 What's happening, guys? So I'm mad today, okay? I'm angry because the other day I was helping someone sign up for student aid and it reminded me of how nobody ever warned me about the risk of taking on student loan debt. Gotcha, b**ch! It's like when you sign up for something new and they make you agree to some terms of service which is 137 pages of legal jargon. Who has time to read? Alright, accept and install. Or when you find something that's 100% money-back guarantee 100% money-back guarantee but when you look really close, you see that there's an asterisk. Why you always lying? And I went all the way through college, undergrad, even graduate school and graduated with my doctorate. So I know a lot about all the tricks that are gonna get thrown at you and I got tricked by a lot of them and unfortunately I can't just throw down an Uno reverse card. But what I can do is show you so that you don't make the same mistakes that I did. And by the end of the video, you're gonna know the ways that colleges screw you over so that you know what to look for and you can avoid those traps. And the first secret is to never forget to smash the like button on my videos because if more people know about this then colleges will have to change their ways. And stick around because I'm gonna give you a few pointers at the end that will help you avoid most of these traps on the list. According to the OECD, the US spends more money on college than almost any country in the world. The only country that beats the US in terms of tuition cost is Luxembourg but it doesn't really matter because their government actually pays for all of the tuition. This is the same for one-third of developed countries in the world where college is actually fully paid for by the government. Another one-third of developed countries in the world keep college extremely cheap and by extremely cheap they mean less than $2,400 a year. And as we all know in the US, college is extremely expensive and the government doesn't pay for it, unfortunately. So where the heck is all of that tuition money going? Well, number one on the list, I'm gonna group a bunch of them together. Meals, housing, transportation, and healthcare cost three times as much as the rest of the developed world. Overall, Americans are spending about $3,370 per year per student on these services. That alone is more than the entire tuition cost of one-third of developed countries in the world. Now, of course, there's other categories on this list that are also needlessly expensive such as Texas A&M's $450 million renovation of Kyle Field or the many hidden fees that college has employed that are often more than $1,000 a year and you don't even know about them until it's too late. Now, you might make the argument that on-campus health services, for instance, are expensive but they're also worth the cost and I'm not necessarily gonna argue with that. It's a fair point but I can say that my entire time in college I used the on-campus health services one time and it was just to get a vaccination that I needed in order to take a class at the college. And it's not just me, I asked a bunch of my other friends if they ever use these services and most of them say no. So, if students are paying thousands of dollars a year for health services that they never use chances are it would probably be better if they just used a normal clinic. And at the very least you could argue that the price that you're paying seems to be somewhat wasteful and inefficient. But this is really the least of our worries here. The data suggests much bigger problems than fancy housing, health services and transportation. Out of the approximate $30,000 a year that's spent on each student about 23,000 of that goes to a category known as routine educational expenses. Now I've already gone over this in other videos but tuition is about three times more expensive now than it was in the 1980s. And the United States is much more expensive than other parts of the world when it comes to getting an education and it's not necessarily because our education is any better than anywhere else. For instance Yale is four times as expensive as Oxford even though Oxford is technically a better university when it comes to the world rankings. Hmm, this shit ain't adding up. So I think that most people would agree that you aren't getting four times better education for the ridiculous hike in price. Now you might say this is an apples to oranges comparison as Yale is a private school whereas Oxford is a public school. But even when you compare Oxford to some of the best public schools in the United States they're still much more expensive even though you're not getting anywhere near as good of an education. And I think the fact that Oxford is a public school and it's able to rank so high in the world ranking shows that you don't need to spend that much money on college in order to give students a good education. And one of the reasons that routine educational operations is so high is because the U.S. spends more money on non-teaching staff than they actually do on the teachers themselves. And from my research I believe that the U.S. is the only country in the world that has this issue. And the reason for that is because they spend so much money on marketing to get new suckers. That's harsh. Yeah. I mean students for their colleges. Now this is very similar to the health care system in the United States where we spend twice as much as other countries on health care only to get middling results. And in my opinion the reason for this in both cases is because it's extremely inefficient. Instead of spending all of their money on marketing staff and faculty that aren't essential and football stadiums they should be spending most of it on the education itself. Now another thing that colleges do that's a bit of a scam in my opinion is they make you buy brand new textbooks every single year. I remember one year I had to buy a chemistry textbook and I bought the one from the year before and then I compared them and it was basically the same with just a few things change here and there. Yet I had to buy the new chemistry textbook because there was a mandatory password to assignments that were online. That's like going to the restaurant and the owner tells you in order to eat you have to buy the table too. Now the next way that colleges scam you is not only offering but overly promoting worthless college degrees. And by worthless I mean a college degree that doesn't help you get a job after you graduate. Now they claim that college educations are always going to be worth it no matter which degree you get and this is technically true but they use the average of all the degrees to prop up the poorly performing ones. This is the biggest scam of all because you pay all of that money and you spend all of that time in order to get a degree that isn't going to help you get a job. And not only that you probably go somewhere around $40,000 in debt which you can't default on. And oftentimes counselors not only will not warn you about this but they'll actually encourage you to go into these worthless degree fields. A lot of the time they'll make you take extra classes that you don't necessarily want to take just so that you get a more rounded education. And this is why it's a good idea to get those gateway classes out of the way so you can finish your college education as fast as possible. I know a girl who did a four year degree in two to two and a half years because she got all the gateway classes out of the way as soon as she possibly could. The next trap I want to talk about is graduate plus loans. And graduate plus loans have a lot of the downsides that the undergraduate loans have when it comes to taking them out plus a lot more issues. And one comment that I get a lot on this channel is people who are going into certain degrees knowing that they're not going to be able to get a job after four years but they think that if they get their master's or their doctorate they're going to be able to get a good job. And there's some truth to this but a lot of people have no idea what they're getting into when it comes to graduate plus loans. And these are the loans that you have to take out. First of all there's virtually no limit on how much colleges can charge for these graduate plus loans. The government basically made them into a blank check. This is created a situation where every single year colleges are routinely raising their cost of tuition because there's nobody there to stop them from doing it. So graduate school is much more expensive than undergrad. Sometimes it's two, three, even four times more expensive. And on top of that they compound at 7% interest instead of the normal 5% interest that undergrad loans compound at. And that compound interest starts collecting right when you take it out even though you're still in school whereas with the undergrad loans they wait until after you graduate. It's a trap! Alright so how do you avoid all of these traps? Well in a nutshell the first thing you want to do is make sure college is as cheap as possible. You can take your first two years of college at a community college which is around $2,000 a year which is much cheaper than the average first state college which is around $10,000 a year. And don't even get me started on private schools which can charge up to $40,000 a year. So the smart thing to do is to go to a community college for the first two years, get all those classes out of the way and then transfer your credits to an in-state state school which is also pretty cheap compared to a private university. This way you can pay for all four years of your college for less than what it would cost to go to one year of a private school. The second thing you want to do is to not go to college unless you know that the degree you're going for is going to be a good investment for your future. Don't just go to college willy-nilly and just you know pick a degree because it's something you're interested in. And this doesn't mean you shouldn't go to college, this means you should just spend some time thinking about which degrees are going to actually be a good investment. And I always say this, I'm not telling you to not follow your passions, I'm saying follow the passions that are going to lead to you being able to get a good job. Because it's important for you to think of something as an investment if you're going to go $40,000 into debt for it. Think about it, would you take out a $40,000 loan for a business when you're selling a product that absolutely nobody wants to buy? Probably not, so why would you do it for a degree? The next thing you should do is seek external resources to get as much of school as you can paid for. Things like scholarships, grants, and essay competitions are great. The next thing is to be smart with your money, don't eat a Chipotle every single day, get a crock pot, and plan your meals out. Meal prep on the same day every single week so that you can save yourself time and money for the rest of the week. Then the next thing you can do is start saving and investing that money instead. The sooner you start investing the better. Most people don't start taking this seriously until their 30s or sometimes even later and the sooner you start doing this the better. When you're young you have the power of compound interest on your side and time is your greatest asset so take advantage of that. The next thing is to do side hustles and work while you're going to school. This way you can pay for some of your expenses like your food and your rent without having to take out extra in loans. I personally tried so many different side hustles in college. Some of them really sucked and then some of them were amazing. But honestly it was such an amazing life experience and you get a really good taste of what different jobs are like and what you like and what you absolutely hate. You also get a really good idea of what you're naturally really good at and what your talents are. But overall make sure to watch my videos right here. I made them just for you. Go ahead smash the like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and then comment down below any ideas you have on this video or other videos that you'd like me to make. Thank you so much for watching and bye for now.