“Think about what you wanted at 18 (years old),” said Kenli Schoolland during a presentation at the Foolish Things SalonΒ on Oahu, Hawaii.
“Would you take a $200,000 bet that that’s what you wanted to do ten years later? . . . Or for the rest of your life?” asked Kenli.
Kenli said that education around the world has changed as government has subsidized higher education. “With these federal loans, people started to take gambles. They started to bet on what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives, with no money down.”
Kenli showed that education today is changing — getting worse in the government, but getting much better outside the government.
Inside the government system, Kenli said, debt is rising for college graduates. “The average debt is $35,000, though there are many that graduate with much more given that a college degree for four years can be upwards of $200,000.”
What are people getting for that money? Many graduates today, said Kenli, are realizing that their degree isn’t worth what they paid for it, as job recruiters seek better qualified candidates with real world skills.
However, Kenli said education outside the government sector is improving tremendously, where costs are falling and quality is rising.
Online schools are one example where students can go take high quality courses for bargain prices.
But another type of education is arising outside of the “school” model, in the form of digital marketing, said Kenli.
“I’m sure maybe you’ve all seen an ad that says, ‘Earn $15,000 in passive income from your home!’ . . . so that’s a cheesy glimpse of it, but it’s actually part of a formula,” said Kenli. “People are being taught to market themselves . . . it’s actually creating a huge educational service, and it’s bringing back a feature of education that we used to have prior to compulsory education and the modern universities which is apprenticeship.”
As demand for tech savvy marketers rises, and the digital advertising landscape changes rapidly, individual experts are offering to train new entrepreneurs, for a fee.
Kenli gave the example of a real estate expert, “His top level product was for his personal mentor-ship. He would actually go with you to make your first purchases . . . He would walk you through the whole process for a year, and if you didn’t make money on your first sale, or something, you got a guarantee money back.”
According to Kenli, the price was around $90,000, “But in comparison to a college education, it’s not so much. It’s cheaper than a lot of them, and with a guarantee. How many colleges give a guarantee?”
Kenli also alluded to a third type of education that is emerging because of digital marketing and search engine optimization. As Google and other search engines attempt to boost web content that is high quality, this helps the average person educate themselves on things that matter to them.
Kenli said, “This is actually having a huge impact on all the websites out there, and all of marketing because you can’t use as many tricks anymore to get your stuff up there . . . Most marketers now say, ‘Forget any tricks, just create good content. Just educate. Actually answer these questions that people are looking for.'”