 What's happening guys? It's Shane here, so everybody knows the red flags to watch out for when it comes to something like dating. You know, if your date is mean to the waitress, she's probably gonna end up being mean to you later on. Or if they start bringing up their exes and talking crap on them right off the bat for no reason, that's another really big red flag. And on and on I think you get the idea. There's a ton of examples and this is great because if you decide to date someone and if you find out they're a bad person years down the line, you basically just wasted a bunch of time. So it's really good to be able to weed out the bad ones at the beginning so you don't waste any time. Thank you for doing this before the concert by the way. Best breakup. But let's talk about another significant life event and that's choosing a degree that you're going to be spending four plus years of your life and probably over $40,000 on in order to obtain this little piece of paper that said that you did a thing. Now my question is why are there no red flags for college degrees when this is something that could potentially put you $40,000 into debt. That's about the average right now and it could waste four years of your life and a lot of people end up not even going into whatever degree. And this is crazy when you realize that only about 27% of people who go to college end up getting a job that has anything to do with that major that they spent all that time and money on. And also students end up changing their degree an average of three times. So that's why I'm making this video to show you the red flags so that you don't end up getting a worthless degree where you don't end up actually being able to get a job with that piece of paper that you get at the end. At the end of the video, I'm going to show you how to calculate the likelihood that the degree you're getting is a scam. I'm also going to go ahead and show you my favorite resources. These are ones that I spent a lot of time finding. You know, I went through a lot of really bad ones to find the really good ones, took me many, many hours and these will save you a ton of time and they offer really good information. So you can go ahead and do the research on your degree. You can check it out, personalize it, make sure it's right for you and then make your decision. Red flag number 10 is going to be your degree has the word studies in it. Now, of course, this is a generalization and I'm sure somebody in the comments is going to furiously type out, you know, well, Shane, my aunt's husband's cousin has a degree in recreational studies and they make $200,000 a year and they love their job and I get it. There's always going to be a few exceptions to every rule, but I think it's much smarter to focus on the big picture and look at the statistics and just think to yourself, are there any actual jobs that are related to this degree? There probably aren't that many jobs and in the few that are out there, you have tons of competition and they don't even pay that well. Red flag number nine is the degree sounds too good to be true. So a great example of this one for me personally is a history degree. History is one of my biggest passions. I absolutely love reading about it and listening to it and watching documentaries. It's extremely fun. I love it and guess what? A ton of other people feel the same exact way because studying history is basically recreation. You know what? I think we're going to be friends. Special friends. And not that many people get paid to have fun. Fun, fun, fun. And the stark reality is very, very few people actually make a living doing what their number one passion is. Now this doesn't mean you have to do something you're completely dispassionate about, but you might have to do something that's maybe your third passion or your fourth or your fifth because the only people who actually get degrees in these majors that sound too good to be true and then they get a job from it are people who are usually rich in the first place. They come from a rich family or they had an insider connection or something along those lines. Or they worked for years and years and years on their craft, probably not making any money whatsoever, having to work two other soul sucking side jobs just to be able to build up the momentum to start a career as an author or maybe a YouTuber or start a blog that gets really big or something like that. And the truth is, you know, something might be your passion, your number one passion, but there's just no jobs out there for it. And if you do want to do that for a living, you're going to have to get creative with it because getting a degree just isn't enough. And for instance, for me, I get to listen to history podcasts and read books and watch documentaries and as much as I want. I have plenty of free time to do that on the side and I honestly get tired of it sometimes because I do it so often. Red flag number eight to look for is a significant amount of people who graduate with that major aren't doing jobs that are related to it. In a 2018 study by the National Center of Educational Statistics or NCES, it was found that 73% of people who got degrees related to healthcare were working a job that was in the healthcare field. Compare that to 27% of general studies majors and 26% of humanities majors that are working a job related to their degree. This means that the majority of these people went to school, probably got about $30,000 plus in debt because that's the average student loan debt these days. It's almost $40,000 now and they're working a job that is completely unrelated to their major. This is a huge red flag guys. Red flag number seven is that there are no jobs that are related to their major. Now this seems like kind of an obvious one but you know you get a degree in engineering and you become an engineer. You get a nursing degree like registered nurse, RN, you become a nurse and if you get a computer science degree, well you have like 10 or 20 different options. But what do you become if you get a degree in romance languages? A romance linguist? I mean off the top of my head the only thing I can think of is maybe getting a job with a company that produces Shakespearean plays or maybe you get a job with a museum or maybe you become a professor that teaches other suckers how to you know become an expert at romance languages. This is an obvious one but just make sure there's actual jobs out there in careers your degree is preparing you for. Red flag number six is there are jobs but there's no job opening. Now again this one is a little bit obvious but let's say there are jobs out there but they're getting like a hundred applications every single day and there's only one position that's open. This is basic supply and demand and I think a really good example of this would be a film degree. You know of course there's jobs in film. You know you can work for Hollywood and become a film director or you can become an expert on lighting or sound or an editor. The only problem is is there's pretty much no job openings and every time there is a job opening they probably don't even post it anywhere they just choose somebody that they already know because they have a huge waiting list of people. And another thing you can check that's related to this is what's called future growth and by that I mean how many jobs do they expect to be created in the next 10 years. And this way you know how many jobs are available for you now and you're also looking out for future you and making sure there's going to be jobs available in the future. And it's always a good idea to look out for future you. Red flag number five is the jobs that are out there don't pay very well. So in most markets with most jobs the way that a job pay you know salary is decided is it's all about supply and demand. You know how many people have the particular set of skills that you need for this job and then how many job openings are there out there. And if not a lot of people have that skill set but there's a lot of job openings guess what the people that do have the skill set are going to get paid higher. It's all about solving a problem and having skills that people are willing to pay for. Now this system is not always perfect and I think the best example of this is education and it's just heartbreaking but teachers in the United States of America are not paid very well. Okay who's got food in here? Even though this is a job where there's plenty of job openings but for some reason even though it's a very important profession they're just not paid very well and they're worked really hard. Contrast this to South Korea for instance where teachers are considered to be on the same level as doctors and they're paid extremely well. But for some reason in the United States they just aren't valued the same even though education is probably one of the most important things for the future of our country. It's just it's really sad but education is a perfect example of this. Red flag number four is low job satisfaction rating. So this is basically where people who are in this career you know they'll get a survey and they you know talk about how satisfied they are with their job. Do they feel like it's meaningful? Do they feel like you know they're making a difference so they feel happy when they're at their job? These sorts of things they calculate it and then they spit out a number which is the job satisfaction rating score. And my favorite website to do this is probably glassdoor.com I think they have the best and most accurate information but it's also a very good idea to talk to people who are currently in that career right now and you can do that with LinkedIn you can just you know reach out through your network you know so you know somebody. Because what's the point in making a ton of money if you're absolutely miserable while you're doing it? Red flag number three is maybe there are a lot of jobs but there's so many graduates that there's just not enough jobs to meet the influx of people graduating with whatever degree that is. Now a perfect example of this is psychology. There are jobs out there for psychology it's very important to society. Mental health is very important it's a huge issue right now but unfortunately psychology is such a popular degree that the jobs out there are just totally saturated even though there's quite a few jobs out there and it's very important and it does solve a problem for society there's just not enough of them and because of this a lot of psychology majors are forced to get their masters or their doctorate just to be able to find a job and then a bunch of the other ones end up going into a job that's completely unrelated to their major. Red flag number two is the degree is either too general or it's too niche. Now there are some degrees out there that are so general that it almost becomes useless and an example of this one would be a communications degree it's almost like you're getting a life degree or something like that whereas just so general the people that are hiring you are like what did you even study in communications I don't understand and it's hard for the employer to identify the particular set of skills that you have and therefore a lot of communications majors end up jobless. On the other end of the spectrum you have degrees that are just way too niche the skill set that you learn is so narrow that it just does not apply to anything else and a perfect example of this would be archaeology you know there's not that many archaeology jobs out there and the skill set that you learn just doesn't really transfer to anything else and so therefore it's just not going to be very attractive to potential employers. Red flag number one is you don't even need a degree to get the same exact job now a great example of this and I'm sure there are certain jobs that are exceptions to this but I'm going to mention it anyways is police officers you know you don't need a criminal justice degree to work as a police officer or detective all you need is a high school diploma and then some random agencies will require an associates degree and then very rarely they'll require a bachelor's degree but it doesn't have to be in criminology or criminal justice and this is something that a lot of people don't really know now there are a lot of jobs where you technically don't need a degree in order to get into that field but a degree really helps in one perfect example of this is computer science you know technically you don't need a degree to get a job at google and computer science but it really really helps and unless you're some kind of child prodigy or something like that getting a degree in computer science is going to help you a lot getting a job at a really good tech company and then the opposite of this is there are a lot of jobs out there that require degrees even though it doesn't really seem like you'd need one to do the job and a really common example of this one is flight attendants there's a lot of companies that require their flight attendants to have degrees but overall if the job doesn't require a degree then don't get one now as promised I'm going to share the best of the best resources with you that I use to do research on different degrees and jobs and the first one is very simple it's the BLS or Bureau of Labor Statistics and you can use this to find the median pay the typical degree required for entry level and then it'll also tell you how many jobs are available now and how many are projected to be available in the next 10 years and whatever I'm searching on BLS I literally just type BLS and then whatever the job is and it's usually the very top result the second site that I use and I absolutely love I think this is the best site of its kind even though there's a hundred other sites out there that say they do the same thing is going to be Glassdoor.com and this one is really great for looking up annual pay and it gives you a little bit more detail on it it'll tell you what like the entry level is and what the upper range is whereas BLS just kind of gives you like an average it's also really good for job satisfaction rating and telling you how many jobs are open right now and again it's super easy to use all I do is type in Glassdoor and then whatever job I'm looking up in Google and it's usually the first one that pops up and it really does give you a more visually pleasing and detailed breakdown of the careers whereas BLS just kind of gives you pure numbers and it's just not as nice to look at now the next one I really love to look at is NCES or the National Center for Educational Statistics and you can find this one at nces.edu.gov and this is a government website and they release all kinds of interesting information like what the average graduate of a certain degree is making in the real world or they might release the unemployment statistics for different degrees all kinds of really amazing studies that are designed and meant to help you make a really good decision when it comes to whichever degree you're going to get now the next tool I like to use is more of a way to just get an idea of what direction I should look in it's not really something where I look for accurate information it's more just to give me an idea and what that is is different forums and Reddit and a good example of different forums you can use would be student doctor network if you're looking into health careers now like I said before you want to take everything at face value don't believe everything you hear you're going to run into some people that are extremely negative you're going to run into some people that are overly positive so just don't believe everything you hear take it at face value but it's a good way of kind of like looking in the right direction now the next tool that I absolutely love to use for research is linkedin and what you can do with linkedin is let's say you're curious about a particular career you can type that in on linkedin and thousands of people that are currently doing that career will pop up let's say you have a dream job of being a software engineer at google for instance you can type in software engineer and you can narrow it down to only people who are working at google and then you can message those people and ask them questions and you can also see what kind of degrees they got what kind of school they went to you know did they get a two-year degree a four-year degree six year all of that information is available on linkedin you can just reverse engineer it and then make a solid plan to achieve your goal and then the last tool that I use is my phone now you can't do this with everyone it would take too much time but once you've narrowed it down to a few careers or a few degrees that you're interested in what you really want to do is pick up the phone and talk to people who are currently doing those careers you can start by messaging them on linkedin or reach out through your network or look up maybe people in your local area that are doing those careers but it's so so important to talk to real people who are doing it and they will give you a more accurate version of what it's all about and nothing beats talking to real people but you do want to talk to at least a few people in each career because again you could get a hold of somebody who's like super positive polyana type person or you could get a hold of somebody who's just a negative Nancy and they're just going to tell you everything is horrible when in reality it's actually pretty good make sure to check out my videos right here I made them just for you go ahead and smash the like button hit the subscribe button ring the little notification bell and then comment down below any ideas you have about this video or if you want me to make another video let me know that thank you so much and I will see you in the next video