 What's happening guys, in today's video we're going to be going over the best alternatives to college. Now this channel does focus a lot on college degrees of course, but there's so many other great pathways out for you if you don't want to go $40,000 in debt and spend four years of your life going to university. College is not the perfect route for everybody, it's right for some people and for other people it's not right. So here are some really good alternatives for you to consider if you're thinking that college might not be the best option for you. And then at the very end I'm going to give an example of one that's sort of college but sort of not college at the same time. Alright, so number one on the list is going to be trade school, vocational school or technical school. I basically grouped all three of these together because they're very similar and this could include anything from becoming a plumber to a dental hygienist or a firefighter or a police officer. There's also lots of different medical related careers that you would go to trade school or technical school for. Now first of all trade school is usually going to be a lot shorter than getting a bachelor level degree, right? So bachelors are generally going to take about four years or so. Trade school, usually depending on what you're going for, it's going to be maybe one or two years. Very rarely it'll take three years. Now on top of that it's also a lot cheaper than normal college, doesn't cost nearly as much and you don't have to take a bunch of extra classes that you may not actually be interested in. All the classes you're taking are designed to help you in the career that you're going into, right? So if you're becoming a medical sonographer all of the classes you're taking are going to have to do with medical sonography. Whereas in normal college you're going to have to take a bunch of electives and other classes that are completely unrelated to the career that you're actually going for. And you have to pay for those classes. Now depending on the state you live in and which trade or vocation you're going into, sometimes you can actually skip school altogether and go straight into an apprenticeship and that is number two on the list. So for instance let's say you're trying to become an electrician or a plumber. A lot of the time depending on the state you live in and what unions they have it kind of gets complicated. Then you work as an apprentice for several years. You actually get paid to work which is awesome. It's not as much as a normal electrician or a normal plumber would make but you're getting paid nevertheless. And then after doing that for a few years you can become a fully fledged plumber or electrician whatever you're going for. And the truth is with a lot of careers out there and I even noticed this in pharmacy myself becoming a pharmacist you know you learn a lot in the classroom don't get me wrong but until you actually start working it's very difficult to turn that classroom knowledge into useful in real life knowledge. I'm not saying that the classroom knowledge isn't important it definitely is but nothing replaces on the job training and nothing replaces in real life work experience. So I think this is pretty cool because you're literally getting paid to learn instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars every single year in order to get an education in the classroom you're actually getting paid tens of thousands of dollars every single year in order to get your education. So this is pretty awesome can be great for the right person there is a website you can go to to kind of like check apprenticeships in your area it's www.apprenticeship.gov. Now that's just in the United States of course I'm from the US so that's why I know that but apprenticeships are available around the world. Number three on the list is going to be joining the military. Now not only is it great that you get to serve your country thank you to all of you who are watching this but on top of that you can actually get paid to learn skills. I talked about this in the video that I did on joining the military a friend of mine basically joined the Navy he was on like nuclear submarines and he got trained on how to like work on those subs and the training that you have to go through in order to do that is extensive like you really have to learn a lot but it's basically like a pipeline people do that for a few years and then they get hired by all these different companies because they're essentially like a mechanic slash engineer at that point so while he was in the military he was getting paid and then right after he left the military he was immediately able to get a six-figure job on top of that there is a ridiculous amount of benefits that you get both while you're in the military as well as after you retire health insurance getting your college paid for just all kinds of different things again you can check out my video that I did on joining the military where I go over all of those make sure you do your research on this there's a lot of downsides to joining the military but it can be a fantastic option for the right person number four on the list is going to be taking online courses now this can range anywhere from like certifications to taking boot camps right so one thing that's really big in the coding world is actually taking a boot camp to learn how to code so sometimes people instead of going to college and getting a computer science degree they will take a boot camp sometimes this will last like several months to a year and that will teach them how to code and they can get their first job and learn the rest from there another thing you can do is certifications so Google for instance is starting to offer certifications and certain skills that they think there's not enough people for so for instance they offer a certification in data analytics because they think that there's not enough people that are really good at data analytics out there there's also a bunch of online courses out there on websites like skill share and teachable I actually offer an online course myself college 101 the ultimate guide to getting the most out of college with the least amount of effort time and money you can check that out down in the description below offering 25% off at the time of recording this video might be 20% by the time you see this but yeah these options are probably going to be better for people who are a little more self-driven if you're somebody who basically needs more of a formal structure of education like being in the classroom setting this might not be the best option for you but if you're someone who's really good at teaching yourself you're like you're an autodidact then this can be a fantastic option I've personally taken a ton of online courses probably like dozens at this point and I've learned so much from them some of them are honestly kind of crappy you know you know it's just like classes like you're gonna get some teachers that are crappy you're gonna have some classes that you don't like same thing with online courses but overall I think it's great another option is going to be a travel career now this actually kind of encompasses a bunch of different careers but I didn't want to make this list too long but this could include for instance teaching people a foreign language so there's thing called teaching English as a foreign language aka TEFL or TEFL I have a good friend who's actually doing this right now in Ecuador where he basically teaches people in Ecuador how to speak English and he makes a living from it now one thing that's great about doing something like this is you can live in countries that have a much lower cost of living so for instance in Ecuador the dollar goes maybe three times as far as it does in the US maybe even four times as far so if your cost of living here in the US is $2,000 a month or let's say $4,000 a month in Ecuador would probably be about 1,000 so you really don't need to make all that much money in order to live the same lifestyle this is just one example there's a ton of others out there you know anything that involves doing things digitally for instance would be a great example you could become like an online tutor for instance I did tutoring back in college I made over $100 an hour at one point you can do freelance works on websites like Fiverr or Upwork and this allows you to make money while you're also traveling abroad which is really awesome you know especially for the right person if you're somebody who wants to travel now number six on the list is going to be basically working your way up in a company but only specific types of companies so you don't want to do this in a company where they don't treat their employees well they don't offer opportunities for their employees to advance if they perform well you only want to do this in a company that first of all is doing well usually sometimes this can work in smaller companies where you know you know the owners personally but a lot of the time the best option for you is going to be to try to work your way up in a very big company like a fortune 50 or maybe a fortune 500 company and preferably you want to join a company that's in a booming industry because if it's in an industry where there's just lots of opportunity tons of money out there if you work hard you're going to get rewarded for that hard work whereas if you're in an industry where they're struggling you work hard and you're basically just going to be barely getting by so for instance I've heard stories about people starting off at you know basically like an entry-level salesman and then they work their way up into maybe like an assistant manager position and then a manager position and then after that they just keep working their way up and all the sudden they become an executive you have to be really careful with doing this because I have just seen so many horror stories of people getting stuck at crappy like low-level jobs that they absolutely hate don't want that to happen to you guys so be very careful if you decide to go this option alright so next on the list is number seven entrepreneurship two words entrepreneurship this is starting your own business so this could be anywhere from turning a hobby that you have into a career kind of like I have with this YouTube channel but really the heart of entrepreneurship is solving painful problems for people right so using your skills to create products or services that solve problems and there's so many different examples of how you can become an entrepreneur and work for yourself some of the side hustles that I did back in the day I probably could have turned into full-time entrepreneurship it's just that in my opinion the ceiling was a little bit too low for those but there are some things that I did back in the day where I probably could have made a full-time income if I decided to just drop out of college and done them full-time so for instance I used to sell eyeglass cleaner where I would basically just go to all kinds of different fairs and shows like gun shows boat shows etc and then I would sell eyeglass cleaner to people and there were weekends where I'd pull in about you know $1,800 $2,000 another thing I used to do is buy and sell stuff so I would use Craigslist that's what we use back in the day now you've got like all kinds of other options like Mercari Facebook marketplace etc but I would use Craigslist to buy and sell stuff so you'd buy something for like $100 and you'd sell it for $200 pretty simple this could take up an entire video actually could take up an entire channel maybe even entire niche on YouTube because it's just so much information out there on becoming an entrepreneur starting your own business but this can be a fantastic option for the right person one thing I did kind of want to mention here is there's basically two different types of people who are sort of entrepreneurial one of them it's best for them to start their own business and then the other type of person it's best for them to actually stay within a company so I like to call this like the entrepreneur and then the entrepreneur okay so entrepreneur is someone who you know really doesn't like rules they don't like to be confined sort of and it's best for them to kind of go off and be their own boss and start their own company whereas an entrepreneur is someone who has some of that same drive and that same creativity as an entrepreneur but they like a little bit more structure so they kind of like to have that creativity but within a defined box sort of so these people make fantastic like executives CEOs etc where they can basically run a company and you know somebody kind of tells them this is what needs to be done now use your creative genius to get the job done so if you're somebody who isn't exactly comfortable with entrepreneurship but you still kind of have that fire and that creativity consider maybe becoming an entrepreneur and try to work your way up within a company that's kind of the last one on the list and then see what happens now number eight on the list is going to be sort of like college but it's basically going to be an alternative and this is basically online college but not the type that you think so there are some degrees out there that in my opinion do not take four years to get okay and these could be for several different reasons first of all certain degrees are much more difficult than other degrees right this is just objectively true I mean you can argue with me like all people have these strengths of these strengths but an engineering degree is going to be much more difficult than like an art history degree it's just it's just facts you know like a physics degree is going to be much more difficult than a recreation and leisure studies degree and there are some online colleges that are well respected keywords they're well respected because a lot of online colleges are not well respected that basically offer a fast track for you to get your degree done much faster than the traditional college track would take so an example of this would be Western Governor University they offer a lot of degrees that have good placement rates a.k.a. degrees where you're actually going to be able to get a job from them and they offer it at a very reasonable price and you can get it done as fast as you want so there are videos online of people going to some of these colleges and they actually are able to get like you know a business degree done in like one year instead of four years for instance so that saves them like three years of time and three years of tuition and three years of opportunity cost I mean I could just go on and on that is invaluable now again you really have to do your research here because a lot of online colleges are pretty scammy and if I'm just being frank here a lot of them are not worth it but some of them are going to be worth it especially since pretty much everyone is doing online classes anyways right now this can be a fantastic option for the right person as well check out my other videos right here if you haven't done already go ahead hit that like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc that you have on the video and I will see you next time