America's Future Foundation

Entrepreneur, investor, and future seasteader, Peter Thiel, is controversially offering kids $100,000 to drop out of college. The program is a tad misleading. The recipients are ridiculously ambitious wonderkids who would succeed without his $100,000 and would probably start businesses anyway (a lot of them already have at least once). He is helping them by putting them in a well-connected incubator and nurturing them. He also sets up a nice talent pipeline for his investments. For them, the trade-off with the classroom is likely worth it.

These kids are so elite, I don’t think the program itself is actually much of a commentary on the value of higher education. Community college couldn’t keep these whippersnappers down (no offense to community college, which I am quite in favor of). However, Theil has used the program to generate media attention on higher education as overpriced and not good at fostering young talent.

Theil is has angered people by encouraging kids to drop out of college. It turns out they don’t need much help. Fewer than sixty percent of freshmen end up graduating from four year colleges after six years. It’s boring, irrelevent, and expensive.

I think far more kids shouldn’t even go to college right after high school if they either don’t have a major they are passionate about or know what kind of job they want after. It is becoming much more common to question the value of the college given its price tag and meager results on professional advancement.

The old assumption that if you got any old four-year degree you’d manage to have a decent middle-class existence is no longer true and hasn’t been true for a while. Yet parents still push their kids into these expensive institutions and pile up the debt on themselves or their offspring without any decent endgame in mind for the investment.

Much of the current higher education debate is focusing on what to do with the existing college debt since it reached a trillion dollars. This is a big problem that needs a solution, but the long-term solution for changing any industry is to opt out, and many more teenagers are and should be doing that.

I hope I see a total breakdown and restructuring of the higher education system before I have college-aged kids myself. There’s no way I would send my children to the bloated, grade-inflating, time-wasting, traditional institutions we have now.

Okay maybe I do hate it as much as Thiel does.

Joanna Robinson is the Owner of Lunar Massage, a growing chain of massage studios in Washington D.C. She is a former Membership Director and now Board Member of AFF.

I went to college in the dark ages when email was still fairly new (Juno was my jam) and we weren’t allowed to use the internet for research to cite in papers. At my small liberal arts university in Phoenix, I was the student body president, I studied abroad at Oxford, and graduated summa cum laude a semester early. My whole life I was an A student, and was always told I would succeed.

Then I entered the workforce. It quickly became apparent that the jobs available to me almost exclusively involved being someone’s assistant. Within six months I was driving an hour each way in Dallas, Texas to a job where I filed papers for some idiot. I was in despair. Why did I work so hard in college if this is what was waiting on the other side?

I called the Vice President of my University who had been a mentor to me and described my disillusionment. His advice: go to graduate school. Even then, ten years ago, I knew that was bad advice, however well-meaning. What’s the point of an undergraduate degree if all I qualify for is a job that I could have done after high school? And if college is useless because it didn’t give me the experience that employers want, graduate school probably would be too.

I started to transition into sales at my job at an importing firm. By inserting my ideas and being proactive, I made myself useful enough that they sent me to China for eight days to teach our counterparts there about the importing cycle so we would cut down on mistakes and miscommunication.

I got recruited out of that job to work at a wealth management firm, but that still involved too much time buried in paperwork, so six months later I packed my car and moved to DC. I saw legions of graduates with much fancier academic pedigrees than me pouring into DC and feeling the same disillusionment about what they were facing in post-college reality. I fell into this thing they called the “Libertarian Movement” and learned fundraising, which is really just sales for nonprofits so I was good at it. After doing several fundraising jobs, as well as helping to grow AFF’s Membership program in my spare time, I jumped industries again and started my own business.

Unfortunately it’s worse for recent graduates today than it was for me ten years ago. Your college degree is worth even less, was more expensive, and the job market is more paltry. If you’re despairing about what you are facing, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Figure out what you DON’T want to do. Especially as a woman, you can get tracked into administrative jobs. Even though I’m very organized and good at that stuff, I knew I didn’t want to get stuck there. I actually pretended to not be good at it so people wouldn’t give me those tasks anymore.

2. Learn what interests you and what you’re good at. School makes you good at school. Work is totally different, but you can take initiative to get on projects that interest you or create them by pitching them to your boss or manager.

3. Jump at new opportunities. I changed jobs almost every year until I was twenty-eight. New opportunities (that come to you or you seek out) help you advance and try out new challenges.

4. It doesn’t matter that you’re smart. I know you were told your whole life that you are smart, but it doesn’t matter that much anymore. More specifically, it matters how you think and solve problems, not how much Aristotle you’ve read or how great you were at writing papers. Being smart made me better at the jobs I took, but I was successful in them because I worked hard and got results.

Life after college sucks at first, but that’s the fault of college for being a weird environment with its own rules. Once you realize that and adapt outside of it, you can do great.

Joanna Robinson is the Owner of Lunar Massage, a growing chain of massage studios in Washington D.C. She is a former Membership Director and now Board Member of AFF.

I sometimes appeal to the clients of my local massage studios through my Facebook page or our newsletter to find people who would be interested in working at the front desk part-time. I’ve gotten some great employees this way who love what we do and want a fun evening or weekend job.

A few months ago I had a client respond by email that she was interested in starting a business one day and would love to help at Lunar Massage because she wanted to learn the ins and outs. I was super-flattered that she considered my business worth emulating and excited to have someone around who was interested in the big picture of running a business.

I don’t have a co-founder or business partner, so for three years I’ve been the only one at my company who thinks about the meta-issues. I jumped on Anne’s offer to work in exchange for massage and said I’d love to talk to her about the entrepreneurial process and bounce ideas off of her.

In just a few months, Anne had added a ton of value to Lunar Massage. We now meet outside the studio as well to work on optimizing our processes and developing new marketing strategies and management layers to the company. She’s a hard worker with lots of energy and great ideas.

Now I wish I would have done the same thing before I started. I could have easily gotten a part-time job at a massage establishment to see how the industry worked, or tried to apprentice myself to a local entrepreneur I admired. Since I didn’t, I had zero experience before I hung out my shingle. I still made it, but the first twelve months (the hardest phase of any business) were probably harder than they had to be.

Anne has not only “apprenticed” herself to me. She has a day job as a research assistant but because of her interest in starting a business someday she has worked at several other businesses on her evenings and weekends, including the local pedi-cab company. She learned how to do basic bike fixes and now teaches workshops to pedi-cabbers on how to fix a broken chain or a flat tire while they’re out on the job.

Consider apprenticing yourself to someone who has skills you want to learn. The value of your free time could be great for them, and your rubber-meets-the-road exposure could be hugely worthwhile for you. Higher education makes you good at school; it’s not good at giving you actual, marketable skills. Skip the high tuition fees and years out of the workforce and go acquire some skills yourself.

Joanna Robinson is the Owner of Lunar Massage, a growing chain of massage studios in Washington D.C. She is a former Membership Director and now Board Member of AFF.

Most DC young professionals are here for a few years as a temporary post between college and graduate school. Unfortunately, higher education is increasingly less valuable (because so many people consume it) and the costs continue to skyrocket (because of government loans and subsidies). It shocks me that so many people continue to choose the graduate school path without really calculating if it’s a good investment based on the time and the expense.

I’m pretty anti-higher education overall (read James Altucher for more on the topic) because it is overpriced, too time consuming, and the market value of the results tend to be paltry except for a very few industries (engineering, some healthcare fields, etc).

Before I started my business, I briefly thought of going to business school. Instead, I just started my business. For $15,000 in startup costs I created a company that was earning about $250,000 in annual revenues in the time it would have taken me to do an MBA. Not only was I not experienceless and $100,000 in debt on school costs, I had a company that was growing and – more importantly – two years of problem-solving skills and street smarts under my belt.

In my view, graduate school allows you to pay someone else a lot of money to forestall doing something instead of just doing something. Even for a trade with a reputation for high wages such as law (the most common path for DC people), the extremely high time and money costs of studying them alter your career path (forcing you into the “meat-grinder” law firm to pay down your debt), lower your quality of life (the big law firm lifestyle sucks), and hang over your finances for years. Within a few years of graduating college you haven’t even begun to recuperate the costs for your four years in an undergraduate degree.

Tucker Carlson recently told a group of young people that both college and graduate school are essentially useless for a writing career. You can definitely hone those skills on your own, pitch stories, work with writers better than yourself, and build a career by doing rather than attending classes and completing school assignments.

Building websites and doing video editing are two highly valuable skills to employers right now. Both of those things you can teach yourself on evenings and weekends, or by watching online training videos, or attending workshops. You can also apprentice yourself to someone who can do those things so you can learn by shadowing them.

Many skills that are valuable to employers like myself can be self-taught or acquired by working hard and learning from smart people around you. That’s a much better use of your time than more school.

Joanna Robinson is the Owner of Lunar Massage, a growing chain of massage studios in Washington D.C. She is a former Membership Director and now Board Member of AFF.

AFF recently held a workshop for people to do mock interviews and get some feedback and tips on the interviewing process. I participated as an employer/interviewer and thought the event was great for highlighting things people often don’t hear from employers about interviewing.

I am in my third year as an entrepreneur and have 15 employees. I am perpetually hiring for talent, so have conducted dozens of interviews since I launched (it feels like hundreds). I’ve learned much in the last few years being on the other side of the table. Most striking is that a much larger number of people in the world are total weirdos than I previously thought.

Here are some takeaways from my experience that I shared at the event:

1. Never ask an employer for directions to their office. I’m amazed how many people do this. I’m not your assistant – I’m a potential employer. Go online and make sure you know where you’re going and that you’re going to be EARLY – not just on time. I’ve already decided not to hire you if you ask me where my Adams Morgan location is or if you’re 30 minutes late.

2. Find out as much as you can about the culture of the organization. I direct people to my website in job posts and explicitly say “if our philosophy appeals to you, email me a resume.” My product is specifically marketed in opposition to most of my industry, and if I can tell when you show up that you don’t get that, I don’t want to hire you.

3. Don’t focus on yourself in the interview; be intuitive about what the interviewer cares about. I know it’s hard not to be in your own head because you’re worried about your answers, your experience, how much you want the job, etc. Instead of focusing on yourself, cast your mental energy on the person you’re meeting with and figure out what’s important to them. You want to leave the interview with them thinking “wow – she really got me/us.” That’s way more important than them getting you. Leaving that impression will make you stick out among the other candidates; even ones more qualified than you.

4. Your problem solving abilities and hustle are more important than your experience. Especially early in your career, people are hiring you for your ability to be flexible and work hard. Try to demonstrate in the conversation how you think through things and that you hustle to get things done and you’ll be memorable.

A resume gives me some basic context for you. Your email (which used to be the cover letter) should establish a narrative for what you’ve done and what you want, and the interview ties all that together in your personality, your presence, and your level of engagement with me and my company. My gut feeling from that interaction is more important than the other two things.

Now go forth and impress. And try not to be a weirdo.

Joanna Robinson is the Owner of Lunar Massage, a growing chain of massage studios in Washington D.C. She is a former Membership Director and now Board Member of AFF.