 So someone sent me this video that the University of Louisville posted about their exciting new gender studies program. Now I have been known in the past to poke fun at useless or mostly useless degrees and if you look at the stats for gender studies they aren't good. They have some of the worst stats for important categories like employment, underemployment, salary, job satisfaction, etc. And I've heard a rumor that it doesn't even teach you the incredibly important skill of being able to gently tap that like button on command whenever you're watching YouTube videos. But with all joking aside, let's see if this video can change my mind. Let's see what they have to say about it. There are so many opportunities for graduates of women's gender and sexuality studies. I love how she's just shaking her head back and forth while she's saying it like like this. I feel like that's a body language tell that she knows that she's lying or she doesn't believe what she's saying. Like there are so many opportunities in this pyramid scheme that I'm about to promote to you. Like definitely so much opportunity. Totally legit, bro. We are a liberal arts degree first and foremost and so that trains you not just for one specific job. It trains you to have a career because it teaches you all the fundamental skills of critical reading, critical thinking, and strong writing skills and those are you can apply those in a variety of different careers. Alright, so first of all, I hear this argument all the time and it's total BS. For one, the lack of critical thinking skills is what they are banking on. That is the only reason why you would go to a university and get a useless or mostly useless degree in the first place is because you don't have critical thinking skills. That's what like 60 to 80 percent of all college degrees, that's what their entire programs are built on. It's the only industry that I know of where 17 to 18 year olds that are terrible at making decisions are allowed to take out $40,000 in loans and they routinely do that. That's the median amount that people take out. Now for some degrees that colleges offer, that is worth it. It's worth it to take out that $40,000 because you're going to get so much in return on the back end. But for many of the degrees that colleges offer, it is absolutely not worth it at all from a financial perspective. So it's incredibly ironic that they claim to teach you critical thinking skills when that's the exact thing that you lack if you're somebody who actually goes for one of these degrees. Number two, just about every major out there is going to say that it's going to teach you how to think critically. So all the other majors claim to teach you the same exact thing. So this really is not a selling point to me for why I should choose this major. Number three, there are many other ways in life that you can learn to think critically. So I'm somebody who went to college. I got the highest level of academic achievement, which is getting a doctorate. And I learned much more about how to think critically from working, reading books, listening to podcasts, studying on my own or starting my own businesses. And in my opinion, many colleges actually teach the opposite of critical thinking. They teach you how to group think. They teach you how to fall in line and not think for yourself. And they tend to have opinions from just one perspective, not a well-rounded perspective. So they're incredibly biased. And colleges in many cases are the opposite of innovative or creative. The women in gender studies degree is very interdisciplinary. So there's a lot of different aspects that go into it. So I've taken psychology classes. I've taken sociology classes and politics classes, anything that you could think of. You could probably take a women in gender studies class. So this is an argument you hear all the time from the snake oil salesman as well. Oh, you learn a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a little more of this. Jesus wants you to get in that car. Sit in that car. So this is an exercise that I like to do. Imagine you're making a decision on whether you're going to spend $80,000 on a car because $80,000 is the typical amount that people spend on their bachelor's degree overall. So the car salesman is trying to convince you why you should spend that $80,000. Now imagine that instead of a car, it is a college trying to convince you that you should spend $80,000 on a major. So after everything they say, add on to that sentence. So this is why you should spend $80,000 or so this is why this major is worth $80,000. This exercise really puts things in perspective. So you learn a little bit of political science and a little bit of psychology and a little bit of sociology. So that's why you should spend $80,000 on this degree, right? That's not a very strong selling point because let's be honest, there's lots of resources out there if you want to be a generalist, somebody who knows a little bit of this and a little bit of that like a jack of all trades. And these resources are available completely free online. I've mentioned this several times on the channel. There's a great Reddit thread that basically puts all of them and kind of like organizes all of these free classes that universities offer. And in many cases, you can listen to the same lectures, have the same assignments, use the same books and even take the same tests if you want from these free online resources. And I'll just have that pop up on the screen. So if you want to be a generalist and know a little bit about a lot of things, you can get that completely free online from the best universities in the world. The value of a college degree, or at least this is the supposed value of a college degree, is that you're supposed to be a specialist in a certain subject when you graduate. Like when you graduate with a computer science degree, you should know how to code. If you graduate with an aerospace engineering degree, you should know quite a bit about airplanes, jets, rockets, etc., things that fly through the air. So basically, they're saying you should spend $80,000 so that you can know a little bit about a lot of things. That is not a very strong value proposition. Everybody in the world has a gender and everybody in the world has a sexuality and over half the world's population identifies as women. There's no place or business or institution that gender doesn't impact upon in some ways. Wow, nice logic there. So with this logic, you know, everybody in the world has a weenus. Weenus is this little flap of skin on your elbow if you didn't know. And only half the people in the world are women. So with this logic, a weenus studies degree should be twice as valuable as a women's studies degree. Right? I think you get the point here. Just because everybody in the world has something in common, doesn't mean it's a valuable skill that's going to justify an $80,000 price tag. Absolute nonsense to say that it does. So again, why should I spend $80,000 to attend this program? What am I going to get here that I can't get elsewhere? And our graduates go into such a wide variety of professions, you know, they go, they become lawyers, they become social workers, they work for nonprofits, they go into business, they do medical research. Okay, so finally she's starting to give some semi-logical reasons to justify why I should spend $80,000 to get this degree. So let's go ahead and break this down. Lawyers, this requires graduate school. So you have to go back to school, spend more money, more time, more effort in order to maybe get a career. Social workers, this also requires graduate school. She didn't specify which medical careers, but I'm assuming she means like a doctor, like if you're trying to become a psychiatrist or something. And yes, that also requires graduate school. So all three of these require you to go to graduate school, spend more money, more time. And then maybe you'll be able to finally land a job that makes you good money. In the case of lawyer, very, very competitive. I made an entire video about that. Can be really good for the right type of personality, but it's super competitive. Be careful going into that. Now the student loan debt clock at the time of making this video is about $1.97 trillion. By the time I edit this, or you watched this video, maybe it's even hit $2 trillion. And graduate school loans account for over half of student loan debt. So this is what you call in business an upsell. If colleges can get you to go to graduate school, they double the amount of money that they made on you. So if you think about it, degrees that are able to get you a job at just the bachelor's or associate level are kind of bad for business. So it makes a lot of sense financially speaking for them to want you to get a useless degree at the bachelor's level, which is basically going to force you to get a master's or a doctorate. So when this lady names these careers, then almost all of them require you to go to graduate school. That is pretty sketchy. Now she mentioned going into business, you absolutely do not need a gender studies degree to go into business. And actually, all those other ones that I mentioned, you don't need a gender studies degree to go into either. Show me an LLC or business creation website that says you have to have a gender studies degree. It doesn't exist. And I've done videos on the college degrees that tend to lead to the most successful people and millionaires and gender studies is not one of them. So gender studies is not going to increase your chances of being successful in business compared to other college degrees. So again, this does not justify the $80,000 price. Next, she mentioned working for nonprofits. So this is the only one that's somewhat reasonable. The only problem is nonprofit jobs are far and few in between, especially for people who only have a bachelor's degree. And this just comes back to supply and demand. There's tons of people graduating with either useless or semi useless degrees. And there's not that many jobs in nonprofits. Now, whether that's right or wrong, or maybe the world should be different, none of that actually matters. My job on this channel is to give you practical advice. I'm trying to help you make smart financial decisions. I'm not telling you that this is right or that's right, or maybe in the future it'll be like this or be like that. None of that matters. You have zero control over that. So basically, all of the options that she mentioned are terrible and I am still not sold on this degree. Well, my wish for our graduates of women's gender and sexuality studies is for them really to be able to be happy and to achieve in the areas that they designate as most important and meaningful to them, whatever that might be. I want them to be able to go out and really have that sense of self-mastery and the ability to know that they can be successful in whatever endeavor they choose. All right. So let's see what students that graduate from this university are actually achieving. So there's this really cool website called aftercollege.com and you basically get to look up what types of careers people are going into after they graduate with certain degrees from certain colleges. So I looked up University of Louisville women's studies degree for people who graduated in 2021 and unfortunately they couldn't find any jobs at all for people without education. I then did the same degree for people who graduated in 2018. Same thing, no jobs out there for people who graduated with that degree, but I thought it's possible that there wasn't enough data on the website. So I switched it to a sociology degree that graduated from Louisville. Now to be fair, a sociology degree probably has better numbers than a gender studies or women's studies degree, but here's what popped up for a sociology degree graduate from the University of Louisville. Almost half of them go into customer service. A large amount of them go into administration, sales, marketing, education, food service, human resources, and then physical labor. All right. So when you see like the sales in the marketing part, you might think, oh, that's really good, right? But here's the thing, sales and marketing are two types of careers that you can get into with just about any degree or in many cases, no degree at all. This is one of the main things me and my business partners actually teach people. I've done tons of interviews of people who've gotten like digital marketing careers, you know, in one to two months with no experience, no college, et cetera. And in many cases, the people that I've worked with are people who unfortunately got one of these useless or semi-useless degrees, couldn't find a job, and then they had to try to find some other career. So they're kind of desperate, they find me or one of my business partners and we're able to help them get into a really lucrative career that way. But it has absolutely nothing to do with their degree, nothing. And by the way, if you want to check out like a free digital marketing masterclass, I guess I'll use this opportunity to say, I'll put it down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. And I've had an entire playlist of people that I've interviewed that have actually used this service to get into digital marketing, you can check that out as well. Now for this degree, the most common job titles are store clerk, administrative assistant, customer service representative, store overnight clerk and customer service supervisor. So yeah, basically everyone who graduates with a degree like this is working in a job that you don't need a degree for. And it probably has absolutely nothing to do with gender studies. All right, so let's read a few of the comments on this video. Hello goodbye says, if there were so many opportunities for employment for this in name major, they would not have the need to repeatedly say so. George Michaels says, there's no place that gender doesn't impact read, there's no place that I can't slap my ill formed ideology on and assume that I know what's wrong and what solutions are needed. T hobby says waste of money in 10 years, they'll have $100,000 in debt and make $40,000 then complain that the college system blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, this is the video, I'll put a picture up on the screen in case you want to watch it. Also, if you want to avoid getting a useless college degree, check out this video right here. And I will see you next time.