And you really don't need to go to college to get a good liberal education.
I'm doing a study with Benjamin Franklin right now, and you know,
one of the one of the greatest contributors intellectually to our civilization. He didn't
go to college, but there's a process that he developed on how to learn
things. And I'm developing a program right now called Benjamin Franklin Forum where you
don't need to go to college to get this great education. It's all sitting
there on books in the library, or on disc or online. You're listening
to carry Lets's Financial Survival Network, where you get valuable information you just can't
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welcome you are listening to watching the Financial Survival Network. I'm your host carry
Lets. It's mid August, literally the midpoint of which means summer will soon
be behind us. But this is a great time if you've got kids going
to college, if you're worrying about how to pay for them, if you
have relatives thinking of college. All of these things you really need to hear
from my next guest, doctor Cooney Beasley. Doctor Beasley, you've been helping
people for over forty years to reach their college goals. I assume things have
changed quite a bit in the past forty years, because forty years ago,
I went to law school and I think it cost me a grand total of
fifteen thousand dollars, not including accommodations, room and board, and I literally
made back my tuition. I doubled the return of my investment in six months
and the rest of his history. As they say, So, things are
a little bit different now, aren't they. Doctor. Yeah. Yeah,
Well, forty years ago, the average American family could, the average American
family could buy their house, buy their two cars, and put their three
kids to college on their salary without without loans. Yeah. Now your average
drugs are can't even do that, you know. Yeah, well, man,
they talk to me, they can do that. Okay, That's what
we know. That's what we focus on. We have a lot of strategies
on how to take the pinch out of the cost of college. Right,
So, I see, like since twenty eleven you said you're you're You and
your team have helped students get over three hundred million dollars in scholarships and grants
for all of the best schools. Hey, but not everybody is supposed to
go to Harvard or Yale, are they? No? No, there's plenty
of good schools out there. You know, a lot of people try to
place a little too much vanity on schools and are willing to pay the vanity
premium for a school, and a lot of the vanity schools, your ROI
will never reach zero. You're going to be in a negative roy for the
rest of your life most of the time, right, especially if you don't
bother to graduate. That's right, That's right. That's a sixty percent of
students don't make it, and so all they have is some college credit and
a lot of college debt. You know, I hate to go back in
the day when I went to school, but we had these things we call
them perennial students, and they just kept grinding through, generating tuition and fees
for the institution, but they never got the benefit of an education. Now
I think people realize that's not really a great course. But hey, if
you've if you've entered college and you stayed there for like, say two years,
a year and a half, you could have amassed enormous debt and then
you drop out, you're still responsible for it. There's no guarantee that you
only have to pay back if you graduate here. Yeah, that's right.
I mean again, most of the college debt or not, I'm gonna say
most, A significant portion of college debt is held by people who did not
finish college. So another interesting thing is even people who do graduate from colleges,
if you go to the wrong college and take the wrong thing. The
statistics are online. I don't gave me the database, but well, right,
no, I'm gonna I'm gonna crash that one. Well, okay,
when you look at the average earnings, there's database average earnings of graduates from
every college in the country, and then percentage that have defaulted on their student
loan debt, and you know, it's kind of shocking. So is it
does it always benefit you to go to college? Well, it depends Statistically,
that says that you're going to make more money going to college as a
norm if you're in the mid line band, yes, okay, but you're
some of your richest people your Bill Gates and your Steven Jobs and those people
they dropped out a lot. Yeah, Zuckerberg, You've got a lot of
people who were very entrepreneurial. I mean, I go from the fact that
you know, I have two doctoral degrees. There's a lot of people who
make a lot more money than me. You don't have college degrees. I
mean, my mother was an immigrant from Japan, couldn't read to write English,
and died a millionaire. Okay, so there's a lot of ambition action
doing the work that counts for that. So, uh, you know,
it's good to have a college degree, but not necessarily required. I mean,
I also follow mic rose perspective. You've got a lot of trades that
make a lot more average plumber makes more money than than your average family practice
doctor. Yeh, dirty jobs. Hey. Yeah. You know. You
know who did graduate from college and did get an advanced degree. Elon Musk,
Yeah, Elon Musk, and and and but he stopped he once he
realized that he had reached his potential and gaining education, he dropped out of
a PhD program and went to business. Right. But point being that,
you know, this romanticized notion of I'm in college I'll drop off and I'll
become the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuperberg's ingenuous. I hear that a lot
because and they'll say, you know, Zuckerberg didn't do it. Stephen Jobs,
I said, okay, then let me go to your garage and see
where you got the next Apple computers. Are you building it? Okay?
Let me go look at your software that you developed. Okay. Some of
these people, they were gifted, and a lot of the people, for
example, a lot of people that you know went on the Zuckerbergs and people
who went to Harvard. Harvard attracted them because they weren't looking for to make
them smarter, they were looking to keep them there for four years and then
as they launched in their career they would be part of the Harvard legacy because
a lot of colleges will will recruit based on legacy that this kid has promised
and is going to be a donor later. So here's a question for your
doctor, what is the purpose of a college education? Well, it's multi
number one. A lot of people go to college just to enlighten their intellectual
capacity. Micro will admit to that he's got a degree in philosophy. Uh,
some people go because they need a technical background. If you're going to
be an engineer, you need to go to college. Okay, you're going
to be a doctor, you're gonna need to go to college. You're gonna
be Dennis, you need to go to college. You gotta and business.
If you're going to get certifications in business, you're going to be an accountant,
you need to go to college. If you're going to be an entrepreneur,
you don't need to go to college. In fact, I I tend
to think that if you are really an entrepreneur, college may be a hindrance.
Yeah, I can. I can see your point there. I will
fourth generation entrepreneur. But I also went to law school and uh, you
know, did other stuff. But in my case, and in my case,
none of my I mean, I have a bachelor's degree in criminal justice.
I've never busted anybody, never go to parking ticket. I have a
master's in business and I got that because I was leaving the service and I
needed to have some sort of credentials that ran into the business world. Ironically,
when I went to the business world, I was hired for what I
did in the Army, not because I had an MBA and then my first
doctorate is in Greek and Hebrew. Nobody's asked me to be their rabbi.
My second doctor in urban and the second one is in urban and public administration.
No one's asked me to be their mayors. So academically I'm a failure,
all right, So twenty two years of college down the drink. Did
you catch that story? It was like, right around the time of the
financial collapse, this guy had gotten a he went back to college, went
into death, and he got a degree in puppetry. And then he was
outraged because he couldn't find major career opportunities in puppetry. I guess, I
guess Sesame Street didn't want I don't I don't remember that story. I don't
know where you get a degree in puppetry. So what about useless degrees,
Well, there's no degrees that are quote unquote useless. You may have high
expectations for some you know, women's studies is not a degree that you get
expecting to make a lot of money out of some of those, some of
the fufu degrees. But again a lot of people don't go into the field
of their degrees unless you're in the technical field. Most people don't go into
their degree field, except maybe if you're in business or communication or something like
that. I mean again, I'm in this field. Of all things I've
I've taught in fourteen different areas at the graduate level. Some of them have
been in business, but I haven't teached I've never taught a course in criminal
justice. I have taught a course in Greek, and I have taught public
administration. But by and large, you know, my business now has nothing
to do with my degree fields other than the fact that I managed to go
to college twenty two years and only pay for one semester, which is pretty
good. Yeah. So, so the idea of becoming more worldly, better
rounded person liberal education when it actually meant something. You know, my daughter
she wounded up going be you and to the College of General Studies, and
she complained for two years that she had to stay there. But she learned
how to write, the you know, really read purpose all these things.
So sometimes you think you're learning something that's a real pain, but it really
is the best thing you could have done, and you really don't need to
go to college to get a good liberal education. I'm doing a study with
Benjamin Franklin right now, and you know, one of the one of the
greatest contributors intellectually to our civilization. He didn't go to college, but there's
a process that he developed on how to learn things. And I'm developing a
program right now called Benjamin Franklin for him where you don't need to go to
college to get this great level education. It's all sitting there on books in
the library or on disc or online. Yeah, it's it's all there.
I mean, you know, I missed out on a bunch of classic books
when I was growing up in school, high school and such. Some of
them I didn't read and I just wasn't into it. And I went back
and read those books sometimes I did audio books. And so the concept though
I find in America, I think many of you out there, I think
that just because you graduate from college or graduate school, you're done learning.
Isn't it true, though, that all going to school does is give you
the tools to find out what you need to learn once you get out into
the job market. Yeah, that's that's one of the purposes of going to
colleges. You get the tools to read, you get the tools to learn
how to write. I mean, I remember I was teaching a political science
class, and I was requiring these types of students turn into monograph each class
period. And I had this girl come up and complain. He says,
why are we writing all these papers? I thought this was a government class
and not an English class. And I said, young lady, you take
composition so that you can write papers for the other classes. And you know,
and and a lot of people who go to college really don't have a
concept or what their room is supposed to really supposed to gain out of college.
I didn't gain that until I was in my PhD program staying here.
Well, my thing was wasn't serious till I took a semester off. I
was ill. I came back and I went to night school, and I
was surrounded by all these students who, most of them first one in their
family to go to college, and they were going to college to get a
degree, whether it was accounting or whatever, to further improve their career and
job prospects. And they were so much more serious than the day students that
you know, it was just a much more intellectually stimulating environment. Even though
they had worked a full day of work and now they were in school,
trying to you know, to get ahead. That's that's what I did.
I mean when I got my master's degree, I was on active duty in
the army. I went to school at night and there was seven of us
who doubled up. We finished our NBA in fifty weeks. We doubled up
work together, got through it. Went to school at night, and then
for the rest of my my graduate degrees, I always in school at night.
Went again, You're there with more serious people the day students were you
tend to tended to be still a little more cology and you want to use
that worst so much partiers, But they didn't take it as seriously. But
the guys at night, I mean, I mean, I remember some of
my public administrations class I had when I was sitting there with an assistant city
managers from Dallas, director of the Dart system. I mean, there were
some pretty pretty heavy hitters. I'm chief of police from one of the suburbs,
so you know, but these people were serious about learning this and getting
a better education. Yeah, hey, I remembering their prospects. In law
school, I had a guy who was the head of the Army Corps of
Engineers for like New York State and the whole northeast. He was a general
and he said, you know, I'm going to law school because most of
the problems I have now have nothing to do with engineering. It's all legal.
Therefore, that's why I'm here. He was pretty amazing. So so
how do you get to go to school for free? Well, well,
we're very simple. You. First thing we look at is metrics, that's
uh grades, test scores, class rank. And I want to I want
to expel this myth about test optional. Okay, except for the state schools
in California, it is still important to get good test scores. I don't
care what they say. People are using this as an it's used to blow
off test scores. But the common data set, that's the data set that
all the colleges report in that if your test scores are in that middle fifty
percent band, what they what they have that your prospects of being admitted are
half again better if if you have test scores in that band. That's just
the statistics, and the people sit there and try to poopoo. This is
now what happens. But these test optional things, particularly when you're doing high
profile schools, your Stanfords and your princess and stuff. They now have a
lower acceptance rate because the number of people who applied have doubled, the same
number of people get in, but the percentage goes down because you've doubled the
number of people who are who are not sending in test scores. They're applying
on a wing and a prayer, and it becomes a I mean, I
think I think one of the colleges said they there revenue increased with seven million
on application fees because so many more people are doing the wing in the prayer
a bit and uh, and they think that there's an easy way to do
it. We don't have to do tests. I mean, I've had to
deal with heads of heads of prep academies and they said, well, we
don't need to do TESTA. Yes, you do. They're not keeping up
with the information, so test scores are important. I mean, and if
you and eighty five percent of the colleges in the country will admit you and
scholarship you on metrics alone. I mean, at University of Alabama, a
three point five and a thirty two act will get you one hundred and twelve
thousand dollars in scholarship money. Automatically. Wow, that's remarkable. Well yeah,
so yeah, this whole thing of getting rid of the tests, I
just think is wrong. Yeah, the tests. There's a reason they give
tests. Yeah, you gotta have you got to have a common denominator because
with all the great inflation that goes on and the weighted GPA stuff like,
there's no way of figuring out somebody is really ready for college and the tests.
The tests aren't the best thing you can do, but that's the best
thing that we have right now. Uh. And SAP scrambling right now with
their new test. I'm not a big fan of the SAP. I lean
more to ACT. It's a more legitimate test. Yeah. Well, it's
just like IQ tests. There is no better predictor of success in life than
IQ tests, whether you like it or not. It's the truth of the
matter. And all tests indirectly reflect the IQ, don't they in a sense?
Yes? Okay, but you can't say that I can raise you know,
because I help somebody raise their SAT score four hundred points, I don't
necessarily help them raise their IQ. I've taught I've taught them how to,
let's say, beat the test, which is what I really don't. I
don't teach people math, reading or grammar or whatever on the tests. I
teach him how to beat the test using inductive in deducted reason. I do
this for the l s AT, the MCAT, the DAD, all of
the other tests. Gre you can beat these tests. Oh yeah, I
know, like go. Originally I took the l SATs and I thought I'm
not a good test taker. And this is back when the scores where the
hundreds. I got five fifty. I spent the summer at Stanley Kaplan.
He was one of the first elsat guys in New York City, and I
went up to seven hundred, and I don't think I got that much smarter,
but I knew the hacks. I knew what to expect and to not
get phased by the test, not let the tests psych me out. That's
right, that's right. I mean my daughter was the top score at University
of Texas Arlington. She was the top l s AT score. I ran
the numbers on that two hundred and forty two people scored higher than her on
the L set and then forty five thousand people took the L set that year.
Remarkable, and it was just getting you know, being being able to
hack the test. Yeah, so test taking is a whole art in itself.
And unfortunately for my education, and I went to pretty good public schools,
they didn't really ever teach us how to take tests. Most of them
don't. Well, you know, SAT test is primarily well, just take
practice tests. Well, if you just take practice tests over and over and
over again, you're going to get the same result over and over and over
again. That's a definition of insanity. Right. You've got to have a
you've got to have a system of correcting your errors, learning from them,
and developing techniques on Well, for example, we teach our students to answer
the reading passages without doing the reading. And how to do math is a
sixty to seventy percent of the math can be done with inductive and deductive reading
without having a crunch numbers. Right, Hey, I just remember I took
a real estate test at California number of years ago. Granted I was a
lawyer for thirty something years, but I was by far the oldest person in
that room, and I had done minimal studying. I did some I won't
say I didn't. I took it cold, but I did minimal studying.
As the first person out of there, out of that room in less than
an hour and past it. So you know, it's really because I knew
how to take the test, and it wasn't. You had experience, you
have intelligence, You're always you're always going to do better when you have that.
But I you know, I also help people take the interest licensing exams
and whatever they that need to take a test on. I teach them how
to disliked the test and beat the test. Yeah. Well, it's amazing
when you get into a mindset where the test psychs you. I mean,
I hear people in Florida here at six seven, eight times they took the
real estate exam and failed. And I'm not saying it's an easy test by
any stretch, especially if you have no burience with the law and real estate
transaction. It's not an easy test. But thirty thousand people in Palm Beach
County managed to pass it, and a lot of them have not a clue
what they're doing. So interesting, So when you're doing test prep, what's
the most important thing? You think, Well, it's it's actually dedicating the
time and doing proper test prep. Now, we we follow a very strict
processes we have you. We have you take the test non timed, okay,
because we don't try to do the timing and learning test taking techniques because
it's like trying to change a tire with the car's rulings. It's not very
good. Strate So first we'll get good and then we'll get fast. So
we have them go through when we train them on all the little hacks you
know how to understand. We'll look at the last digit or look for semi
colons and periods and think there's little hacks that you do right. And then
then they take the test, and then they go back and they would do
what's called a critique and all the answers they got wrong, they reverse engineer
the answers, and then they go back and they said, Okay, I
answered as incorrect. I took a because and you want to erase that neuropathway
in your brain that got you that bad answer. And then you say,
this is what I should have done to get the correct answer. And what
you do is you bore a new pathway, so when you see that similar
question again, you're going to get it right. Well, we have them
take the same test three times. Now, there was a study done that
they took two groups of people. One group took an sat the same test
test one once, sent test one twice, test one three times, and
another group took test one two three, and then it gave test four.
The group that did the same test three times scored higher on test four because
after a while they were able to recognize the patterns that were involved, they
were able to observe and some people, once you get to that point,
you're able to look at the question, figure it out real quick and intuitively
get the correct answer using inductive and deductive reasoning. And that's what we teach
them to do. And we have them repeat this with three tests, and
then we work on timing. So they assume we do a lot of this
online, and now it's all done online, we have to say, you
know, one of the things that we do is we tell them mark,
if you're using a paper test, mark your answers in the test booklets,
and then at certain points you transfer your answers in batches and reduces coding error
and you depending on the link of the test, you'll say three to five
minutes, sort of going back and forth, trying to reorient every time every
time you transfer answer you transferred batches as simple as that. One thing I
find so interesting is the contrast between like an SAT or an ACT and a
state licensing test. Your goals are totally different there. Sat els at whatever
you want to get the highest score you possibly can achieve, and you get
every point in the licensing test. All you want to do is get seventy
or seventy five. You just want to pass. You just want to pass.
And it's so different, Like because I'm studying the real estate exam and
I'm getting upset because I'm not getting over ninety percent and I should be doing
better than this, you know. And then I said, well, wait
a second, the ninety I'll still pass it because you only need seventy or
seventy five. And I realized I was focusing on the wrong the wrong priorities
here. Yeah. Well, the difference also is that your real Estate exam
is content origent. You have to know the material, Okay, you can't
cipher through that test, whereas SAT and ACT their aptitude based and you can
cipher through the test. If you learn to do the proper test taking techniques,
you'll raise your score. So it's not so much content. I mean
you have to know your basic math functions, and you have to know basic
grammar. Right, you're not you're not. It's not you're not. Your
grammar is not being tested. Your ability to cipher through your grammars being tested.
Yeah, and then they got all those like little trick questions that they
ask to trip you up. And those follow a distinct pattern too, don't
they. Yeah, yeah, well ACT is notorious using me. SAT is
notorious for that. ACT doesn't doesn't have a lot of trick questions. But
that's how SAT makes its questions more difficult. They put more trick questions in
and not so much that it's a higher level matheism, but they'll put it.
And so we show them the different types of questions. We have what's
called the bonehead answer or the landmine answer, you know, sucker answer,
things like that that they put in there. So we have to make sure
that students can recognize these upfront. I remember maybe it was the bar exam.
They said, there's one question that you will see that you always know
you know the answer too, and that is that they will give an example
and then one of the things will be this is an example of the doctrine
of the fruit of the poisonous tree you know theory. I mean you always
knew instantly because nobody knew what the fruit of the poisonous tree theory was,
but it was always in there. And yeah, I guess it's it's the
same at all. They just put in those standard questions to trip you up,
and once you see it, you smile, and that helps improve your
confidence to a confidence with test taking is everything, isn't it? Well,
that's that's part of it. And plus you know when I tell people how
do I prepare for a test in college, and I go, you have
to know the material? Okay, As I go back to mister Miyagi,
best block is not be there, Okay, best best way for an academic
test is know the material. There's no you know, there are certain test
taking techniques you can do to make sure you don't screw up and make fewer
mistakes, but if you're if you're taking in an English exam, you have
to know the material. If you don't know the material, there's no substitute
for knowing the material. Yeah, I remember with courses like you know,
I'd look at the I'd go to the back of the chapter at the questions
first before I did anything, and then I would pay very close attention to
what the teachers said and trying to figure out what questions they were going to
ask on the exam. That way, it was a lot easier, you
know, I didn't have to go through learning a bunch of stuff that wasn't
necessarily productible. We have a course, it's called Learning Dynamics on how to
do how to take notes, how to book notes, how to take class
notes, and where they overlap, where your questions on the tests are going
to be. And if you know the questions on the test, or you
write questions that are tougher than the questions on the test, then it's then
then you're going to know the material. That's we have an entire process how
to read, study, test and write better, faster and easier. You
know, if people use this system. I mean, we've had kids take
off. I've had kids graduate from high school as youngest thirteen. I've had
people graduate from college as young as sixteen. I had nineteen year olds get
into med school. I had an eighteen year old sit for the California Bar
amazing, and you know, but now these are not typical kids, but
they were very ambitious barn Burner kids, and they were they were suffocating in
a conventional school environment. Understandable, I know that. Feeling quite well and
all right, so hey, just tell us how we connect with you,
how we find out more about what you're offering here and hopefully get a piece
of that scholarship and grant pie. Yeah, well, they can contact me
at Beasley College Bred It's b E A s L e Y Beasley College Prep
dot com. Depending on how much bendwidth we have, I will and your
your participants here. We will give them a free consult Let's show them,
you know, what they need to do. And we're not We're not here
to make a sales pitch. We're here to help people, and you know,
we'll tell them what they need to do and if there's a place that
we can help them. Now we can help just about anybody. But you
know, a lot of times we can tell people to do and make a
good decision and they can proceed with it, and that's what we're looking to
do. Excellent. Well, hey, we appreciate you coming on doctor A.
The link is in the show notes on Financial Survival Network dot com.
And make sure when you're there you sign up for your free newsletter. Got
a question for doctor Beasley or myself, Shoot me an email k L at
kryltz dot com. We'll get you an answer quick. Hey, doctor,
appreciate you coming on and keep up to great work. All right, Thank
you, bye bye. Thanks for listening to carry Lets's Financial Survival Network,
your solution to today's trying time James. For the latest, go to Financial
Survival Network dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than ever,