if it's not obvious to people that everything's changing right now, I don't know how to help'em.
• 28:49
  Matthew Chang: Wake up, get a Twitter account, right, that you'll, you'll be aware.
• 28:53
  Matthew Chang: So be high agency.
• 28:56
  Matthew Chang: What I personally like to see from every 18-year-old that comes to then try to internship at Chang Robotics is number one, I love it when they have their own website.
• 29:07
  Matthew Chang: So your total cost of a website is what?
• 29:09
  Matthew Chang: Probably 10 bucks a month or something for something basic.
• 29:12
  Matthew Chang: So have your own
• 29:13
  Colin Russ: Not even, you can, you can host it on GitHub.
• 29:17
  Matthew Chang: Well, they need to talk to you.
• 29:19
  Matthew Chang: They call it.
• 29:19
  Matthew Chang: I'm still old school then.
• 29:21
  Matthew Chang: Um, so have your own website, have a few research projects that you've done your.
• 29:28
  Matthew Chang: It could have been something for your parents, maybe the HOA, that you live in your school, but you've done a few things where you actually endeavored on a project and you came out with a solution.
• 29:38
  Matthew Chang: In the age of AI and cloud code, there's no reason that a young student can't go solve a problem.
• 29:44
  Matthew Chang: Right.
• 29:45
  Matthew Chang: And then be in that mentality from 18 years old and up that I'm gonna network, I'm gonna have a LinkedIn account.
• 29:55
  Matthew Chang: Not because that helps you, but because again, it helps people understand who you are.
• 29:59
  Matthew Chang: So you've got your website, you've got your LinkedIn account, and then be aggressive in your young years before the burdens of families start in achieving certifications and skills.
• 30:08
  Matthew Chang: So for example, welding, we talked about it like it was one ubiquitous thing.
• 30:14
  Matthew Chang: I don't know the answer to this, but how many welding certificates do you think there are?
• 30:19
  Matthew Chang: I mean, I have to imagine
• 30:20
  Colin Russ: think of at least four off my head of just different types of welding.
• 30:24
  Colin Russ: And then you get into, you know, specialized materials, circumstances.
• 30:28
  Colin Russ: I mean, hey, if, if, if somebody watching us wants to see where there's really big money at, go look at, uh, deep sea welders, the underwater welders
• 30:38
  Matthew Chang: Well then, then you gotta be
• 30:39
  Colin Russ: Those guys poof.
• 30:40
  Matthew Chang: to do the job.
• 30:41
  Colin Russ: Yep.
• 30:42
  Colin Russ: Yeah.
• 30:42
  Colin Russ: Well those guys make bank.
• 30:44
  Matthew Chang: That makes the point is like, just in welding, I would bet you there's several dozen certifications just within welding, like you said, materials, hazardous environments, undersea.
• 30:54
  Matthew Chang: Are we in the air?
• 30:54
  Matthew Chang: Like where are we?
• 30:56
  Matthew Chang: So, so for the young welder, they should be constantly kind of biting off a bigger and bigger challenge.
• 31:03
  Matthew Chang: The, the, for me personally, the most exciting welding project I ever witnessed was an auto clip.
• 31:09
  Matthew Chang: 18 month weld job on site for a one of one of the top three largest autoclaves on earth.
• 31:15
  Matthew Chang: And it was fascinating.
• 31:18
  Matthew Chang: The welders were practically fighting each other to get that job right.
• 31:23
  Matthew Chang: They wanted to do this autoclave that was like the pinnacle of their category of steel welding.
• 31:28
  Matthew Chang: Um, um, so for that young person.
• 31:31
  Matthew Chang: Start off with something easy like structural steel in a building, move up to something a little more challenging, like sanitary piping in a pharmaceutical facility, and then see how quickly you can get on that big autoclave job, you know, or whatever.
• 31:45
  Matthew Chang: Whatever the equivalent is.
• 31:47
  Matthew Chang: And so I think if I was to be an entrepreneur all over again, I would have a really tough time picking between the trades and engineering school personally.
• 31:58
  Colin Russ: Yeah, I, I mean I, I've played that, what, what would I do different game a million times and I'm, my, my whole thing has come to, I'd obviously go the trades, trade routes initially.
• 32:09
  Colin Russ: If nothing else, just for, you know, first two, three years to figure out where am I really interested more than anything else?
• 32:16
  Colin Russ: What do I not like doing?
• 32:17
  Colin Russ: And then from there, I mean, engineering, I'm a big believer that, you know, if nothing else that teaches you the most valuable problems solving framework and, and thinking process to go through.
• 32:30
  Colin Russ: But I mean, overall, I just think we, we've gotta get to a point where.
• 32:35
  Colin Russ: We're not shoe boxing kids into the, you get your four year degree, you go work and then, you know, a couple years later you get your white picket fence with your house and your two and a half kids.
• 32:45
  Colin Russ: It's, it's a different world out there.
• 32:47
  Colin Russ: And, you know, we keep pretending that education hasn't changed or the realities of it having, and, and it's just, we, we gotta get back to basics and what makes sense.
• 32:58
  Matthew Chang: Yeah, I totally agree.
• 32:59
  Matthew Chang: And I think the other part, hopefully we have a couple parents listening in,'cause it's, in my opinion, one of the biggest challenges is the parents that are pushing the idea that their parents grew up with and that they grew up with it.
• 33:11
  Matthew Chang: Now they're pushing it on younger people, uh, on their own kids.
• 33:15
  Matthew Chang: And, um, you know, it's, it's basic stuff like how much should we value a person based on their SAT score.
• 33:24
  Matthew Chang: Right, and you look, you talk to a lot of 15, 16, 17 year olds in the country right now, and they're stressed because of how they're gonna perform on a standardized test, of which you and I are the employers.
• 33:36
  Matthew Chang: We're both gonna be hiring these young people.
• 33:38
  Matthew Chang: I got a newsflash for the parents.
• 33:40
  Matthew Chang: Colin and I are not going to ask what the SAT score is, right?
• 33:45
  Matthew Chang: If it's a young man, I may ask him to hold a five gallon bucket of water.
• 33:52
  Matthew Chang: For as long as he can while he recites things to me.
• 33:55
  Matthew Chang: Right.
• 33:55
  Matthew Chang: That might be the interview, and it's a young woman.
• 33:57
  Matthew Chang: I might ask her to go walk up to a business and sell something.
• 34:00
  Matthew Chang: Right.
• 34:00
  Matthew Chang: And just see how she does.
• 34:01
  Matthew Chang: Like, throw her out there.
• 34:03
  Matthew Chang: But it's, it's never gonna be What was your SAT score?
• 34:07
  Matthew Chang: How, how did you do in your calculus three class?
• 34:10
  Matthew Chang: Tell me about how you scored on the final exam.
• 34:13
  Matthew Chang: Like, we just don't care about that.
• 34:14
  Colin Russ: GPA on that?
• 34:15
  Colin Russ: No, it, it's, it, it doesn't align that practical needs in real world.
• 34:19
  Colin Russ: The fact that you have information right at your fingertips.
• 34:23
  Colin Russ: How are you going to actually operate in a real world environment?
• 34:26
  Colin Russ: That's a hundred times more important.
• 34:28
  Matthew Chang: Awesome.
• 34:29
  Matthew Chang: Uh, that's about all I got before I get myself in trouble waxing on about universities and, and young people.
• 34:35
  Matthew Chang: But, uh, for the audience, you know, follow me on X, the handle's right there, I talk about it enough, uh, to where I, I do invite some pretty healthy debate on the topic.
• 34:45
  Matthew Chang: Colin's super passionate.
• 34:47
  Matthew Chang: He's a little bit funnier than me.
• 34:49
  Matthew Chang: Um,
• 34:49
  Colin Russ: know about that, but my, my daughters would argue otherwise, but.
• 34:54
  Matthew Chang: yeah, so we're, we're big on this.
• 34:56
  Matthew Chang: Um.
• 34:56
  Matthew Chang: If, if there happens to be any state administrators or board of regents out there that wanna reach out, let us know because it, it really is about taking formal teaching and industry and kind of fusing them together and creating that mutually aligned success.
• 35:10
  Matthew Chang: So industry gets what they want, students get what they want, and the universities add value.
• 35:17
  Colin Russ: Matt, awesome episode.
• 35:18
  Colin Russ: Thank you.
• 35:19
  Colin Russ: And just to reiterate, you know, we are not anti-education.
• 35:22
  Colin Russ: We're about getting things, you know, getting, getting things back on track so that everybody wins in the, uh, forthcoming.
• 35:29
  Colin Russ: Reindustrialization revolution.
• 35:31
  Colin Russ: Matt, again, thanks for another great episode and thank you for everyone listening.
• 35:39
  Thanks for tuning in to the Reforge Podcast.
• 35:42
  Make sure to like, subscribe and follow us on all of our social media at the Reforge Pod.
• 35:47
  We'll see you next time.