 What's happening guys? It's Shane here and in today's video we are going to be going over eight alternatives to getting a college degree. College has been getting more and more expensive and the value of a college degree overall has been going down especially over the last few decades and so for that reason there are some very viable alternatives to college and these are other choices that you should absolutely consider. Now it really is going to be person to person whether you go for a college degree that can be a great choice for some people or if you go for these alternatives and hopefully this video will help you figure out which path that you should go down. So I'm going to be going over eight alternatives and then at the very end as a bonus I'm going to be including a ninth one that is sort of still a college degree but I think it's something you should definitely consider if you don't want to go the traditional college route. And we are going to get into it right after you gently tap that like button. Let's aim for 2,000 likes on this video. I don't even know how to set goals for likes. I should probably set like much higher goals but yeah let's aim for 2,000 likes and also hit that subscribe button. Only about 18% of you are subscribed I believe. I'll have it pop up on the screen and out of those 18% I think only 8% of you click bell notifications. So come on stop being a lurker. You know I work really hard on these videos for you. Just hit that subscribe button, ring the notification bell. I really appreciate it. All right so some of these are going to be pretty obvious but definitely still worth discussing. So number one on the list is going to be trade school. Now there are a lot of really good trades out there. I've done several videos on the highest paying trades and the best trades etc and I think when people picture trades in their head they just think okay like a plumber or something right and that is a good job especially in certain areas but there's a ton of other types of trades as well. So for instance dental hygienist is a trade that you can go down. That's not something you would probably picture in your head. Another one is medical sonographer. Somebody who creates those images that are inside of a person's body. Now when you look up how much trade careers make on BLS which is the Bureau of Labor Statistics they're pretty good but a lot of people would think maybe they're on the lower side but what I found researching this over and over again is that for some reason BLS underreports how much trade careers actually make and the reason for that is likely because a lot of the transactions are actually in cash and so the way that it's reported to the government is probably a little bit different than if you get paid at a normal job and all of your payments are either a check or they go right into your account. But I can tell you for sure from first-hand experience knowing a lot of different people including my own brother trade careers make a good amount of money and it's especially good if you start your own business. Number two on the list is going to be very closely related and that is doing an apprenticeship. So depending on what state you live in the region you live in whether you are working union or non-union and a bunch of other different factors you might go to trade school or you might also do an apprenticeship and apprenticeships are great because you know trade school isn't too expensive but you do still have to pay you know a decent amount of money. However with an apprenticeship you're actually getting paid to learn how to do the career. Now you're not going to be getting paid as much to somebody who's like a full fledged tradesperson but you're still getting paid to learn the career and it's on the job training. That's pretty awesome so you could legitimately at like 18 years old start your career whereas everybody else is going through like four years of college going into debt maybe they're going to trade school for a few years and so you get to start living your life right away. The number three option on this list is going to be joining the military. Now I did a whole video on all of the benefits the pay etc the perks that you get for joining the military so I'm not going to go over that in detail here but you know the perks and the benefits are very very good and besides the perks and the benefits a lot of the time especially depending on the path that you go down in the military you're literally going to be getting paid to be trained for a high paying job and I talked about this in that video where a friend of mine that I went to school with he actually joined the military and he basically you know worked really hard for I think it was like two or three years or so and he worked as a nuclear technician on a submarine and so he was basically being trained during that entire time for some really advanced stuff and he was able to land a six-figure job right after leaving the military. Now the military also gives you the option to pay for your college later on so if you decide that you know what later on you do want to go to college you're going to have that option as well so the military could of course be a temporary thing like three or four years or so where you're basically making some decent money and also getting paid and then you have a lot of perks and benefits or you can decide to make it your career and that would probably involve you being in the military for about 20 years or so but the cool thing is at the end of those 20 years you can pretty much retire right so if you join the military at 18 years old you can pretty much retire at 38 so there's definitely a lot of perks and benefits to joining the military not the best choice for everyone um you know there's some downsides definitely but it is something for you to look at and for you to consider. Number four on the list is basically a modern career okay and I'm going to explain exactly what I mean by this there are many careers out there that 20 years ago didn't even exist I mean think about it people hundreds of thousands maybe millions of people are now working as like social media managers right they're working in social media and social media really didn't start until 1997 and it didn't get off the ground until my space maybe and even then you likely probably wouldn't be making in full-time income from it so think about it most of the people who are now working in social media and it's literally their career they're making a full-time income from it social media didn't even exist when they were born and this is more and more common with all kinds of different industries and fields where a lot of these jobs are going to be popping up in the next five to ten years where you didn't even know it existed when you were born you didn't even know it existed when you were a kid and so there's no way that colleges and formal education in general is going to be able to keep up with the speed of innovation so there is a ton of opportunity for people to get into these modern careers learn skills that you really can't learn anywhere else you definitely can't learn them in college and basically live kind of an alternative lifestyle when it comes to your work life now along the same lines number five is going to be certifications this is basically where you get training for maybe like a month or two and at the end of that training you get a certificate now a lot of certificates out there are going to be completely worthless so you do have to do your research on this but a lot of the time you are going to find certification programs in jobs where there is a ton of demand right there's so much demand that they're not able to fill it and so therefore they come up with certification programs now i think this is going to be more and more common as basically what i was talking about before happens the speed of innovation is so fast that colleges and other types of education simply cannot keep up with it you know college used to have basically a monopoly on education when you talked about getting educated after high school and college those were basically the same things and now there's just so many different alternatives and colleges are either going to have to drastically change the way that they teach things or they're going to get left in the dust in many ways so one example of a certification that google themselves came out with was it support for instance they also came out with a certification in data analytics project management user interface design in android app development and the reason they came up with these certifications is because they found that there just simply wasn't enough people who had these skills and there was a ton of demand so they were having a lot of trouble themselves hiring people with these skills so what did they decide to do they basically opened their own like free university so they could train people in the skills that they need and there's honestly a lot of really good certifications especially in technology um a lot of the time it's actually better in many ways for you to get a certification than to go to college for technology degrees that doesn't mean going to college and getting a tech degree is a scam by any means you're definitely going to still be able to get a job in most cases but in some cases especially if you're someone who's good at self teaching uh getting a certification might be the better option number six on the list is going to be online training and specifically i'm talking about websites like skill share you to me teachable as well as other online courses and this is basically where you can get trained to learn certain skills online it's much cheaper than university it's also a lot more flexible and in some cases it can train you for a job and in other cases they'll actually train you to start basically your own business i do have a course on teachable it's basically the college 101 course how to get the most out of college with the least amount of time effort and money it's been doing super super well i've been getting amazing results for the clients and if you want to check that out you can see it down in the description below but yeah online training i have benefited tremendously from it myself i do have to say there are a lot of courses out there that are not worth the money they're overpriced they you know in some cases they're actually designed for you to not get results so that you buy their upsell if you want to kind of like learn how to spot those types of scams you can watch channels like coffee zilla but i'm a firm believer that online training online education is going to change the world in a very similar way to the written word right books when books came out when the written word came out that changed the entire game right because you were able to learn from people who might have lived like a hundred years ago right you were able to learn from people who were hundreds or thousands of miles away and the same way that books changed the education game forever i think online education is going to be the same way and the reason for that is because it essentially incentivizes people to teach important skills that they have mastered and this is just incredibly invaluable like for instance i took gram stefan's youtube course and i took a couple other youtube courses and it really helped me start a youtube channel i mean i don't know if i would have been able to do this on my own if i didn't take that course so yeah like i said before it is kind of the wild wild west right now when it comes to courses a lot of scammy ones out there you kind of have to learn how to recognize whether it's just one of those courses where they're just going to try to upsell you and a bunch of stuff but online training is big and it's only going to get bigger in the future it's completely unstoppable number seven on the list is going to be work your way up type positions now this could be something like just getting a normal job within a small kind of like mom and pop type company and then you slowly just work your way up into higher and higher positions you do a really good job and eventually you're basically just running the company for them but it could also be a position like a sales person it's basically like entry-level sales you do a really good job and so maybe they put you in charge of the sales team you do a really good job there so maybe they make you a manager do a really good job there and then next thing you know you're like an executive or something along those lines now it can be pretty difficult to do this it is also pretty risky you're going to have to start off at the very very bottom usually but for the right type of person you work really hard you do a great job you can definitely work your way up within a company and good things can happen number eight on the list is of course starting your own business right so starting your own business very difficult your chances of success after 10 years is about 30 so it is kind of a high risk high reward type of move it's also not going to be the right choice for everybody some people just have the right mindset to start a business and others kind of just want to go to their job do a nine to five uh and get their paycheck every two weeks and that's totally fine but if you do have the right mindset to start a business this can be a really really good option as well so owning your own business affords you a lot of freedom right so if you've got a wedding one of your friends have or something you don't have to ask the boss hey can i take this time off you are the boss so you can just go take that time off but at the same time especially with some types of businesses and i know this from personal experience you might have clients calling you at early hours in the morning and you have to figure out whatever problem that they have at that time and solve it you also might be in the middle of a date or something and one of your clients has an issue or something breaks or something like that and you have to cancel it and go fix it so there's a lot of freedom in certain ways afforded to starting your own business however it also is going to be more responsibility and more stress likely in some ways at least and more risk so it really just depends on the type of stress and the type of responsibility that you want but to be honest there is more opportunity than ever to start your own business again you know the speed of innovation is happening so fast and because of that there's just so many opportunities that pop up where just nobody is taking advantage of it and you can start a business there and you know find a little niche and make really good money with it and i've said this many times before and it probably sounds like overly simplified but honestly business is just all about practical problem solving you want to find a painful problem that a bunch of different people have and then solve the problem for them that's really all businesses now number nine and this is going to be the bonus that i talked about this is technically still going to college but you know there are many different ways to accelerate college to where instead of four years maybe it takes two years or in sometimes even less than that so one university for instance that i think is really good for certain degrees is wgu it's western governors university i'm not sponsored by them or anything like that i do have several friends who have went there and they have very good things to say about it it is basically one of the only respected online universities and yeah there is videos on youtube you can look it up of people graduating with degrees in like one year so it basically is self-paced and if you're somebody who's super motivated and you want to take a bunch of classes you can knock out an entire degree in two years and sometimes even less so yeah wgu you can be a great option it's also not that expensive compared to most colleges out there and there's a lot of other different accelerated programs and ways to cut your college time down as well so for instance you know i got a doctorate in five years and nine months usually that takes people eight years to get the same degree and i was able to do that by using a bunch of different methods and basically just cutting a few classes here and there but there's other people that have taken it to the extreme where they graduate with a doctorate in like four years and i've made lots of videos on this channel about how to do that so if you haven't done it already go ahead and check those out but i hope you enjoyed the video hope you got something out of it hope it helps you to choose your future career path if you haven't done it already go ahead gently tap 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