Have you been looking at the price tags on college degrees lately?
It’s $40,000 to get certified as educated – if you go to an in-state public university.
For that price, you could buy just over a pound of gold.
But is a diploma really worth its weight in gold?
A degree should be one of the most valuable investments we can possibly make. Yet, all too often, it’s not. According to one study, only 13 percent of U.S. adults, 11 percent of C-level executives, and 6 percent of university trustees say college graduates have work-ready skills.
That means most people are leaving college without the ability to earn a living from their degree. 🤯
Scary, no?
The good news is that people have begun to wake up to what the higher education industry is doing. They aren’t going to get away with this for much longer.
You don’t have to take that road. You’ve got another option.
In my new book, Skip the Degree, Save the Tuition, I show you how to thrive as a confident, self-taught professional who makes money online with a valuable skillset.
Live, Love, Laugh? More Like Learn, Labor, Level Up!
To succeed in today’s world, you need real, tangible skills.
But you already knew that, or you wouldn’t be a content hacker.
Despite what the higher education industry wants you to believe, the secret to success lies in these four simple steps:
1. LOVE What You Do. Identify your interests, passion, and aptitude to figure out what it is you really love doing.
2. LEARN Everything You Can. Forget college – internet is your oyster. Anything you want to learn, you can learn online.
3. LABOR Away. Roll up those sleeves and get your hands dirty. Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.
4. LEVEL UP to the Big League. Consistent quality over time lets you build your skills, establish your credibility, and charge MORE.
It’s really that simple.
And that hard.
That’s why I wrote a book about it.
The Story Behind Skip the Degree, Save the Tuition (What Inspired My New Book)
Facts, my dear fam:
If I had set out to nail a “trend,” or just make money, I would have given up on the journey weeks in.
This book took over $10,000 (my own personal investment) and crazy amounts of time. I was pulling my hair out on Thursday nights at 8 p.m., back in the editing, re-editing, and re-re-editing phases. (Yes. All of those phases and more exist.)
Skip the Degree is a literal byproduct of both my co-author and myself setting out to TRANSFORM education.
It is a heart mission, and nothing less.
My incredibly inspiring friend, Dr. Ai, has two degrees. Yet, she identifies as a “professor dropout.” She dropped out of a highly paid, well-respected position teaching college PR and social media, resigning from her six-figure position when she saw firsthand that her students weren’t graduating with real-life skills. A student didn’t know how to use Pinterest when he exited her class—and the classroom rules forbade her from using it herself.
It was a wakeup call she couldn’t ignore. She became a practitioner, and today, she’s teaching her students life-changing skills.
On the flip side, I run a writing agency, Express Writers, that takes on 200-300 projects per month. We’ve been around for 10 years, mostly because we have high standards. We pay multiple five-figures out to our contractors every two weeks.
Show up. Write well. Deliver on time. Consistently. We have to hire, CONSTANTLY. Those traits are, oddly, very hard to find.
Even in this digital-first era, we’re STILL filtering through college grads, looking for immediate client-ready writing skills.
And we find that it’s the self-started freelancer that followed a passion and taught themselves a skill that we’re able to hire.
Not the college graduates.
Then, when COVID-19 hit last year, the dilemma became a problem I truly couldn’t ignore anymore. WAY MORE candidates flooded the online workplace. Our ability to hire went from 1% to .5%.
Skip the Degree, Save the Tuition was a book I’d planned to research and write later in the year. But, knowing that this book was the Holy Grail for this problem… it would teach EVERYONE THE pathway on how to uncover their passion and map a direct path to a digitally PROFITABLE skill set, I made it a goal to launch the book within a year.
Well, we did it. We conducted 50+ interviews (but who’s counting), worked with countless people, and did immeasurable work to put forward the powerful information revealed in our book. And we did it all inside a year.
Skip the Degree is our BIG, HAIRY, AUDACIOUS GOAL (BHAG) to provide a GROUND-FLOOR answer to today’s problem in education.
Want more of the “why” behind the book? Watch the full 20-minute interview I recorded with Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang on YouTube:
You Need to Read Skip the Degree, Save the Tuition Right Now
Skip the Degree, Save the Tuition is more than just a literary pep talk. Created along with my friend and co-author, Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang (of the #ClassroomWithoutWalls fame), this book is…
1. A Proven Path to Success
There are a lot of people out there right now talking about self-improvement, changing your life, and levelling up during the second decade of the 21st century.
How many of them actually know what they’re talking about – and can prove it?
At 19 and freshly dropped out of college, I used my last $75 to start Express Writers.
Ten years later, it’s not just become wildly successful (one of the biggest content agencies online), but I’ve also grown other brands from the ground up.
I am what I sell, and I walk you through how I did it in the book.
2. Packed with Research
I’ve got the field work that proves it’s possible to skip the degree, but my friend Dr. Ai has the research – the cold, hard numbers proving that college doesn’t necessarily make students ready for the future workforce.
Like how 60 percent of Americans would rather have an internship at Google over a degree from Harvard (in a study led by QuestResearch Group in 2020).
Her experience working with students – both in the traditional classroom and in the Classroom Without Walls – has yielded SO MUCH data that you’ll never look at traditional education the same way again.
3. Written for People Like You
I won’t lie; this book isn’t for everyone.
It’s not for people who want to “get rich quick” or take the mythical easy road to success. Those things don’t exist.
It’s for people like you – people who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, who know it’s going to be a slog to the top of the mountain.
It’s for people who get excited when they see lists of resources to develop new skills.
Who know that there has to be some other way than that expensive college degree that you aren’t even sure is worth its weight in gold.
There are no secret ingredients kept hidden, no BS, nothing held back.
Skip the Degree, Save the Tuition, and Step Up Your Game
Ready to thrive in a world where SKILLS matter, not degrees?
Your four-step guide to becoming a confident, successful, self-taught professional is here.
It won’t be easy. It won’t be quick. But it will 100 percent be WORTH it (and you don’t even have to invest a literal pound of gold in it).
See you on the flip side.
Get Skip the Degree, Save the Tuition on Kindle, in Paperback, and Audible.
