Office Hours: Should I Replace My Full-Time Job with My Side Hustle? How to Reestablish American Trust in Higher Education, and Advice on Balancing Family and Early-Career Aspirations

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1:09welcome back to the prof g pods office hours this is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business big tech entrepreneurship and whatever else is on your mind if you'd like to submit a question please email a voice recording to office hours at prof g media.com again that's office hours at prof g media.com first question hey scott thanks so much for your podcast i love listening to it both as a professional and as another two young boys. My question is about Substack. I'd love for you to share your thoughts about the platform as I don't think you've touched on it in your show.

1:40I'd also love some advice about my own Substack business. I started my Substack five months ago and have been getting about 300 new subscribers each month, 20 to 30 of which become paying subscribers each month. So I'm earning about$1 ,000 a month pre-taxes. I only write one post per week because that's all I can manage with a full-time job, young kids, and aging parents. But I really think that if I dedicated all my time to creating content, building my audience, and monetizing it, I could replace my not-amazing communications day job salary with sub-stack and related income in about 18 months instead of the six years I've calculated it would take at my current rate to get to the 2 ,000 paying subscribers I'd need to quit my job.

2:26What's your advice for people like me? Writing on my nights and weekends is a slog, and I feel like I'm delaying the career I really want to have. But I also don't want to be an idiot and bankrupt myself either. Thanks for your thoughts. This is tough. First is, you are where most of America is, and that is you work hard, you have kids, you have people who depend upon you, you have people who you love, and then my guess is love you immensely, and you feel some financial strain. That is where almost everyone between the ages of, you know, 22 and 55 is. And that's so, first off, you're kind of where you should be.

3:04And that is you're thinking thoughtfully about your job and your career and economic security. It sounds like you're talented. The fact that you have a full-time job, take care of kids, aging parents, and manage to write something on Substack that people will actually pay you for. Okay, all roads lead to the same thing and the same observation. And that is you are clearly really fucking talented on a number of dimensions. So well done. And I hope that when you're stressed out, you realize that this is kind of part of the journey and the majority of America feels the same way or similar. Now, as it relates to whether to give up steady income and kind of go all in and hope that at some point the additional focus results on incremental revenue that supplants your day job.

3:48I think what most people tell you is go for it and follow your passion. And I think that's dangerous advice to give to someone unless you're going to pay their bills. And I'm not willing to do that. So my advice is the following. I would try and set aside a 15 or 30 day period where you're going to make this sort of time sacrifice or actual kind of lifestyle sacrifice. You can't go all in because you have a job, but really try and turn on the jets on your sub stack business and see what kind of incremental lift you get. Because my fear is that you don't get the return on investment you're anticipating by making an incremental investment in time by giving up.

4:24That's the worst of both worlds, right? You give up one revenue stream and you don't recognize the increase in revenue you were hoping. Because there is a diminishing return. You might be at the sweet spot where posting once a week, you get a few people, a week new subscribers, you're getting$1 ,000 a month. It takes, you know, it goes up, but it's a nice little, you know, mad money. and you might find that you could double your investment in time and only get an incremental increase of 20 or 30 percent of revenue. So this is what we need to do. We need to do a test, and that is for two or four weeks, and that may not be a long enough test, but let's assume it is, and the bottom line is you can't spend that many plates at the same time.

5:02So let's try and go at least 15 days or 30 days, prepare for it, ask for some help from your partner or your parents around some child care, and kind of pretend you're full-time on the sub-stack thing, and very closely track what kind of ROI you're going to get from incremental time commitment. Now, the best of all worlds might be that you double or triple your time commitment and you see a quadrupling in new subscribers and you think, well, I can get to replacement of my current income in my job in six or 12 months, not 18 months. But be very careful here Because as awful as full-time jobs can be, you know, time goes fast.

5:40And having that steady paycheck every two weeks, especially from someone who sounds like, you know, you're not flush with cash, like most households, you need it. But let me finish where I started. And that is you're clearly an impressive woman. You're clearly helping other people. and the fact that you figured out content on Substack, that people will actually, do you realize how few people actually get paid for their content? So you must be very talented. I wish you the best, but again, let's be sober about the return on investment of that incremental effort. Best to you. Question number two.

6:17Hey, Professor, love the podcast. Recently got into listening to it and been sharing it with my father, comparing notes and connecting over it. So thank you for that. Wanted to ask a question regarding the recent New York Times article about Americans' distrust for and divestment in higher education, especially when compared to other nations. My two questions here are, what do you see as being the biggest high-impact change that could be done to shift that distrust and divestment? And second question. If you were an administrator in that system, a mid-level, lowly administrator, what would you do on your local level within your control to influence change there?

7:04A thoughtful question. So some data on American sentiments toward the value of college. According to a Gallup poll, only a third of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. That's down from 48 % in 2018 and 57 % in 2015. Bottom line is there's few institutions other in the Supreme Court that have seen such an erosion in trust as higher education is registered. Data from New America shows that 45 % of Gen Z Americans say that a high school diploma is all you need today to ensure financial security. Well, okay, I'm going to argue that 90 % of those 45 % of Gen Z have their head up their ass and aren't looking at the data.

7:40But anyways, a poll conducted by the Hechinger Report reveals that now almost half of American parents say they prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college, half of the American parents, even if there are no obstacles, financial or otherwise. I got to think some of that is political. Some very conservative people I know are thinking about not sending their kids to college, not because they can't afford it, but they just see the political bias. They feel like it's re-education camp for wokeism, and they want their kids to avoid it. 16 % of parents say they'd be interested in their children attending non-college vocational training, 22 % prefer their children explore alternative paths, including starting a business, joining the military, getting a job, or doing community service.

8:22Also, the number of students on campus has shifted according to the National Center for Education Statistics between fall 2010 and fall 2021. Total undergraduate enrollment decreased by 15 % from 18 million to 15 million students. It's even more striking when you think about the fact that our population has increased. Meanwhile, higher education is more popular than ever outside of the U.S. In Canada, 67 % of adults, two-thirds of them between 25 and 34, are graduates of a two or four-year institution, 15 percentage points higher than the current attainment rate in the U.S. So a couple of things.

8:53One, it's very popular. Bill Maher says, don't go to college. And it worked out for Bill. He went to Cornell. Typically, when people say, don't go to college, it's someone who went to college and has had a million different invisible hands lifting them up in terms of the learning, the maturation they got, the kind of invisible credibility and certification they have. By the way, by the way, America does a few things really, really well. We make great weapons. We make great movies with men in tights. We make great software. We all serve the best in the world at college. Anyone abroad, I'm living in the UK right now, and anyone who's talking about college, I'm like, come to an American college.

9:33We don't realize how singular they are. College football, fraternities, sororities, I mean, the best minds in the world aggregate around American universities. It's just an amazing experience. Now, having said that, having said that, what is the downside? How do we reestablish trust? We earn it. Because here's the bottom line. For the last 40 years, me and my colleagues have woken up every morning and asked ourselves the same question. How do I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability? And we found the ultimate strategy, the LVM8 strategy. Let's restrict the number of freshman seats such that we can raise prices faster than inflation, create all sorts of departments that make no fucking sense and have no measurable outcomes, Rolexify the campus, make it feel like the Bel Air Brentwood as opposed to UCLA.

10:20When I went to UCLA, we had a bowling alley and shitty buildings. When I went to the high school of business, we were in this building called Barrows that was awful. And guess what? That's how universities should be. We have shitty buildings, and the place doesn't look like the Four Seasons. You can have tuition at$400 a quarter, which is what I paid at UCLA. Now, granted, it would be more than that, but it wouldn't be what it is now, what,$35 or$40 grand a year. And here's the bottom line. We have arbed down these kids through artificial scarcity to a second-tier college oftentimes where they pay a Mercedes price for a Hyundai product.

10:48Why? Why? Because there's some endacious fuckery going on in higher education, and that is we have a cartel. It is ridiculous that the FTC or the DOJ haven't moved in on universities who just accidentally all raised their tuition four and three quarters percent the same year. All of them in lockstep. And here's the real – here's where we really fuck young people. They go to school for two years. They borrow a shit ton of money. They drain their household finances, and they don't graduate. They decide college isn't for them. Two-thirds of our youth isn't going to get a traditional four-year degree.

11:19They're not cut out for it for whatever reason. And the household feels shame and the kid comes home without the certification, but a ton of debt. And by the way, that debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. So what do we do? We expand freshman seats. We massively invest in vocational programs such that we can give some young men who aren't cut out for college broader honor arms to the middle class. We put universities on the hook for 10, 20, 30 % of bad debt, and we fall back in love with unremarkable kids. Who doesn't need college? The top 1%. Who needs it? The lower 90%. Let's fall back in love with the unremarkables.

11:51Let's massively decrease costs through scale, through investments, and let's increase vocational programming, and let's go back to who we are. We are public servants, not fucking Birkenbacks. We have one quick break before our final question. Stay with us.

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13:07welcome back question number three hey scott kevin from toronto here first of all i want to say big thank you i really learned a lot from your shows reading your recent uh no mercy no malice about your instinctive thought to call your mom and share your collective victories really resonated with me um there's a couple of decades between us but um with my my grandparents aging and then also moving away from my parents. I think it's quite the thought to think that one day they won't be around anymore. And with that, my question to you is, if you have any advice on what, you know, young people, young professionals can do to try and strive a balance between cherishing those moments with their family, with their parents, but also, you know, finding the time and the need to still pursue their careers or whatever other goals that they might be going after while they're young.

14:01Thank you so much. Have a great day. That's a thoughtful question, Kevin. First off, congratulations on living in Toronto. I think Toronto is one of the nicest cities in the world. It's like a clean, gentle New York. Look, I think that the pat answer is, you know, you won't regret it. Spend more time with them. And your grandparents are always going to absorb every moment of time you will give them because you're this miracle, right? Kids are tough because you're responsible for their well-being and they can be difficult and they're hugely stressful. They just are. Grandparents get this amazing relationship where you're just nothing but upside.

14:40And then they can hand them back to their parents. And I see one of the kind of luckier moves, I guess, was we moved back to Florida or we moved to Florida so we could be close to my spouse's parents such that my kids could have what I didn't have and that was grandparents. And that relationship is just so singular and special. And one of the observations I have around grandparents or what it taught me is just how ageist we are. Because when we would take my in-laws to a party with friends, people are polite to them but aren't really interested in them. People are very ageist. They don't really want to hang out or speak to old people.

15:17But then my kids are like, oh, my God, it's the grandparents. They're probably here with gifts and they're going to let me do whatever I want. And when mom and dad leave, let me just eat dessert over and over. And you just see this reverse. You can see why grandparents love kids. It's like, here's this group of people that are these beautiful little children that think I am the greatest person in the world. Anyways, back to your question around tradeoffs. Look, boss, I think as a man, as a young man, I think I don't want to say your priority. But your focus should be establishing economic security for you and your family, figuring out something you're good at, investing the requisite time.

15:56perseverance, endurance, such that you can develop a currency in a domain that you, I don't want to say love, but don't hate, and that you're good at, hopefully get great at, and that people will pay you for. Because you're going to have your own family, you're going to have your own kids, and your economic security is going to be incredibly important in a capitalist society, fair or not fair, to maintaining healthy relationships with your partner and your kids. So in terms of maintaining, you know, what are the hacks here? I find that just a quick message, a quick text message, a quick, what I do with my 93-year-old father now is I will record a video and send it to him.

16:36And I can be anywhere. And he just loves hearing from me. If it's a 20-second video of me getting, walking into Union Station, Dad, I was at the White House today, first time ever. This is what I did. And I'm getting on a train and I just show him the train, you know, he can't really get out of his assisted living facility anymore. So just giving him 30 seconds to kind of live my life through the lens of how, what I'm experiencing, I think it's really rewarding for him. And I imagine that as a grandson, just a quick text message, quick call, you know, you don't have to be home for long, for every long weekend, right?

17:11So I would say use new technologies just to sort of ping him funny things, jokes, memes, hey, grandpa, hey, grandma, thinking about you. But I'm not going to tell you, you know, sacrifice everything for these relationships that are going to be gone soon. Because here's the thing, what they want, I mean, they want time with you, but more than anything, I think, grandparents want you to be happy. They want you to be successful. They want you to register the same sort of love and joy that they've experienced. My point is this, I'd move to hacks, but I'd be very sober about your job as a young man is to build a base for you and your family.

17:50Thanks for the thoughtful question, and best of luck to you. Go Canada! Go Leafs! That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehours at profgmedia.com. Again, that's officehours at profgmedia.com.

18:14This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer, and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show. Support for this show comes from Airbus. It took 100 years for electric vehicles to catch on. Modern solar panels? Half a century. Lithium batteries? Decades to go from their debut to daily use. It's a pattern. Energy tech breaks through, stalls, and then something tips the scales.

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