 What's happening guys? So the number one undisputed source of financial news on the internet, BuzzFeed, put out a video where they interviewed this girl. My name is Brittany. Now she studied to get a drama degree. I studied drama and communication. And she ended up six figures in debt. And I owe $118,000 in student loans. Now I talk a lot on this channel while you should only go to college if you have a solid plan that's going to lead to you getting a good job. But Shane, my passion! Okay, okay, okay, okay, I get it. Calm down, I'm not saying that you shouldn't follow your passion. What are we talking about? All I'm saying is that if your passion is going to put you $100,000 in the hole and prevent you from being able to live a normal life, then you probably shouldn't go to college in order to follow that passion. What did you say? Instead you should get creative and find another way to follow your dreams. And Brittany here is a perfect example of that. So I'm going to react to this video and if you're somebody who's in the same boat as Brittany, I think this video is probably going to help you out a lot. Because the truth is, if your passion in life is to become an actor or work in Hollywood, getting a drama degree probably isn't going to help you out that much. Acting is open to anybody. That's quite a waste of time. If your passion is photography, getting a photography degree probably isn't going to help you much. That the majority of the people that I graduated with never got anywhere in photography. But if your passion in life is watching YouTube videos, getting a degree and smashing that like button studies is a great investment. And all you need to do is turn that little button from gray to blue. Now, I do appreciate if you do that, but without further ado, let's jump into this video and see what we can learn from Brittany's situation. So this is extremely common. Brittany was experiencing probably a lot of peer pressure. All of her friends were going to college. Everyone around here was just taking out loans and acting like it wasn't any big deal whatsoever. Taking loans out was just part of what everyone had to do, that they weren't going to affect my life that much. And so as a 17-year-old making one of the biggest decisions of your life that doesn't really know that much about life in general, of course, that's what you're going to do. You're just going to do what everybody else is doing. Going to college is pretty much just a part of the American dream at this point. And so that's what everybody thinks they should do. On top of that, there's a ton of pressure from society, as well as your parents and your family. Everybody's saying you need to go to college to be successful. The media, TV, movies, shows, popular culture, they all portray college as the funnest time of your life. And then if all that wasn't enough, universities spend millions and millions of dollars every single year to tell you that same exact message. In fact, many of them spend more money on the advertising and the marketing than they do on the students themselves. And when you do agree to student loans, it's almost like one of those long terms of service agreements that you just scroll to the bottom all through all 37 pages and just automatically click agree without reading any of it. And I know that when I was going through the process of applying to college, not one single person, not high school counselors or college counselors or anybody sat me down and was like, Shane, you do know what you're getting yourself into with this debt, right? Nobody bats an eye, even though it's probably one of the top five biggest decisions you'll ever make in your life. And why would you? Everyone's doing it, right? I really didn't understand the magnitude of them until I graduated and your minimum amount is astronomical. So this is what I'm trying to save everybody from going through with this channel. Way back in the day, like the 1950s, smoking was something that was super cool and it's just, you know, everyone did it. And so therefore millions and millions of people fell into that trap. Nobody worried about the health consequences because there were so many different forces from peer pressure to advertising. They were telling you that you should smoke. Well, turns out that smoking is horrible for your health in the same way that student loans are horrible for your finances. This is why you need to start thinking of college as an investment and any investment has to have a good ROI. And if an investment is going to lead to you not being able to get a job and being buried in high interest student loan debt that you can't forfeit, then don't do it. And sure, it's really sad that we all have to think this way. It would be great if college was just a place for learning and enlightenment and becoming a better citizen of the world. But the reality is that in the United States of America, things just aren't this way anymore. Gone are the days where you can just get whatever degree you want and employers would be lined up outside your door. This is why I always tell people that they need to start thinking about their future. Think about the job you want in the future, the career that you want. Have a plan before you go into college. And then whatever degree that you want to get, make sure that that degree is going to help you achieve your goals, not hurt you. So my total due for this month, $707.74. I'm literally just paying the interest. Holy cow. So she's been paying off her student loans for over 10 years now and the majority of it just went to the interest. Hardly any of it even went towards the actual loans that she took out. And this is all because of the power of compound interest. So I do talk a lot about investing on this channel and one of the biggest things when it comes to investing is when you're young, you have time on your side. And here's a quote from one of the smartest people that's ever lived. Albert Einstein says, Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it. He who doesn't pays it. And without going into too much detail here, if you understand how compound interest works and you start investing early, you can easily become wealthy. However, in the case of student loans, the power of compound interest is working in reverse against Brittany. Now, Brittany's only making the minimum payments. So most of her payments is going towards the compound interest and then a tiny little bit of it is going towards the principal. Now, on top of this, usually other types of loans like a business loan or a house loan or something like that, if things don't go your way, the business goes under, you lose your house. You can default on that debt, declare bankruptcy, and then it's not a pretty process or anything, but you don't have to pay it off at the end of the day. Now, with student loans, you can't really do that except in extreme circumstances. You have to have some sort of extremely debilitating injury like you got all four of your limbs chopped off or something along those lines. Now, this is obviously extremely attractive to people who actually sell debt, people who profit off of your student loans. It's a huge debt trap and it's almost impossible for people to get out of it. And if you don't fully understand this, then you're going to be helping some asshole on Wall Street by his second mega yacht. So at this point in the video, she basically just goes over how she has to be extremely frugal and she has to sell her clothes and a lot of her possessions just to make ends meet. And then she drops this on us. I'm a freelance production assistant. I also work at a dance studio as a receptionist and I also work for a temp agency. Wow. So she's working three different jobs just to get by and two out of the three jobs aren't related to a drama degree or a career in drama or whatsoever. So I have to be honest, you know, a lot of comments on this video are really negative against her and I don't agree with those comments at all. I feel really bad for Brittany. She's in a horrible situation and she's not the only one. A lot of other people are finding themselves in similar situations to her. They buy the hype, they go after their dreams and follow their passions and they get a college degree that is supposed to lead to them being in something that they're truly passionate about and they end up working two or three jobs just to get by and they never even work in the career that they originally wanted to be a part of. And this is all even though they're college educated and they learn a lot from the degree itself. That's why as someone who has gone all the way to the very highest level in education, I'm trying to get the word out there to people so that you can make a better decision for your future. And I guess it's kind of interesting to mention that not a single time in this entire video and I watched it several times now, did she mention anything about what she learned from her education or what she got out of college? Because education a lot of the time is kind of an afterthought at most colleges. And a lot of people who have gone to college will agree with me on this. You know, your first semester in college, you're gonna get stuck in a class with like 300 students, giant lecture hall. You can barely see the professor unless you stand at the very front. Usually the lecture's pretty boring or dry. A lot of the time the professor will literally read word for word from the slide, which I mean, I can just read the slide myself. I don't need them to read it to me. And this is why a lot of the time students will end up just not going to class after a few weeks at all. And then there's a lot less people in the class at that point. And the truth is that many professors don't really care that much about the teaching portion of college. They're going to the university, first of all, just to make ends meet. And second of all, they're doing it because they want to research. That's their primary job and their mind. They're all about the research and the teaching is just a little thing that they do on the side. And I'm not saying all professors are like this. There's definitely a lot of exceptions, but I would say that at least the majority of them in my experience and the experience of a lot of people I've talked to have been like this. Now on top of this, most of the stuff you learn in college, you'll never actually use in real life or even in your job. You know, I'm in the medical field and never once have I ever had to know the ridges and the pathways on a bone that you have to memorize an anatomy. And in my opinion, there's really only two main reasons to go to college. The first one is proving that you have the ability to work hard and sort of just learn how to learn. And then the second and most important reason is for that piece of paper at the end that's going to open doors and opportunities for you. And then I guess you could add the third little part in there, which is a very distant third, which is having fun. So I think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they're not for learning. But going into debt to go to college just to have fun is like going into debt to buy a gold plated PlayStation 4 because that's going to be some of the most expensive fun you're ever going to have. Instead, what you really want to do is make sure that your college investment is going to pay off for you and think about it like return on investment like I mentioned before, the ROI. So I just want to reemphasize here that in no way am I making fun of Brittany. I feel really bad for her and the situation that she's in. And I'm sure some people in the comments section are going to say, you know, she made bad choices. It's her fault. She has to deal with it now. And there is some partial truth to that. I do think that she should take responsibility for her choice and then make sure that she makes better choices in the future. But on the other hand, when you see millions and millions of people falling for the same exact trap, you have to stop and think for a second. That tells me that there's just not enough awareness around this subject right now. And I really wish things weren't this way. I wish it were still like the 70s where you could just get any degree. It doesn't matter what you get and you'd have a really good job lined up for you for the rest of your life. But at least here in the United States, it's not like that anymore. And you have to start thinking of your degree as an investment. And that's one of the main reasons that I made this channel so that less people will fall for these sorts of traps. So I really appreciate Brittany for sharing her story and I hope that you can learn something from this video and make better choices for your own life so that you can have a better future. But if you haven't done it already, make sure to smash that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring little notification bell and then comment down below any ideas for future videos or any comments on this video. Thank you so much for watching and bye for now.